Not much Godzilla for your money

Rating: 3/10 (24 March 2018)

Visually this version of Godzilla is pretty impressive. And most of the last 25 minutes or so are quite cool. There, that's all I can see that the movie has going for it. Hollywood took 18 years to try again and remake the Japanese classic. Let me say they are still struggling.
It's as if studios were criticized once too often that blockbusters lack characters so now they cram sad excuses for characters into every movie and forget what it was supposed to be about. Think of Transformers which fed viewers the personal life of Sam Witwicky instead of fighting robots (or their characters). Think of Iron Man 3 which was about the personal struggles of Tony Stark instead of, well, Iron Man. This Godzilla is about an American soldier and bomb expert and his relationship with his beautiful wife and little son who miss him a lot because he's away a lot. It's also about his relationship with his father who went a bit cooky after loosing his wife. The movie is also about the US military who are mainly there to look cool and fail heroically. It's furthermore about the Japanese scientist who has been studying Godzilla, has some unexplained motivation and is mainly there to look concerned. Do you realize which character I've been leaving out so far? Yes, it is, of course, Godzilla, the literal father of all "dai kaiju". I am sorry to report that he doesn't appear very much in what's supposed to be his own movie. In fact, you could probably skip to the 90 minute mark and not miss much of him. There is a new kaiju, which vaguely reminds me of Mothra, and it seems to get more screen time than Godzilla.
Another reviewer compares this to old horror films, like Jaws, that (driven also by technical limitations of the time) would tease the viewer with glimpses of the monster until the climatic reveal. I disagree. In Jaws you would not see the shark but it would always make its presence felt - it would kill people. Actually, think of Cloverfield as a kaiju movie in which, I think, both the focus on the people and the monster-teasing worked pretty well. You get some backstory of the characters but from then on the monster's presence drives everything they do.
I'd recommend Shin Gojira instead of this one.