A giant improvement on the last outing

Rating: Null/10 (17 May 2014)

Clearly one cannot keep down a monster the size of Godzilla (the name is a combination of two Japanese words meaning 'gorilla' and 'whale'). Since his first appearance in a Japanese movie in 1954, there have been no less than 28 offerings from Toho Studios, while there have now been four American productions: two (1956 and 1985) re-packagings of a Japanese film, the ill-fated 1998 version (which was supposed to have been the first of a trilogy), and now this Legendary/Warner Brothers outing.
Let it be said immediately that British director Gareth Edwards has produced a superior film to the mess than we had in 1998 - a well-paced and entertaining thriller. He is helped by advances in technology (the end credits name a vast army of special effects artists) and the co-operation of the US military (the same end credits acknowledge the use of an arsenal of ships and weaponry), but also we have a vaguely understandable plot this time, as San Franscisco rather than New York City is pummelled into the ground. Godzilla looks the part (congratulations to the casting director), but the two MUTOs (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms) look as if they were rejects from the 1997 movie "Starship Troopers".
As two of those in charge of the monster hunt, Ken Watanabe and David Strathairn fit their roles well; and, as a romantic couple in peril, Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Elizabeth Olsen are pretty enough; but Sally Hawkins is miscast for a blockbuster movie (and I mean that as a compliment) and there is a criminal under use of the wonderful French actress Juliette Binoche (as with Jean Reno in the 1998 film, it seems that the producers just wanted to pull in a Gallic audience). For once in a movie, the ending comes at exactly the right point (with no silly coda) and makes it clear that a sequel is likely.