I still like this movie, but holy hell does it not hold up in repeat viewings. I'll stand by my earlier thoughts that Edwards completely nails the monster aspect, but the movie suffers greatly when it comes to the human elements. It literally took me 2 tries to rewatch the whole thing on HBO and I haven't seen it since watching it in theatres. I honestly think a majority of my enjoyment for this was seeing it on the bigscreen for the first time, because it's definitely a HUGE spectacle worth seeing in that format. The sound design was AMAZING, but not having Godzilla for such long periods of time starts to become annoyingly noticeable, especially when you have such boring human characters to follow.

They really fucked up not making Bryan Cranston the lead IMO, considering he easily gives the best performance in the movie and it's total bullshit that he gets killed off so early. However, there are things I can still appreciate about this movie like constant empathic terror the monsters envoke everytime there on screen or the dark, atmospheric score by Desplat. Oh and that Halo Jump scene is still incredibly beautiful to watch and very well done.

Exactly.

Watching this movie again (far from marketing) puts this in a different light. Cranston's absence is not nearly as missed, Godzilla is given good screetime. The only problem I found was that throughout the movie it keeps building one encounter after another but when the actual fight comes it ducks out by showing a closing gate or fading to next scene. This helps some part of the final fight but even there its shown half screen from human point of view. I understand this would work for passion project like "Monsters" from the director but for a big blockbuster it just felt they ran out of ideas/budget. Regardless this is miles better than the horrid sequel "King of Monsters".