Godzilla (2014)

Review

You know all those nuclear tests the Yanks conducted in the Pacific back in the 1950s, well apparently they weren't testing weapons they were trying to destroy a honking big prehistoric monster. At least it gave birth to Monarch, a clandestine organisation whose sole purpose is to investigate the Kaiju. Flash forward to 1999 and a mining company in the Philippines have discovered a big underground cavern complete with a huge skeleton and what looks like a couple of cocoons. Before you can wonder about the mounting plot holes the Monarch team, who have been called in, discover one of the cocoons has hatched and something has escaped into the surrounding jungle leaving more damage to the tree line than a respectable herd of elephants could be expected to achieve. Said creature swims across to Japan and totally wrecks a nuclear power plant.

Flash forward to the present and there's some conspiracy theories floating around regarding the non-abandoned nuclear plant and a close by City. Seems the theories have a grain of true about them as something is stirring at the plant, and ominous is calling out across the Pacific and being answered. All roads lead to San Francisco and the U.S military will prove ill equip to handle a menace out of your worst nightmare, the only hope for the United States is the mighty Godzilla, the creature the U.S military tried to destroy back in the 1950s!

So yes I was looking forward to Godzilla as even here on the Senile coast we would likely get a few screens of Godzilla action interspersed with the usual bogan fare that dominates cinemas here. Unfortunately as the movie unfolded, and some numb nuts spent great swaths of it checking his mobile phone, I became less enamelled of the tired old Boredwood shite being splattered across the screen. Godzilla (2014) is simply a big tent pole movie where stuff happens because it'll look good on the screen rather than through any logical fashion. There are plot holes galore, simply stunningly stupid scenes, and a pacing that had me wondering if I shouldn't nab into the next cinema to see if there was something decent playing there. Godzilla is all hype, talked up by quote whores and bandwagon riders, rather than being viewed by our so called Critics with anything like an impartial eye. In simple terms the movie is another Transformers only without the robots that franchise throws at the audience. Where to begin, there was so much wrong, which surprised me as I had a reasonably good time with the flick end of day.

On the bright side, and before we disappear into the rabbit hole of woeful decisions that lead to the movie I just watched, they got the big G exactly right. This time round the big fella looks like the traditional Kaiju king, albeit while sporting a few extra pounds - Godzilla is a bit of a lard arse in the new version folks, and can fire plasma at his enemies - or it could have been bad breath, your call. Anyways for those of us who have jived to the early Japanese movies that made the franchise, we are on common ground and having a good time. This all goes down in the final quarter of the movie by the way, you are left wallowing in the painstaking slow build up that goes on for the rest of the flick, something people wrongly view as character building. Hint folks, you need more than cardboard cut outs in order to have character building, anyone else not really give a crap about the characters in this one?

When Prometheus (2012) was released the web got inundated by nerds pointing out all the supposed plot holes in that movie. It became an overnight sensation with losers of all sorts reiterating the work of a few nerds with nothing better to do. I felt the same way with Godzilla, the movie makes zero sense from a logical point of view but I'm as yet to see sites going up pointing this out, guess the bandwagon hasn't left the station yet. Hint, biological life cycles don't change folks in insectoid life forms. You could also add moving a nuclear weapon to just off shore a major city, moving that nuke on a direct path to a clash with a Kaiju that uses it for food, and heck the number of coincidences needed to get a character from Japan to San Francisco. I look forward to the nerd brigade adding a whole bunch more, any day now I'm sure.

Okay I have to admit when the Kaiju brown stuff hits the osculating appliance, late in the movie, I was rocking to the total destruction of San Francisco, we're talking skyscrapers being knocked down like ten pins etc, fanbois wonderland folks. Of course it takes a few decades getting to that destruction, or at least it seemed to as the movie dragged out like a rainy weekend in Hobart, but still the movie ends up on a high. Or it would have if only the Editors had of thought to snip that line from the television report that is simply face palming stupid. How fracking stupid was that crap, and I got to say a lot of screen time spent watching a kid watching the Kaiju menace on television was less than riveting.

Taking into account that this movie is a tent pole and hence isn't going to be built around the foundations of a decent script, character development, and focusing on some aspect of the human condition, the script was still brain dead. Shite happens to either allow the plot to lumber along to its pre-ordained conclusion or to allow the insertion of the next CGI laden scene to keep the tween males wetting their seats. For the rest of us it's just more big action scenes that simply allow Director Gareth Edwards get his Michael Bay on. Rock on if this represents your cinematic highpoint, but frack me could we get at least one big blockbuster that wasn't retarded to the nth degree.

Guess that's about it for me with this pound puppy, leave your brain at the door if planning to go, Godzilla is simply fanbois shite written large, no pun intended. The dude I checked it out with really enjoyed himself, the rest of the audience were restless for great lengths of time, and to be frank while being entertained I still wouldn't call this flick anything like a good outing. Long slow build ups don't work if you have cookie cutter characters who are defined by one aspect of what should be more complex characters. Worth checking out for the final quarter, don't stay for the final five minutes its vomit inducing, I'd wait till the flick hits disc to be honest. Better than the previous attempt at shaking up the franchise, but still not good enough to justify the big G's inclusion, disappoint as hell folks, Godzilla fringes on suck-ville and fails on a lot of levels.