Pretty good, with faults

Rating: 8/10 (16 May 2014)

There is an incident at the nuclear plant in Japan where they both work, and Joe's wife Elle dies. Joe spends the next 15 years labelled as a nutcase, pursuing the truth of what really happened. Then the same thing starts happening and Joe's son Ford, now grown, gets caught up in it.
Let me start by saying I thoroughly enjoyed this. Loved it - no, but enjoyed - certainly. Because there is some terrific stuff here Bryan Cranston, as Joe, is simply wonderful, but won't get recognised because of the type of film this is. Elizabeth Olsen is also terrific, and these two actors give the film the beating heart it needs to avoid simply being a special effects extravaganza (because Aaron "Kick-Ass" Taylor-Johnson, as Cranston's son and Olsen's husband, unfortunately, operates merely as a merely cookie-cutter hunk, and offers no emotional weight whatsoever). The effects themselves are terrific, and we finally get a Godzilla which looks like what the man in the rubber suit would look life if the creature he was portraying actually exists.
And there are a number of things which are not so terrific. None is a deal-breaker, but all could have been better.
One, the heart goes out of the film when the effects start. Having established characters who have an emotional stake in what happens, and made us care about them, we hardly see them once the destruction is under way.
Two, Ken Watanabe has little to do except put on an expression which is halfway between awestruck and concerned.
Three, Sally Hawkins - why was she in it, again? (I love Watanabe and Hawkins, by the way: they were wasted, though Juliet Binoche's cameo was classy).
Four, are the US forces really so dumb that they keep using small arms fire against these critters?
Five, are the US forces really so dumb that they keep sending fighter planes against critters that defend themselves by emitting EMPs?
Six, we unfortunately know that collapsing buildings create vast dust clouds. Emulating these dust clouds accurately in a battle which decimates San Francisco, and staging the battle at night, means you don't see what happens clearly.
Seven, the US battle strategy (as regards the bomb) makes little sense.
As a friend of mine observes, though, this is pretty much one of the original Godzilla films but with bang-on special effects. As a result, it can be taken seriously (though not too seriously).
The 3D conversion is poor.