7.5/10

Rating: 7/10 (25 September 2014)

Before saying anything on the movie itself I have to talk about the expectations I had going in: as always I do not watch trailers but what I heard about them was nothing short of spectacular, plus the buzz surrounding this movie was incredible and on the top of this was a talented crew, both behind and in front of the camera, and Legendary Pictures, one of the better studios of the moments. You sum up all of this and you can understand I was very pumped for this movie, yet the result in relation to my expectations was just "meh". Don't get me wrong I liked it very much, but I can't deny it being a kind of disappointment. Talking about positives there are many things that could be pointed to: no one in their right mind would dare say this movie looks bad. Everything here is visually stunning, even the small-scale scenes are wonderful to witness and Godzilla and his fellow monsters felt very real, detailed and most certainly looked beautiful. Seamus McGarvey is a really special cinematographer. The cgi department here did a truly breathtaking job, even if there were a couple of shots that made me go "huh that one was cg", it is rare for a movie to have the quality special effects you find here. The film also feels very organized and grounded, so from a visual point of view there is lots of continuity. Credit to all of the actors too for making their roles perfectly believable, Bryan Cranston is definitely the highlight here the fact that he isn't in it enough actually detracted a lot of emotion. All in all there's just no way for someone to not have fun or be thrilled here: the money is spectacularly spent in amazing action scenes, add Godzilla and other monsters there and you'll only be excited by it. Quick shout-out to Alexander Desplat and his genius, with this he demonstrates himself as a very versatile composer and pays off with a riveting score. Where this movie fails is in drama and story continuity: on the first point there are small sparkles of interesting character moments, but on the wide scope there isn't enough for getting me attached to the people involved and this is probably due to some wasted time in the first act introducing the characters in very clichéd way (the time feels wasted also because the movie is 10-15 minutes too long) and to the continuous repetition of coincidences and situations that at some point I just gave up on. Talking about repetitions a minor problem I had with the movie, but kind of got on my nerves the more I saw it, was that the action scenes feel always the same in their introduction, they are all opened in the same style and other that being it a kind of clichéd style it was used for two hours and it really bothered me: the action scenes themselves are awesome, but it's the way in which they are introduced that I had a problem with. To the major fault of the movie: the story just did not flow spontaneously enough. There were way too many time where I asked myself: "but what about that?" "oh yea? and where's that been the whole time" and I went "Really?" so dam frequently. An example is when Godzilla (minor spoiler) breathes "fire", it was so out of nothing I simply didn't believe in it. Sure it is a iconic characteristic about the monster, but use it wisely or don't use it at all: it felt like a wink to the viewer that ended up being only annoying. Plus, I never fully understood the dynamics of the monsters, it always felt like the logic in it was about to fall a part. The character of Godzilla itself didn't really make much sense. He didn't bother with humans even if they tried to kill him, twice, but then he just leaves them. Very confusing. I don't declare myself a Godzilla fan at all, so I don't know if there's anything behind there, but it could have been easily addressed. Generally the problems I have with the movie are nit-pick, but when it becomes repetitive to a point of stress you loose me, nevertheless the direction was strong and the film was great fun.