[Movie] Legendary Picture's Godzilla (2014)

when the muto is attacking the airport, attack helicopters are shooting at it and getting progressively closer and closer until one of them flies right into it. these guys are highly trained military pilots with missiles and cannon that can hit a target from miles away, why are they flying right up into this huge monster's face?

there's going to be a huge godzilla vs military battle that is the greatest thing since sliced bread in kaiju movies, allegedly godzilla gets the shit knocked out of him or so you're supposed to think until he comes out of the smoke and fire revealing himself to be barely damaged at all and kicks military butt, can't wait

It was an alright movie just suffered from some pacing issues, a few weak characters, and not enough Godzilla. Would like a sequel with just more kaijus fighting. Give it a 7.5/10. Watch it in theaters if you really want but if you got a friend or your own home theater with a large TV and sound system just watch it there.

My biggest grip is how, up until the end, whenever the monsters would start fighting, it would just cut out and leave that stuff in the background, or not at all. I mean I wasn't expecting Godzilla: Final Wars or anything, and I guess CG is expensive, but still, I'd like to have seen then actually fight each other before the end.

That said, the ending fight was great. That atomic breath, and then the last atomic breath where it grabs a MUTO, forces open its mouth, and fires that shit down its throat was great. The whole final part was really good.

Godzilla swim in tight formation with the US Navy

They were both barely in the fucking movie. Is it a coincidence that in all the trailers for this movie they spent the vast majority of the time focusing on these two? That's because they are by far the best part of the movie. Why the hell would you kill off the only person in the movie who can seem to act AND keep moving shots off the monsters fighting?! It's like Cloverfield all over again, though it makes less sense here.

Man the human plot was entirely useless other than baiting everything to a hotspot. Also sucked that BC died so early he was carrying hard.

the movie repeatedly set you up to expect things to happen and then they did not happen. i'm not just talking about skipping out on godzilla fighting male muto at the airport and female muto tearing up vegas. i mean things like serizawa tells the admiral that he wants breaking bad and ford nobody on his team. bryan cranston dies like five minutes later. there never is a team. serizawa does nothing the entire movie. the main characters should have been cranston and watanabe with cranston helping watanabe discover muto 2 the same as what happened in the film. and seriously go ahead the same thing as in the original, serizawa has a super weapon but has a dilemma about using it. maybe a nanomachine swarm or hell why not the OXYGEN DESTROYER. just go there. ford nobody's wife never feels like she's in any danger. his son never feels like he's in any danger despite being on the golden gate bridge while godzilla is a hundred feet away. BREAKING BAD DIES BEFORE THE END OF THE FIRST HOUR. this makes zero sense. walt does not die. he is basically indestructible. everyone knows this. have ford nobody die so he loses his wife and his son to monsters. have him push serizawa to use the superweapon to kill em all. give the humans some actual fucking conflict. the military guys sleepwalk through their scenes. hey giant monsters are tearing up apple pie and baseball, you'd think american soldiers would show some goddamn emotion.

i thought there was gonna be some crazy military attack on godzilla, guess what gareth edwards the way to show human weapons are ineffective is to show them looking awesome and doing jack. not show explosions over the other side of a mountain or 3 minutes of random explosions around godzilla while a black guy drives a bus on the golden gate bridge. and then godzilla just walks through the golden gate bridge anyway. muto EMP = dumb as fuck. oh our electronics don't work so we can't even spend some SFX money on a badass army vs godzilla fight. 160 million dollars and we can't see godzilla vs GI joe for 10 minutes. if the military's ineffectiveness is not effectively shown, who gives a shit when serizawa says let them fight. if he says that because he doesn't want to use his superweapon and the only alternative is hoping they kill each other, that's cool. it's lame in the movie because serizawa who gives a fuck? he headed some secret international research team that apparently learned fuck-all about giant monsters in 15 years because what useful advice does he ever provide really? bryan cranston with his windows 98 and nuclear engineering degree and paranoid crazy drive schooled dr. serizawa with his millions of dollars and dozens of scientists. pretty much everything cranston knew in 2014 he already knew in 1999 and had on the discs they got from the "quarantine zone." and that is just no. you do not do that to a character named serizawa in a movie named godzilla.

it's really unfortunate that so much stuff like that was in the movie because the first 45 minutes are pretty good. the intro credits with the newspaper clippings and photos and the accompanying music is really good. muto 1 wakes up and then any time godzilla is not on the screen it goes to pieces. godzilla's reveal is truly awesome, so is the first time he uses his atomic ray and how he kills muto 2. grabs her by the throat, pours some blue deathray down her gullet and tears her head off. that = greatness. made me think of mortal kombat which only made it greater. but godzilla kills muto 1 by slamming it into a skyscraper with his tail? breaking muto 1's back, i guess? muto 1 should have had an awesome death too. the CG is really excellent, the mutos look awesome. godzilla's snout should've been a little bit wider but the cinematography is so good that godzilla looks fast and agile and moves fluidly even though he's really very bulky.

end of the movie, godzilla wakes up and heads out to sea. damn they should've had a 15 minute post credits scene with the military going all out on him and he ruins their shit and heads for monster island or whatever. would've redeemed this film.

In this he doesn't even behave like a predator. He's indifferent to humans, even when they're attacking him, and when he finally gets his kill, he just walks off into the sunset (almost literally.) At the very least, he should've been more carnal and actually ate his prey. Godzilla's motivations were completely selfless, which really isn't a hallmark of most of the series. Usually there's a self-preservation element.

I didn't see the portrayal of Godzilla as a hero very direct in this movie, I mean come on, he just destroyed the Golden Gate Bridge with buses full of kids and civilians, and his body blocking the missiles was just a coincidence. Rather I believe Godzilla to be a force of nature who does not discriminate between collateral damage similar to how a hurricane simply exists and damages, not as a moral force but as a natural one. Did Godzilla intend to save humanity from the MUTOs? I doubt it cause that just happened to overlap with balancing nature and Godzilla would be all too happy to do the duty.

As far as the human characters go it was a bad choice in having Aaron Taylor-Johnson and his family be the focal point of the human story when I felt a combination of Cranston and Watanabe as the leads would have been fantastic. Typically scientists have been important characters to a Godzilla plot, and when Watanabe went, "I need those two" I had really hoped Cranston would have survived somehow to have lasted longer in the story. And of course, how does the main character just happen to end up where the MUTOs and Godzilla would end up is just beyond me and a MUTO escaping a heavily guarded nuclear waste disposal site with no alarm was just dumb.

As for the big G, it was disappointing seeing him barely have a presence outside of the last quarter of the movie. We get it, building hype for the character is important but when the titular monster is only in it for about a good 6-10 minutes you have to wonder whether they were trying to buy more time but just couldn't afford it so had to resort to cut-aways. It was all compensated by the big kaiju fights, and don't tell me you didn't get hyped as fuck when you saw the back fins glow blue and Godzilla did the finisher on mama MUTO.

This movie was a solid 7.5/10 even though I hate rating things out of 10. It had some great parts and a few weak parts which could have been solved easily but I assume if it wasn't a "serious movie with military stuff" it wouldn't work in Hollywood. As for the comparisons with Pacific Rim this wasn't as much of a neon-lighty comic book movie so I don't think comparisons are too valid but as a kaiju movie this felt better.