Movie Review: Godzilla (2014)

 Why does Godzilla feel like an afterthought in his own movie? Especially after having a hype campaign that was solely centered around having the mystery of how Godzilla looks? All the latest Godzilla monster flick made me do was remember Pacific Rim. And the comparison is not kind to Godzilla.

 The Godzilla movie starts off at a nuclear reactor in Japan. We are introduced to a family consisting of a father and mother who work at a nuclear reactor and their son. I found this opening very effective to establish the family in a short amount of time before a monster attacks the reactor. This leads to the mother dying, the father becoming a conspiracy theorist to try and find out what really happened and the son joining the military. We are also introduced to a scientist looking at a massive crater somewhere close by. At this point I thought this would take the approach of World War Z (the awesome book) and follow different peoples perspectives during the monster attack, which would have been awesome.

 Unfortunately, this was not the case. Fast-forward to 15 years later and the father is still looking for the truth, the son has grown up and joined the American military  (but as bomb disposal, so there are no grey areas about him killing foreigners and being a bad guy, of course) and has a family in San Francisco and there is a giant monster containment unit over the Japanese nuclear reactor site. And this is where the movie starts to go off the rails. In short, the parts with the family are horrible and bland and often take the focus off where it should be: the monster (or spoiler alert, monsters).

 There are multiple monsters in this movie, being a male and female Muto that are quite bland and a giant Godzilla that is quite uninspired. In effect, the Muto are trying to breed and Godzilla is hunting them, for some reason that is never adequately explained (they don't even feed on eachother, instead feeding on radiation). This would have been fine, except that everytime the monsters go to fight it cuts back to the bland army guy trying to do his stuff. This was particularly evident when they initially face off and instead it just cuts to the next day and the destruction caused. That being said, once the movie settles back and lets you see the monsters fight, it is as impressive as Pacific Rim.

 Compared to Pacific Rim, Godzilla ends up being an extremely boring mess. There are many other things wrong with this movie, but it would have all been okay if it just got Godzilla right. However, like Transformers, it cuts away from the action I wanted to see to some human characters I didn't care about at all. The best parts are the very beginning (the prologue) and some giant monster fight scenes at the end. If it was released earlier, it might have been okay. But in a world post-Pacific Rim, monster movies should be doing better.

1.5 out of 5 monstrous waffles.