Stunningly bad

Rating: 2/10 (19 May 2014)

I walked into the theater hopeful and walked out feeling like I had been robbed of $11.50.
The movie's biggest problem is that no one acts like they are in a Godzilla movie. Instead, the performances would fit just as neatly in a regular action flick. The only character who really acts as if the kaiju are an existential threat to mankind is Joe Brody. The film starts out hinting that it will be a serious character-drive story, making Joe Brody the main character on a scientific and perhaps spiritual journey that gives him a greater appreciation of nature, existence, and reality. But instead, they kill him off.
We're left with Ford, Elle, and Sam Brody. The Ford Brody character is so stilted and wooden that his non-reaction to everything that was happening to him and around him just made me laugh. His dad dies after uncovering a huge secret, monsters rampage across the Earth, he is almost killed several times, and he's completely stoic and brave about the whole thing. A human being would not react to such things that way. Poor Elle and Sam - relegated to near-silence as they serve as Ford's motivation.
The plot starts off well enough: A massive cover-up has been going on for decades. First, Godzilla was roused from the depths and we tried to kill him with nukes. Then, when the energy-sucking kaiju first appeared, it was explained away as a natural disaster.
Then, the Tokyo kaiju, called MUTO by the military, heads out to Hawaii, and that's where the story seriously goes off the rails. Ford Brody just happens to be directly in the MUTO's path not only in Tokyo but again in Hawaii, and has to save himself and some random kid on a airport train that is attacked. That was when I started wondering: Were they really going to put Ford Brody, a Navy lieutenant, in the monsters' way the whole movie? Unfortunately, yes.
The MUTO destroys Honolulu, and the government decides the charade is over, the cover-up must end. And so the news goes out on TV, and the military tracks the MUTO and Godzilla as they head to the US west coast. With many hours of advance notice, do the authorities evacuate the west coast? Nope. Do they even try to get people away from sources of nuclear radiation? Nope. That would spoil the "Elle and Sam in peril" plot point. During the San Francisco fight, we even see the male MUTO fly past an office building with people still working at their desks as if nothing were going on up until that moment.
It turns out a second MUTO, the female, is in Yucca Mountain in Nevada. We get treated to a suspenseful breaching of the nuclear waste facility by a military team - who discover that the female MUTO has busted out of the side of mountain and headed off to a romantic rendezvous with her mate in San Francisco, knocking down much of Vegas along the way. This part produced unintentional laughter, too: Did the military not fly over the place in helicopters before going in? Did they just miss the gigantic hole in the mountain?
Then we get the attempt to lure the monsters out to sea off of San Francisco with a nuclear missile and then detonate it 20 miles from the coast, killing them all. When asked why it will work when the bombs in the 50s didn't, they say the new ones are much, much bigger, and the blast will kill anything. The problem here is one of theme of the movie. Dr. Serizawa speaks the line that is supposed to be the intellectual center of the movie, "The arrogance of men is thinking nature is in their control and not the other way around." In other words, what people do in this situation is irrelevant. And for much of the movie, that's the case. Nothing the humans do affects the behavior of the monsters in any way that gives the humans control, up until this point. But now Serizawa acts as if the nuke could actually kill Godzilla, which totally undermines the point. What would have made more sense is for the nuke to go off, and for the kaiju to go on fighting Godzilla as if nothing had happened. That would have allowed a moment to see real terror on the faces of the humans as they finally realized they were completely helpless to affect the outcome of events.
During the surprisingly slow-paced monster fight, Ford Brody once again is in the thick of the action, both setting fire to MUTO embryos and trying to get the nuke disarmed or out of the city. At one point, a MUTO is going to kill Brody, and he pulls out ... his pistol. With a completely serious expression on his face, he aims it at the MUTO. I literally did a facepalm at that moment. But Godzilla saves him, and in the movie's most excruciating moment, makes eye contact with Ford Brody and appears to give him a smile before being swallowed up in a cloud of dust and smoke. This was unbearably stupid.
Now Ford Brady sends the nuke out to sea (not the planned 20 miles - he is on some small navy vessel, with only 5 minutes on the timer, so it's at most going to be 3 miles from shore, and you'd expect the devastation of S.F. as a result, but we're not even playing by the internal rules of the movie anymore, much less actual physics). Then Brody gets rescued, Elle and Sam are safe, and Godzilla comes back to life and jumps into the sea over a TV graphic of "city's savior". Cue the sequel! But I'll catch the next one when it comes out on streaming video.