Painfully Dark

Rating: 1/10 (8 March 2015)

I don't mean dark as in figuratively but physically. I watched it on the Sky Movies website which compresses the hell out of films normally (and is generally awful) but since so much of the screen is black or near to black for most of the film the pixelation was terrible. Even without Sky's ridiculous compression the film is just so dark that I could barely make out half of what was going on without maxing out my screen's brightness, contrast and gamma settings to the point where explosions were blinding. It seems like the majority of the film is set at night which kind of makes the huge FX budget redundant. Black monsters fighting against a black sky backdrop in a black city with black planes firing black missiles at them. Then again half way into the film when I gave up Godzilla hadn't had more than about a minute of screen time anyway.
Then there was the audio. I had to have a finger hovering over the volume control for most of the film. Several times it goes from someone whispering to something exploding in a heartbeat which means you're either left straining to hear or blowing up your speakers. I'd have been better off watching it with subtitles (if Sky Movies wasn't such a dreadful website and actually had that option).
Eventually I had to give up watching it because it was like a simulation of being both blind and deaf. The plot didn't seem exactly engaging anyway but perhaps I'll give it another try when it comes to Netflix (a website that doesn't use stone age compression and streaming technology). Without having a nuclear powered monitor though I doubt I'll be able to make out much more. I'm not saying it's a bad film. I'm saying that it's more of a shouty black rectangle than it is a film.
In conclusion: Sky is a joke of a company.