Post by ld1449 on Jun 5, 2014 23:55:32 GMT -5
I'll start this off by saying that there will be spoilers.
Now having said that, I feel as though the Godzilla marketing team cheated. The entire marketing campaign centered around two things:
1) A giant Lizard rampaging and destroying stuff
2) Bryan Cranston in a lead role.
Godzilla is as far from a rampaging lizard as he can possibly be and Bryan Cranston is dead within the first thirty minutes.
So yeah, I feel a little jiped here.
But moving on, I feel as though I have just watched two movies.
One involving rampaging monstrosities that can level cities and shrug off missiles like annoying flies (in other words, the fanboyishly awesome part)
And another about a Soldier boy, a nurse, and their child...which sounds and was utterly boring and predictable by comparison.
So lets start out with the 'Good' things about the movie.
1) The backstory for Godzilla. The normal backstory for the iconic super lizard has been given something of a new twist with a fresh breath of air in this latest installment. Godzilla, in most instances is the product of radioactive fallout from old nuclear tests, either he is a freak born of nature of a freak born of mankind's hubris. Either way it is a creature that has been alive only within the last century.
In this movie Gozilla, or at least his species is far older than anything else on this earth, he wasn't born of radiation it *feeds* on radiation as a result of an unbelievably ancient evolution when the earth was still a molten mess of radioactive explosions with a too thin atmosphere.
So, points for originality. I enjoyed this part.
2) The Antagonist creatures MUTO1 and MUTO2.
These things were big, they were freakish, they were primordial. In other words, the perfect enemies for the iconic creature. These were beasts that supposedly evolved from this earth but they're simply so alien in appearance you can't in any way pin down their origins whether mammalian, reptilian, amphibious or insect. They have elements of each group which is good since they're supposed to be the oldest type of creature that ever walked this earth so who's to say how the descendants evolved through the ages. Its off mixture of the alien with the familiar hit just right in my book.
3) The battles.
While many of the battles were captured at a distance, through cameras, far far far away, in the dark, through clouds of debris and smoke and ash and god knows what else that you could never really get a clear view of the fight itself save in a few select scenes, the parts that they did show were done well and stood out more because of that. What we *did* get to see, was great and it wasn't an over saturated film where the director tried to make every encounter between Godzilla and the MUTO beasts "unbelievably awesome" that it would just end up being more and more of the same. Which is understandable since there's only so much "claw swipe" "Chomp" and "Hyper Beam" you can show before it just becomes a repeat of the same crap over and over again.
Now. The bad stuff.
This list can be summed up in three words.
The main family.
The three people in this family, from the protagonist, to his wife to his kid were there as little more than pretty faces.
The protagonist was competing with a teacup for least number of facial expressions and winning as far as I could tell.
The Wife was competing with Mary Jane Watson for least useful love interest around. To be fair though, Mary Jane is still leagues ahead in that category.
And the child...was there for flavor I guess.
This is the Trio the movie kind of centers on.
To be honest I don't *mind* the fact that they would focus on humans because its a necesary bi-product of having a monster movie. You cannot have a movie of nothing but a giant lizard rampaging through a city because that will lose its luster within the first ten minutes. You need characters, dialogue, plot and tension and a human focus provides these things.
But good *god* did they have to be so unbearably *boring*?
Bryan Cranston, for the twenty minutes he was on screen was more compelling than the two hours of screen time the actor who played his estranged son had. The five minutes Cranston's wife had were also more emotion provoking than the entire performance of his son's blond haired waifu.
I am under the firm opinion that the only reason these people were hired was because they're both very pretty people. Because individually, they added absolutely *nothing* to the performance. You could switch out the female and male leads with any other actress or actor and it would be no different. You could put *anyone* in that role and *nothing* would be lost. Their mutual performances were that flat.
Furthermore the writing around them was riddled with cliches and things that you could see coming ten miles away even at the time of night 90 percent of this movie was shot in.
Or, am I wrong and this is genuinely the first time a soldier gets together with a nurse, the kid by the stupidity of his parents is thrown straight into the path of the crossfire, that the heroic father figure is desperately trying to reach his wife and son because he's clearly the only one capable of protecting either one of them (since mom sends the son off to go with a freaking co worker while she sits and looks pretty in a hospital)
This was the A-typical "murican" family and it was a snore fest. The entire performance feels like a ball and chain that drags down the rest of what would be a pretty good film without them around.
So yeah. If you cut out the whole "murican" family, the film could easilly be a 9 out of ten if only for the original backstory they gave the beasts that gave motivation and drove the whole film from start to finish.
With the family dragging it down, its a 7 on a good day.
So ends my review of the latest Godzilla movie.
Now having said that, I feel as though the Godzilla marketing team cheated. The entire marketing campaign centered around two things:
1) A giant Lizard rampaging and destroying stuff
2) Bryan Cranston in a lead role.
Godzilla is as far from a rampaging lizard as he can possibly be and Bryan Cranston is dead within the first thirty minutes.
So yeah, I feel a little jiped here.
But moving on, I feel as though I have just watched two movies.
One involving rampaging monstrosities that can level cities and shrug off missiles like annoying flies (in other words, the fanboyishly awesome part)
And another about a Soldier boy, a nurse, and their child...which sounds and was utterly boring and predictable by comparison.
So lets start out with the 'Good' things about the movie.
1) The backstory for Godzilla. The normal backstory for the iconic super lizard has been given something of a new twist with a fresh breath of air in this latest installment. Godzilla, in most instances is the product of radioactive fallout from old nuclear tests, either he is a freak born of nature of a freak born of mankind's hubris. Either way it is a creature that has been alive only within the last century.
In this movie Gozilla, or at least his species is far older than anything else on this earth, he wasn't born of radiation it *feeds* on radiation as a result of an unbelievably ancient evolution when the earth was still a molten mess of radioactive explosions with a too thin atmosphere.
So, points for originality. I enjoyed this part.
2) The Antagonist creatures MUTO1 and MUTO2.
These things were big, they were freakish, they were primordial. In other words, the perfect enemies for the iconic creature. These were beasts that supposedly evolved from this earth but they're simply so alien in appearance you can't in any way pin down their origins whether mammalian, reptilian, amphibious or insect. They have elements of each group which is good since they're supposed to be the oldest type of creature that ever walked this earth so who's to say how the descendants evolved through the ages. Its off mixture of the alien with the familiar hit just right in my book.
3) The battles.
While many of the battles were captured at a distance, through cameras, far far far away, in the dark, through clouds of debris and smoke and ash and god knows what else that you could never really get a clear view of the fight itself save in a few select scenes, the parts that they did show were done well and stood out more because of that. What we *did* get to see, was great and it wasn't an over saturated film where the director tried to make every encounter between Godzilla and the MUTO beasts "unbelievably awesome" that it would just end up being more and more of the same. Which is understandable since there's only so much "claw swipe" "Chomp" and "Hyper Beam" you can show before it just becomes a repeat of the same crap over and over again.
Now. The bad stuff.
This list can be summed up in three words.
The main family.
The three people in this family, from the protagonist, to his wife to his kid were there as little more than pretty faces.
The protagonist was competing with a teacup for least number of facial expressions and winning as far as I could tell.
The Wife was competing with Mary Jane Watson for least useful love interest around. To be fair though, Mary Jane is still leagues ahead in that category.
And the child...was there for flavor I guess.
This is the Trio the movie kind of centers on.
To be honest I don't *mind* the fact that they would focus on humans because its a necesary bi-product of having a monster movie. You cannot have a movie of nothing but a giant lizard rampaging through a city because that will lose its luster within the first ten minutes. You need characters, dialogue, plot and tension and a human focus provides these things.
But good *god* did they have to be so unbearably *boring*?
Bryan Cranston, for the twenty minutes he was on screen was more compelling than the two hours of screen time the actor who played his estranged son had. The five minutes Cranston's wife had were also more emotion provoking than the entire performance of his son's blond haired waifu.
I am under the firm opinion that the only reason these people were hired was because they're both very pretty people. Because individually, they added absolutely *nothing* to the performance. You could switch out the female and male leads with any other actress or actor and it would be no different. You could put *anyone* in that role and *nothing* would be lost. Their mutual performances were that flat.
Furthermore the writing around them was riddled with cliches and things that you could see coming ten miles away even at the time of night 90 percent of this movie was shot in.
Or, am I wrong and this is genuinely the first time a soldier gets together with a nurse, the kid by the stupidity of his parents is thrown straight into the path of the crossfire, that the heroic father figure is desperately trying to reach his wife and son because he's clearly the only one capable of protecting either one of them (since mom sends the son off to go with a freaking co worker while she sits and looks pretty in a hospital)
This was the A-typical "murican" family and it was a snore fest. The entire performance feels like a ball and chain that drags down the rest of what would be a pretty good film without them around.
So yeah. If you cut out the whole "murican" family, the film could easilly be a 9 out of ten if only for the original backstory they gave the beasts that gave motivation and drove the whole film from start to finish.
With the family dragging it down, its a 7 on a good day.
So ends my review of the latest Godzilla movie.