The serpentine skin of flow

Rating: Null/10 (27 September 2014)

Not many viewers will take to this. I agree with the first complaint, badly scripted and acted, bad even by comparison to Marvel's similar stuff.
I take a different tack on the other complaint, not much lizzard time. There's more behind the decision. The idea was to give us the usual Godzilla movie of destruction where a giant creature stomps around but through the eyes of people who run to and from it, as shifting glimpses of unfathomable beings tearing at the skies.
One clear example of this choreography begins with the discovery of the Russian sub on the island. We get no more than a vague first glimpse of Godzilla's hulk swimming underneath a ship, rushing to battle, followed by another vague reveal of only bits of a larger creature to the reddish light of cascading flares, a majestic unveiling seen by an audience of onlookers.
Then a child's pov from inside the stopped train as lights come back on, popping up one by one in the cordon of tracks, guiding our eye to the monster, another unveiling here. The train drawn towards the monster as if by the urge to see. All this prefigures the first encounter between Godzilla and monster; a first battle which we only catch glimpses of as news footage on TV as another child is dozing off on a couch, again teasing us with postponement.
You'll see again and again this choreographed pattern of withthold and unveil; humorously in the destruction of Vegas, more ordinary actionlike in the night bridge scene.
A superb moment that encapsulates the approach has a special ops team parachute down on the city from a plane, they have to do a plot thing about a bomb, no matter. A beautiful shot at the edge of the atmosphere as planedoors open, then as they fall, a first-person parachutist's view of the two monsters fighting among skyscrapers unfurls across the screen, a majestic glimpse of the larger event stolen on the way down.
How can anyone say there's no creativity here? It's what we came to see all along, monsters, only given to us in this more dynamic way, as ribbons of perception fluttering in the turbulence of spectacle.
I don't think a great filmmaker was stifled here by the blandness of what he signed to, but he may be a technician to watch. Watch this. It's pure Gothic horror reinvented by the eye.