We followed the wrong character

Rating: 5/10 (24 August 2014)

This review contains spoilers for Godzilla (2014), Executive Decision (1996) and The Village (2004).
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I can sort of understand the film makers thinking "wouldn't it be cool if we kill off the best known actor in the beginning of the movie" for pure shock value. Kind of, but not exactly, like when Steven Seagal (who, believe it or not, was kind of a big action star back then) was killed a half an hour into "Executive Decision", or when Joaquin Phoenix was stabbed in "The Village".
But in those movies the shift of focus worked, because the characters had motivation. Kurt Russell was a fish out of water, desk jockey analyst in a tux ("Who's this? Double-oh Seven?") trying to stop a bomb going off in an airplane before it's too late. Bryce Dallas Howard has to leave her little tight-knit community and venture out into the unknown woods where monsters reside in order to get medical supplies before her loved one dies.
In Godzilla I wished we would've followed Bryan Cranston's character because the movie sets up some kick-ass motivation for him where he tries to unravel the secret behind why he had to sacrifice his wife. But instead we follow his son which could've worked if, for instance, he slowly but surely takes on his estranged father's obsession, a slow descent into madness where tries to unravel the mystery that his father tried to solve in order to avenge both his parents. But he doesn't even seem that upset or sad about the death of his father (who he doesn't seem to care that much about in the first place), he rather has a look of weird annoyance on his face a second after he watches his father plummet to his death. That was really the best take they could find?
But instead we get a generic military character who specializes in bomb disposal, something which is emphasized throughout the movie, but has absolutely no effect in the end. He has a generic family with whom he shares a scene, but if you'd delete the family scenes from the movie absolutely nothing would change. What's his motivation other than "going home"? Why is he suddenly back in the military fighting monsters, and why are we as an audience following him specifically instead of the thousands of other random soldiers? And he's not exactly a fish out of water as he's former military to begin with.
Him being the son of Bryan Cranston and Juliette Binoche makes no difference to the character. You could easily delete the entire prologue and Bryan Cranston's character altogether, and substitute Aaron Taylor-Johnson's character with Josh Dumahel's from the "Transformers" movies and it wouldn't make a difference. They're both generic military characters whose motivation seem to be "I'm military, and this is what we do".
This Godzilla was such a wasted opportunity. I absolutely loved Gareth Edward's previous movie "Monsters", a master class on how you work with a shoe string budget (the documentary on the blu-ray is definitely worth checking out), so I was most definitely looking forward to his version of Godzilla. But maybe my expectations were set a bit too high.
Godzilla is by no means a bad movie. It's well made, with some good effects and excellent sound. But it's quite dull. It more or less plays like a computer game where the main character moves from one action set piece to the next: Stage 1 - Japan, Stage 2 - Hawaii, and so on. You never really care for any of the characters, and we are never given any motivation for why we as an audience even should care about them, so there's nothing at stake.