Everything You Expect in a Godzilla Movie, Nothing You Don't

Rating: 6/10 (16 May 2014)

Godzilla (2014, 2:03, PG-13, Imax, 3-D) — SF, biggie, remake
It's everything you expect in a Godzilla movie and nothing you don't. Special effects are bigger and better than ever before. I saw it in Imax (worth it for the big screen and big sound, not so much for the retrofitted 3-D, which is nothing special).
If you were expecting meaty roles for top-notch actors Bryan Cranston, Julette Binoche, and Ken Watanabe, too bad. The first 2 are killed off early, and Watanabe mainly just stands around with his mouth open (tho he and sidekick nuclear engineer Victoria Graham do get a couple of minutes to unload the only exposition the screenwriters figured the audience would sit still for). At no point does anyone question why creatures that feed on electromagnetic energy need such huge mouths and so many teeth.
Elizabeth Olsen is utterly wasted in a throw-away fretting-mom role, and the nominal hero of the whole shebang, Aaron Taylor-Johnson (much buffed up since regularly getting his ass kicked in the title role in Kick-Ass) stoicizes as a Marine lieutenant thru a series of disasters that he just happens to be in time to witness as he follows nature-balancing Gojira and its 2 new nemeses, a male and female mating pair of MUTOs, across the Pacific where they will jointly devastate San Francisco for a change, after warming up with Honolulu and Las Vegas.
Blessedly, the movie-makers let us see the creatures fairly early (instead of teasing us with obscure distance shots and partial glimpses for much of the movie) and at full size. Unlike the Transformer movies and Pacific Rim, you can actually see who's doing what to whom else at reasonable distances, and at speeds resembling real time. Good shot composition and no soft-pedaling of the destruction involved, tho the PG-13 rating is preserved by showing us essentially none of what had to be a gargantuanly massive toll of deaths and injuries.
Godzilla gets bigger with every incarnation, and this one is no exception, making it perfectly believable that some forces of nature (like Antarctic glaciers, sunspots, and giant radioactive Japanese lizards) are so powerful that humanity is helpless before them. Really, with CGI technology as advanced as it's gotten, there's no upper limit on creature size, certainly not the frequently and cheerfully ignored square-cube rule. I expect that soon we'll be seeing Galactus gracing the big screen.
Of more substantial interest, the opening trailers included one for Christopher Nolan's latest mind-blower, Interstellar, due out Nov. 7. It's not the case that the trailer alone is worth the price of admission, but it's value added.