A Cloudy Echo of the Monster's Youth, Filtered to Match the Modern Style

Rating: 6/10 (30 March 2015)

In a lot of ways the Roland Emmerich Godzilla is an exhibit of '90s popular cinema, for better and for worse, and I think we'll feel the same about this one in about ten years' time. It's dark, gritty and menacing, often to a fault. The screen is awash with grays and browns. The important CG moments are impressive and generally perform well, but they're still quite obviously digital set pieces and feel unnatural. I did find a lot more to appreciate in the tone of this one than in its 1998 cousin, which wears a strong admiration of the Toho source material on its sleeve. In terms of focus, this could've passed for one of Japan's own: the screen spends far more time hovering around the human components than the monster himself, who's largely relegated to a cameo role. Those civilians are universal retreads, though, only vaguely interesting at their best moments. For the most part it's a very bland movie, slogging through a repetitive plot that had me checking my watch on the regular. The monster fisticuffs are cool, even if the impact of familiar skylines being toppled has lost some edge in the wake of Man of Steel, Pacific Rim and The Avengers, but even those are often tossed aside as afterthoughts. I lost count of how many times the screen cut away just as the king of monsters got his paws on an equally-oversized freak. Clearly it was a conscious decision to keep our perspective with the huddled masses, but that makes for a tough contradiction; artistic, yes; rewarding, no. The HALO jump seen in an early teaser trailer is probably the only thing I'll remember in a few months. Much less enthusiastic a revival than I was hoping for.