"Godzilla" (2014) Movie Review

         Godzilla (2014) is directed by Gareth Edwards and stars Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Elizabeth Olsen, Ken Wantanabe, and Bryan Cranston. It is the well-known story of… Godzilla. Except here, the plot is very different from the plot of the original 1954 version. Because of that, I will provide no plot details so I will not accidentally disclose any plot points to people who have still not seen the film yet.

            As far as enjoyment goes, I really enjoyed this movie. It is very fast-paced and provides just enough fantastic action to thrill audience members. There are throw downs in this movie that are incredible, and the visual effects for the monsters are excellent. Down to very detail, they look fantastic. The sound is also excellent in this movie. When Godzilla does his shriek, it is awesome. The score here is also very good. It is not only very exciting and very powerful, it also provides very eerie music during some scenes to show how scary and menacing some of this is for the humans. Although the music seems to be copied straight from 2001: A Space Odyssey, that film had no original score, so I will not count that against this film.

            This is a very well-directed movie. Throughout the movie, everything looks very good. During the scenes with Godzilla, everything looks great. Some of the shots used in this movie are incredible. There is one POV shot that really shows how gigantic and menacing these monsters are. The ways the action sequences are directed make them incredible. The only reason I will not say the directed did a great job is because during the dialogue scenes, he uses the usual cut-back-and-forth-between-characters thing, which is not a flaw, it is just that he does not direct the film greatly throughout all of it.

            As far as the performances go, they are good overall. Bryan Cranston is great in this film, but he is not in it that much. Aaron Taylor-Johnson is alright, but he should be better as the leader character whose eyes we are seeing all of this happen through. Elizabeth Olsen is good, but she does not have much to do here, either. Ken Wantanabe is good, too. And though he is in the movie more than Bryan Cranston and Elizabeth Olsen, he is not in the movie nearly as much as Aaron Taylor-Johnson is.

            Another thing I liked about the film is how different it is. It is not a straight copy off of the original. It is very different and new. Though, my favorite thing about the movie is that it gives some insight on the monsters. It treats them not as big CGI cool beasts that just destroy things; it treats them as animals that could really exist. This adds a lot of realism to the film.

            Speaking of the realism of the film, one of the film’s main goals is to be a realistic Godzilla movie, and, for the most part, it succeeds. Sometimes I did feel the movie was unrealistic. Sometimes I did not quite know if it was realistic or not. But for the movie part, the movie felt realistic.

            Many people who have seen this movie have had problems with Godzilla and how much we see him. I think that it does well in not showing Godzilla too much. It does tease us, and I do not think that should have done, but it does it for the better. I do not have a problem with how much they show Godzilla. I have other problems with the film, though.

            I did say that I liked how different this film was from the original, but sometimes it is way too different. It forgets major plot points and completely makes the plot a completely different plot. I will not take as many points off the film as I normally wood, though. That is because the original film is foreign and sixty years older than this film. I will allow some of it, but not all of it. This film also completely forgot about the moral of the original. It did not have that at all.

            This film also has some movie clichés. The first 25 to 30 minutes of the movie were thoroughly predictable and incredibly familiar. The plot of these first 25 or 30 minutes was clichéd. The characters were clichéd. Everything was clichéd. Luckily, soon after this, a somewhat large plot point happens and the movie takes a different turn in which it is not nearly as clichéd as it was before. Though, there still are some clichés I found in the script here and there.

            I have another very small flaw with the movie. It is that in a few scenes there is some explanatory dialogue. In one of them, the scene called for explanatory dialogue, but the flaw is in the way the dialogue is worded. It is worded like narration of a documentary. Human dialogue is not planned-out, documentary dialogue. It is us improvising. This explanatory dialogue was not like human dialogue.

            My last flaw here is the characters. When a movie does not have much character development, but does not call for us to care about the characters and does not shoot for big character moments, that is alright. This film does not have much character development. At the beginning, there is character development. But after that, it switches to fast-paced plot and no more character development. Though, this film does call for us to care about the characters and does call for big character moments. Therefore, the emotion with the characters does not work.

            I did have flaws with this movie, but I really enjoyed it and it was very well done. It is a good movie.