A film that had so much potential, but flatlined.

Rating: 4/10 (13 September 2014)

I followed this film for several months before it's release and my expectations were sky high. What I was hoping for was a fresh new take on the original Godzilla film; a grittier, darker, and far more complex film. What I got instead was a cookie cutter military action film that horrendously segued into a pseudo super hero film.
Unfortunately the ending of the film completely ruined it for me. The film blatantly asks the viewer to choose whether or not Godzilla is the hero, when in fact Godzilla is not a hero nor a villain. What Godzilla represents is sheer chaos and destruction; Godzilla is "a force of nature" and that's how things should be left off. Unlike the atomic bomb, Godzilla cannot be controlled by man, and the beast operates on it's own terms. Thus this is where the main problem of the film lies. The film teeters between this idea that Godzilla, somehow, is our savior, but for the first 90 minutes of the film the viewers are lead to believe that Godzilla must be stopped at all costs. But this problem mainly stems from the poorly contrived military plot.
Which brings me to my second biggest flaw, which are the human characters. The only redeeming characters to the film are Joe Brody, portrayed by Bryan Cranston, and Dr. Ishiro Serizawa, portrayed by Ken Watanabe. Unfortunately their time on screen are severely lacking and any possible resemblance of character development goes out the window once we are introduced to the dry military portrayal of Ford Brody, played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson.
Instead of going the military/action route the film would have benefited from taking a more detective/mystery/thriller path, which the trailers so falsely advertised. But back to the subject at hand. The characters, besides the previously mentioned two, are dull and lack any redeeming qualities that the viewer can latch on to, which causes us to simply not care about what is happening to them. The film tries so desperately to establish a tone, but that's all the film does. There are no layers or complexities to the situations that are presented, which go hand in hand with the simplistic and boring characters.
My third gripe about this film is that it struggles to identify itself. Is it a disaster movie? A hero film? A monster movie? A thriller? A horror? A science fiction? Well in case you couldn't figure it out, it tries to blend all of these different genres and more. But you often see that in military action films that strive to be more than what it is. If the filmmakers simply went 100% the monster/action genre route then the film would succeeded in delivering it's message and concept. Instead this film appears to have been bogged down by multiple script revisions and having too many hands at the wheel.
And in regards to the elephant in the room, the film is advertised as Godzilla when it really should have been advertised as "The People vs Godzilla." Godzilla is only featured in about 20 mins of this 122 min film. While the human characters, excluding Cranston performances, are featured for a good 60 mins. Try to keep yourself awake during long dialogues between bone-headed military superiors and soldiers not listening to the scientists, a boring and shoe horned love interest and blah blah blah...
Overall the film was over-hyped with expertly crafted trailers and advertisements to lead viewers, like me, to believe that this iteration of Godzilla was going to take this franchise to the next level. Like the name itself, Godzilla is a "God" like creature that does not play by mankind's rules, vice-versa, mankind must learn that Godzilla is something that we cannot control and we must adapt to live in his realm of destruction and chaos, essentially hell on earth. Godzilla is not a figure that should be labeled as hero or villain, unless that's the initial purpose. Taking cues from films such as Alien and Jurassic Park would have greatly benefited this film in the long run and would have established not just a franchise but a bonafide contender for many Summers to come.