Godzilla… the new Godzilla movie is… curious. It’s a good movie, but not a great one. It has epic moments of serious kaiju big battle giant monster throw-down action… but it curiously keeps a lot of it off screen. I think intentionally so though. It was made by a dude who made an low budget (under a million bucks) giant monster movie back in 2010 called Monsters which was largely focused on what life would be like living in a world where monsters pop up every once in a while, wreck your city, and the military buzzes in and fights back. You saw very little of the monsters for both budgetary reasons and to showcase the direction the movie was taking (the results, not the attacks). This movie does that on a HUGE budget… It’s kind of frustrating at first since you think you are about to (finally) get an epic monster attack on a city or fight… and then it cuts to the next day (with some news footage in the background). Eventually we do get what we went to see a Godzilla movie for in some pretty satisfying action scenes. In between all this is fairly well acted human drama but really not good enough to encourage multiple viewings of the flick, at least in my book.
I don’t want to reveal the bigger surprises of the movie but they affect the entire tone and direction the movie takes. I was kind of pleased… but saying more would be spoilers.
So, anyway, this is a good, possibly flawed, and curious movie. The amount its flawed is often based on what the movie is trying to do vis-a-vis that earlier movie but if you aren’t aware of that earlier movie, then I think it’ll just feel like a big case of, “Hey. That would have been a pretty good movie to see. Lets see that movie” every time it cuts away from some big action set piece right when things were getting good.
So you know if you want to see this movie and if you do have any interest, then I say see it. It’s a well made, serious-minded big summer movie that may have some dumb “huh?” moments but they don’t derive from deep-seated stupidity or scorn for the audience unlike a lot of big epic dumb Summer movies (looking at Transformers and very much looking at the last dumb-as-hell 1998 Godzilla movie). Speaking of the 1998 Godzilla movies, I think there’s some fun to be had at its expense… and long-time Godzilla fans will be very pleased and might even cheer a few times.
Compared to, say, Pacific Rim… this is a far more serious-minded movie. It doesn’t have the rock ‘n roll, monsters punching robots type vibe. It feels a lot more like Cloverfield, minus the shaky cam and the annoying characters.