The action scenes with Godzilla were pretty good, he was portrayed as powerful as imposing without sacrificing the MUTOs against him. I also think that the final battle in Godzilla is better than the action scenes in Pacific Rim. But Pacific Rim had a much better paced action than Godzilla, more coreography and more of an identity when it came to kaiju fights.
Sadly I must agree that the plot is not enough about Goji to be just named "Godzilla", a shared title for the film such as Godzilla vs MUTOs would've made more sense of the plot we saw. But that's marketing for you I'm afraid. In the end, it remains very true to the franchise where Godzilla is not always the epicenter of the action.
Not in all movies but certainly in most of them. It's rarely the main attraction anyways, which hurts the overall structure of those movies that rely in the Human element for most of the films.
I think that all things considered the humans weren't that bad here... I was probably just expecting worse. I'll rewatch the movie when I buy the DVD.
Gender: Male Location: 4th Street Underpass, Manhattan
The main problem with Godzilla is the characters. I understand not focusing entirely on the monster for the film's run time, as Cloverfield did, but the difference is Cloverfield had interesting characters to focus on. The characters in Godzilla may have just as well been cardboard cut-outs. When the main character's brother dies in CF, we see how this traumatizes him and motivates him to save his GF. In Godzilla, Brody doesn't react at all to his father's death. It's like after Cranston died the writers forgot he was ever in the film. Compare to Pacific Rim (which I liked more than GZ14) where Yancy's death is the clear emotional motivator for Raleigh throughout the film, and other PR characters who had clear motivations, emotions, and just a general sense of dimensionality to them. Compare Serizawa from the 54' film, where he sacrificed his life, to this film where he spouts exposition and Confucian philosophies about nature. Hell, compare to Edward's earlier film Monsters, which had an excellent character arc and love story to go along with it's kaiju plot, with this one and it's 1D stock character stereotypes.
And I understand that many of the 70's era GZ films had the same formula as this film, but most of those films are Sy-Fy level B-movies only enjoyable because of the iconography of Godzilla. It was rather hard to get invested in GZ14 when none of the characters really were.
Gender: Male Location: 4th Street Underpass, Manhattan
TBH, even the 1998 Godzilla (which admittedly I enjoy, even just on a guilty pleasure level) was better in terms of characters. I could buy that a nerdy guy like Nick Greekname, or some blonde reporter like his girlfriend could actually exist and react to the situation the way they did. They at least had some dimensionality and character to them. With GZ14, SIRI would have been a more emotive and interesting protagonist.
And I don't blame Taylor-Johnson for the blandness of his character as some reviewers do. The script simply failed to deliver any kind of interesting motivation to the character.
Even some of the characters in those old Godzilla movies were better too
One comment that i came across over at comicbookmovie.com to do with Taylor-Johnson character he's a soldier and he's trained to not be all that emotionally-available and then there's the backstory with his mother's death, (and how he tells his father that he "doesn't want to hear about it" in regards to his father's guilt over her death) helps explain why he's not exactly the type of person to emote all that much
something about it being natural for that character
i know the movie wasn't perfect but i still enjoyed it for what it was.
Gender: Male Location: 4th Street Underpass, Manhattan
I would give it a 6.5/10 at best, as every scene with the monsters was good as was the climatic battle, but the 1d characters did not fill the void made by the lack of monster screentime, and their blandness and them cheering on Godzilla at the end killed the realistic atmosphere the film was trying to build.
I've heard that too and not only do I not buy it but even if so, that is the fault of the writers that they made his character a wood plank instead of interesting.
This new writer better be good because they've got him tapped for the King Kong origin story & the pilot for Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report TV series among other projects
The 2014 version may be not very good in my opinion, but it still blows the previous American Godzilla clear out of the water. The 1998 version was terrible on every conceivable level, while the new one at least had a great first act with Bryan Cranston and the final fight was cool, if underwhelming for me. The characters in 2014 were boring outside of Cranston, but the characters in 98 were irritating shmucks.
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Last edited by Nephthys on Sep 19th, 2014 at 01:24 PM
The characters in 2014 were boring outside of Cranston, but the characters in 98 were irritating shmucks. Every character in that movie is comic relief. I mean wtf?
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Jun 10th, 2014 08:39 AM
