Great Godzilla movie - NOT

Rating: 2/10 (21 October 2014)

I settled in to watch what I expected to be a great movie. AT 71 and a viewer of many Godzilla movies, as I like monster movies and Godzilla is a classic one, I was expecting this one to be even better than the Matthew Broderick one which I like very very much. I have never written a review that I could only find one redeeming thing about it. Until now that is. This movies has but one and only one good thing I can say about it. And that is that it is (a little) better in special effects than the very old Godzilla movies out of Japan. MUSIC–I guess there was music though the movie was so bad that I paid little attention to it as I spent most of my time trying to figure out what was going on. SCENERY–Most of it was showing destroyed major cities. Not all that neat to look at. CONCEPT–My mind kept trying to understand all the totally impossible things that were taking place. I will not spoil the movie for those that want to see it, as there must be some redeeming qualities since it gets over a 6 rating on IMDb, but that sure makes me wonder if maybe there was some built in subliminal messages at the theater showings that told people what they were watching was not all that bad. BASIC STORY–Well, the movie did not explain much of what was going on to help me even to begin to understand the many elements of the story. Without background information and relatable context, much of what went on just seemed like random happenings. ACTING–This was for the most part like reading a line and getting out to go eat. I won't say it is as bad as watching high school kids acting (though some of them are pretty good) but for sure no one is going to win any awards – or even be nominated. To give you an idea of it all, I will just say that one of the main character's spent most of the movie making faces and not talking. He was good at that but I was watching the movie for entertainment and he was not that entertaining. SPECIAL EFFECTS– There was so much wrong here that it almost killed the movie for me. It showed lots of destruction but not the destruction taking place. Thus, the part that made sense was left out, which makes no sense. It looked like in a lot of cases they were trying to put so much into the special effect that it made my mind jumble to the point that if would eventually just shut done when it continued to happen. GODZILLA–This is the main character. Is not the movie called GODZILLA? Maybe the movie should be called MISSING GODZILLA since he was seen very little. It took forever for him to come on scene and when you saw him you almost felt like that they went to the person that designed the original one for the Japanese movies and asked him to do the design. In the rare parts that you could really see him, he looked like a man in a Godzilla suit walking – which is probably what it was. FIGHT SCENES–These were pitiful. I would like to say that they were at least doing a ROPE-A-DOPE, but they would show a few seconds and then cut away to something else and you were not sure what was going on. What they did show was almost pitiful in special effects, and often either too dark to see or too far away or too much background that they blended in and you could not focus on them. I am not against movies that use jumping forward or backward in time (like saying 13 years later or 5 years earlier), but there needs to be a solid tie between the parts. I must have blinked as that sure seemed to be missing for me. There was far too much going on most of the time to be able to understand a lot about what was going on. That destroys a movie for me. Of course I suppose it gets a high rating because there are a lot of people that just like Godzilla . I ended up watching the whole show as I knew I was going to write a review on it and I actually expected it to get better as it went along. It didn't. In all fairness I guess I could watch the movie over and over and probably get more of a sense of what was going on, but that has one glaring problem. And that is that I would have to watch the movie. I gave the movie a 2. One point for being a Godzilla and one point for special effects being better than the original Godzilla. I suppose if this would have been just a monster movie and I had never seen a Godzilla move I would have given it a higher rating, but I don't believe it would be all that much higher. I guess I could compare it to a bunch of the older Godzilla movies and it would get a higher rating as well, but again, I can't see how that be much higher. Maybe that is what they were trying to do. Film one just like in the olden days with the technology available today. Now if that was their goal I would probably give it a lot higher rating, like a 4 maybe. BOTTOM LINE – If you expect to see a modern day Godzilla movie with good modern special effects and a story line that is good, acting that is good, and all the other components that make a movie good, do not waste your time. If you are interested in how not to make a Godzilla move, then your time will not be wasted if you watch it.