Not what I was expecting

Rating: Null/10 (24 February 2015)

So far in my lifetime, I have only seen a few Japanese Godzilla movies, so I can't say that I'm an expert on the Godzilla genre. However, I do feel confident enough to say that the 1998 American Godzilla movie was a mockery to the genre. But my hopes were up that this reboot of sorts would be an improvement. It was... kind of. It takes itself much more seriously than the annoyingly goofy 1998 movie. The special effects are also pretty good, giving a good portrait of the monsters and the destruction they make.
But in the end, I was kind of unsatisfied. For starters, you might think that the movie would showcase Godzilla a lot, but you would be wrong. The movie is about two hours long, but for the first ninety or so minutes, Godzilla hardly makes an appearance! This is not the only case where the movie is coy. There are a number of scenes where the action starts brewing, but then the movie abruptly cuts to another location or the same location some time later. This is extremely frustrating. Another big problem is that while the monsters LOOK good, they don't get to show a lot of personality. The rubber suit monsters in the Japanese Godzilla movies managed to deliver a lot more personality than the monsters in this movie.
While I guess I could scrape up some more (somewhat) positive things to say about this movie, such as it's not boring (though it gets close to being boring at times), in the end the strongest thing I can say about this movie is that if you want to see an American Godzilla movie, watch this one instead of the 1998 version. Not exactly an endorsement, but it's the best I can do.