Godzilla 2014

Being a great step forward for director Gareth Edwards, Godzilla, on its own, is a good movie. There was just enough action and drama to please all audiences to an extent: the fact that my mom enjoyed this movie gives you a little clue.

We follow a soldier and his separated wife and kid as they try to survive the sudden global threat two giant monsters pose. Who will stop them? Godzilla!

Being a major league Godzilla fan, I was a little let down. They spent an unrealistic amount of time on character development, which was OK, but I didn’t get to see enough of Godzilla kicking butt to even it out. Unlike the 1998 film, Godzilla actually looked like Godzilla and contained his atomic breath (except he was really fat). The film also lacked the intensity it should have contained: the trailer made it look much crazier than it was.

If you wanted to watch a great recent kaiju film (Japanese monster movie), see Del Toro’s Pacific Rim. If you want to see a decent American monster movie, watch Godzilla.

 

RATING: 6/10

★★★★★★★☆☆☆

Thoughts on… GODZILLA

Introducing the King of Monsters

The Big G. He’s an acquired taste. Not everyone will find pleasure in watching a man in a rubber suit obliterating scale models of Tokyo. For me, it never gets old. And even if you don’t love or want to love Godzilla, many of them are worth watching for the spectacular visuals and influential special effects they contain, that, at-least to me, look great even today.

The Franchise

Ok. Time to geek out.

There have been a total of 28 Toho distributed films in the franchise. Geeks about the series, like myself, categorize all of the films into three eras:

Showa (1954 – 1975)

Heisei (1984 – 1995)

Millenium (1999 – 2004)

Each one has a different style. The Showa era contained many fantasy-like elements. Although these ones can get pretty cheesy, the art of the genre was really established, and several films of that era added on to important plot points in the entire franchise, like in Ghidorah, the Three Headed Monster. In this film, Godzilla becomes a good guy (I won’t spoil why, but it’s pretty schlocky). In Invasion of Astro Monster, the first ‘spacey elements’ were introduced to the Showa series, which would really be important the rest of the series (the ‘aliens’ try to kill Godzilla with more monsters). The franchise was doing great until 1975, when Terror of Mechagodzilla was released. This flick was the least attended Godzilla film in Japan and only sold 970,000 tickets. Because of this, the series was put on a temporary hold. However, Toho had no intentions on permanently ending the series. The sad thing is that Terror of Mechagodzilla is actually a more far fetched but intelligent entry to the Showa series and is one of my favorites. Nonetheless, the series was put on a 9 year hold, until…