Stealing Guillermo Del Toro's words for Pacific RIm, Godzilla is a great, great poem to one of the biggest movie icon.

Rating: 7/10 (16 May 2014)

If you have come looking for characters and development, there is not much to find here, unfortunately. It is kind of bummer when the movie does boast a very decent cast. Bryan Cranston of Breaking Bad fame does have his few moments initially, but later he is reduced to conspiracy mumbling scientist. His rather wooden son, played by Aaron Taylor Johnson, is a military boy who returns home only to find the world under a far greater threat. Elizabeth Olsen plays the loving and caring wife, but don't go looking for emotional epiphany there either. Ken Watanabe is mostly found in one or two positions, either he is spewing deeper philosophical ramifications of Godzilla's presence or he is just stunned with the proceedings. But then the actors are not to be blamed, because the story does not provide much of an area for the actors to make the characters their own and the clunky story telling leaves much to be desired from the humans. Gareth Edwards tries to give a logical coherence to the movie that takes itself seriously, but as monster movies always tend to be, Godzilla is filled with plot holes and logic debridement. The story deliberately uses the human characters to be the vehicles to tell the story of the heroic adventure of Godzilla through their eyes, and also as a scale to measure the enormity of the monsters. Gareth Edwards has worked meticulously to build up an atmosphere with great construct of light and shadow that varies with each of the set pieces. The set pieces are huge and Edwards have tried to bring phenomenal outrageous craziness to these locations so that when the monsters hit, one could shudder at the reality of it if it did ever happen. But that does not work much towards infusing us with terror, since the human emotional context is entirely missing. But it does manage to fill us with awe. When the monsters break out onto the screen or leave mayhem in their path, we find ourselves watching a lyrical celluloid of mayhem, destruction and monstrosity with the realisation of the colossal nature of the beasts and our minute existence. In the last epic battle as the giants fight in the shadow of smokes and darkness in the middle of a city, the fight takes on the form of gigantic proportions on which the fate of the humanity is precariously balanced. Godzilla is not much of a movie with enough emotional resonance, but it is a monster movie through and through. You may lament for mere twenty minutes of Godzilla's presence, but then you would be entirely missing the point of movie if you couldn't find monsters on the screen in their absence. It is one of the few beauties of Godzilla. For many the build up of Godzilla may be intolerable and the brief final battle too short, but if one can look at the amount of technical and visual wizardry and Edwards' vision has gone to create a monster movie that is about atmosphere, build up and visual spectacle, and to what wonderful poetry those are translated on the screen, you would be able to appreciate it.