The new
(and hopefully improved) American version of Godzilla came out on Friday and I will have a review for it up next
weekend. In the meantime, we will ignore the 1998 American version of Godzilla and focus on the 1954 Japanese
version of Godzilla.
Godzilla takes place in ‘50s Japan. When
a ship gets destroyed in water, another ship is sent to record what happened.
That ship gets destroyed, too. Some of the older people believe that it is
Godzilla that is doing this. Godzilla, according to old folklore, is a monster
that lives in sea and eats all of the fish. Scientists go on an expedition to
see if there really is a monster, and they do indeed find a giant monster that
has been moved from its natural habitat by testing of nuclear weapons, and now
it has soaked up a huge amount of radiation and seems to be unstoppable.
With a running
time as short of 96 minutes, Godzilla
has to move very quickly to get the entire story into the movie. It does move
very fast and I did enjoy this movie. There were many interesting scenes having
to do with the scientists looking to find Godzilla or finding things about
Godzilla. There were also exciting scenes in which Godzilla was destroying the
city. I thought they were very cool and exhilarating.
But I do
have a flaw with this. In the first five to ten minutes of the movie, it went
by so fast that it would skip hours and days on end just to get to a scene that
contained something having to do with the plot. It did eventually stop this,
but those first few minutes did bother me in that they went too fast and only
showed what was important for the plot.
Another flaw
I have with the movie is that there is little character development. We have a
few characters that I would call main characters, and they had little-to-no
depth. Because of this, in scenes with them that did not have much to do with
the central plot of the movie, I was less into the movie. I also did not care
much about them when some things that I will not spoil happened, and during emotional
scenes with the characters, I was not invested.
Though, one
big positive is that this movie is really well directed. During the dialogue scenes
we get a bit of a sense of depth because of the camerawork. A combination of
up-close shots and wide shots helped me figure out what one character may be
feeling. The destruction scenes with Godzilla are also really well directed.
The shots that are used are all wide shots, and the assemblage of shots was
very good and the uses of cuts helped make the scene better.
I thought
the premise here was very good. I liked the fact that the firing of nuclear
weapons was how Godzilla came to be. And there was a moral at the end having to
do with nuclear weapons and mass destruction weapons in general. That theme was
the best part of the movie.
But there is
one very unbelievable thing having to do with how Godzilla is alive. It made no
sense. There was also one thing that Godzilla could do that went too far and
was also very silly and unbelievable.
The movies
also had some very awful choppy editing that could have easily been fixed. It
was like no cared while editing the movie.
Just because
the movie is old does not mean I am going to let the flaws slide. I did enjoy
the movie, it was very well made, it had a really good premise, it did have a
theme, it was exciting sometimes and interesting sometimes, and it also had a
very good score, but it has actual movie flaws. There is some choppy editing,
there is an unbelievable idea, there are over-the-top things, there is very little
character development, and the beginning does movie.
Overall, I
did think Godzilla is an alright movie.
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