Lol in caps! Man, shit just got serious.

I know I pulled a Grill and just felt bad afterwords. Still better than BKB going Bold on everything

I saw this in IMAX last weekend and I really don't get all the negativity surrounding it from some people. Maybe it was my expectations being lowered a bit but I had an absolute blast from start to finish. Some of it was seriously intense too, I was surprised. The only negative thing to me (and people are going to hate me for this) but was Cranston. He was so bad. I don't expect great acting from a monster movie though, so I wasn't bothered by it. Also, I didn't see the lack of Godzilla. You always felt his presence even when he wasn't on screen. The build up was insane. All in all, I thought it was pretty much the perfect summer movie.

A-

I actually like Godzilla 1998 better.

ew

For those who haven't seen it yet, here's some good advice from this reviewer:

I found it to be a refreshingly unique blockbuster for its visuals and craftsmanship, though it's the type of film I may cool on after a few weeks from the in-theatre experience and I start to think about things like what a SO SO BAD trainwreck all the Ken Watanabe scenes were. Cranston, Olsen and Aaron Tyler-Hansbrough's scenes weren't good, but they were passable enough if that was all the human scenes, the Watanabe/Hawkins/Strathairn scenes are just a killer though. Overall it's the film version of an artist that can draw animals and buildings only, but should avoid trying to draw people at all costs.

Still, the action scenes and how the city at night is shot is amazingly well done and everytime Godzilla or MUTOS (is that another name for Mothra??) are on screen is major boner material and gets better and better culminating in the fight.

Can't disagree more with the people who think Godzilla isn't on screen enough, the slow introduction and then dominating the 3rd act was perfect for me. Admittedly that may because for the first half of the film, I thought Godzilla was just turned into a bug in this version

"dominating the 3rd act"

if only.

You've gotta be kidding.

It's Shack.

I was baffled by my wife thinking it was Godzilla too.

I was surprised to hear the estimate that he's on screen 7-10 minutes. It felt like a 40 minute climax with him on half of the time, but I was enjoying the film.

Godzilla

Sensational. Of course it's far more impressive than Godzilla (1998) and Pacific Rim, but then that's not setting the by very high. I absolutely adored how they kept the film feeling authentically Japanese, which showed that they respect the source material while still deviating somewhat. What I really loved was how the marketing differed so much from what you see in the cinema. We got a progressive and teasing Summer blockbuster the likes of which we've kind of never seen before, and where Godzilla is actually humanity's saviour, yet the marketing resembled just another Godzilla vs. Americans plot or Godzilla being the main threat - I loved how they covered up the fact that Godzilla is versus two other monsters, and the scenes of them fighting and demolishing are fantastic!! The build up and story created (regarding the atom bomb tests in the 1950s etc.) was really very good, and it all made sense. A sequel would be terrific.

For such an event monster picture, the film also had such a human feel to it. I got the sense that these monsters were not just brutes intent on destruction, but monsters with feelings and agendas themselves. Humans kind of got in the way of a simple saving-of-the-day by Godzilla, to a degree. I loved how Godzilla resembled the Godzilla from the Japanese movies rather than the dinosaur thing from the 1998 movie. I also liked how they just went at it and fought for a while instead of it being Godzilla against the US Army. Then they let him go at the end, which is such a rarity in US monster films. Usually they just kill everything to show they are the dominant nation.

The music wasn't anything special, and the fights, while impressive (especially the final one where 'Zilla rips the jaw and breathes a blue bolt down its throat, which had me double fist-pump in the cinema), were all shot in the dark, which I kind of disliked. Although it was shot much better than films like Pacific Rim. I also think I've spotted a plot hole; the two other monsters didn't really need each other. The female could have got herself her own nuclear warhead, to which point I don't see the relevance of the male since he only seemed useful to pass a warhead to the female - he didn't actually fuck the female at all, the eggs were already present, they just needed energy.

I liked how the whole film pretty much acted like a teaser too, not letting us see Godzilla or the money shots until the end. Great stuff, and risky film-making. But it worked. Ken Watanabe was good, Brian Cranston was fantastic, Aaron Taylor-Johnson was miscast, and Elizabeth Olsen was wasted (she should always have a bikini scene at least).

Considering how the summer blockbuster scene usually goes, this year has been really great. Big blockbusters but with quality instead of quantity. Great summer so far. I liked the film a lot, but I'm going to ignore my subjective boner and give it both grades; one that I will likely reduce it to in a few weeks anyway, and the other is how I feel about it now:

A-/B+

Glad you liked it!

For me, Godzilla reminded me how a summer blockbuster used to be in the 90s before you could see every part of the movie before attending. Because they tricked us with the marketing, the results are the same. I was watching it and everything I saw I was amazed by because I hadn't known about it previously.

I only wish that the lack of Godzilla in the marketing wasn't because of the actually lack of Godzilla in the entire film.

I enjoyed this quite a bit.

Gonna say though, for awhile I thought that Brody's son, the blonde girl at the beach and the Asian kid were all aliens, I mean seriously, why would you cast three different kids and have them all play slightly off-kilter creepy staring into space. Obviously it was a directorial choice but I don't know why they needed to all pull the same expression.

This is the only aspect of the marketing that was sincere.

I've watched this again to see if my initial disapointment was justified.

It even got worse. When there's no action, it's boring like hell with boring characters that do nothing but boring stuff. When there's action, it's frustrating like hell because it just won't let us see anything and is badly cut. Seriously, the action starts and either we don't get to see anything of it or it's set in such an ugly dark that we still have problems seeing anything.

This movie sucks. Gareth Edwards sucks. Everyone who thinks not showing Godzilla and instead have a terrible lead performance by some boy makes this a more quality blockbuster, sucks too.

I have rarely seen a movie that offers less than this one.

At first, there's Bryan Cranston (who, before 'Breaking Bad', would've played the Strathairn role, at best) as a grieving, conscience-stricken dad that seems to be taken straight from some random TV show, before being abruptly killed in a fashion that reminded me of some of the deaths in the movie "Blood Surf", where they quickly had to get rid of some more characters and couldn't really think of any decent way to pull it off.

Afterwards we're left with a protagonist that's entirely based on the 'Quake 2' main character, i.e. a complete non-entity who's seemingly supposed to appeal to the movie's main target audience: aspiring US soldiers who want to serve (and preferably die for) their country in Iraq at all costs.
Furthermore, there's Watanabe as the indispensable Japanese scientist who simply embodies everything the writers were able to grasp while skimming the wikipedia article on "Godzilla" (before writing the script, which must have taken about twice as long as reading through that article), one Olsen twin who's trying to showcase everything she learned during her "worried mother 101" lesson, three or four 6 year old kids of different races who apathically gaze into the distance, and numerous badly programmed NPCs from 'Call of Duty'.
And of course, there's Juliette Binoche, a reputable actress who was apparently included to emphasize the movie's aspiration to stand above the usual Hollywood blockbuster fare and to offer some depth, however, her role is that of a stereotyped understanding wife/mother for 2.5 minutes and then a stereotyped self-sacrificing wife/mother for another 2.5 minutes, before she disappears for good in a ridiculous scene that's seemingly based on the acclaimed art house film 'Armageddon'.

Whenever there's no action, the movie is boring, however, once the action starts, it gets even more boring (and very dark).
Despite wanting to present a menacing global threat, the movie doesn't offer any sort of scope or grandeur at all, just a number of various cities around the planet that get destroyed in quick succession and always in the same trite way. The highly innovative idea of displaying a MUTO while ripping apart the Eiffel Tower speaks for itself.
The composer apparently didn't create any music, but simply got the "Hollywood Action Score 05.wav" file from the studio archives. He should probably have chosen another file, because this one was utterly forgettable.

As for the Godzilla '98 vs 2014 comparisons: The Emmerich version is utter garbage, but at least it contains some sort of campy characters. Gareth Edwards basically removed the Cusack and Reno characters and replaced them with some anonymous member of the military forces; the camp factor was replaced by "CSI"-type "realism", which is extremely dry and unappealing.


My score is a 3/10 for the following reasons:
1 - The scale starts at 1.
2 - The movie isn't quite as ridiculous or enraging as some others.
3 - I laughed twice during the terribly clichéd "school bus on a bridge" scene, because two details unintentionally reminded me of the humor in Jacques Tati's movies.

That was the best part of your post.

Believe it or not, but the genesis of this signature was in a private conversation between him and me, hehe.

BTW, Guybrush, though I disagree with your review (you didn't appreciate the visual style of the film?), I wish you'd write comprehensive reviews like this more often. I like the style.

It's a great signature quote. Love it. I could just see FPj saying that with a straight face.

I wish he would do more reviews, but not because I like his style. It's not nice.

The school bus scene WAS beyond cringe worthy.

Let me first say that I am all for the tease and I am not one of the millions complaining "WTF is Godzilla?" I did not mind his absence. What bothered me was just how generic everything about this movie was. There was not a compelling plot line going on beneath the spectacle. It was just a bunch of disaster movie cliches. Not one thing in this movie was memorable outside Zilla's roar

D-