Gareth Edwards’ reboot of the famous monster franchise is surprisingly fresh and entertaining. “Godzilla’s” special effects are astounding, but it is the perspective through which we see the monster that draws us into the film’s reality. The biggest criticism of this film is that its human story is underdeveloped and, while I completely agree, it may be the key to making “Godzilla” a success. The focus of the film is the titular monster, but any movie made directly about him requires an impractical suspension of disbelief. A movie where a monster is the main character screams “Fiction!” However, if you create a movie written about believable human characters and always show the monster through their lenses, it becomes much easier to believe. This is why the movie “Cloverfield” is so effective. It is farfetched to believe that this family could coincidentally witness monster attacks in Japan, Hawaii, and San Francisco over a two-day period and yet, it helps us to believe that we could see it for ourselves. The director could have better utilized his best actors (Juliette Binoche and Sally Hawkins) if he wanted to impress us, but the acting is a means to an end (with the end being an epic battle between Godzilla and the MUTOs that you simply have to see). I love that the writers wait an hour to finally give us a good view of Godzilla and wait even longer to reveal Godzilla as the hero of this film. Any more information than that would turn into a spoiler, but trust me that they did a much better job than the writers of the 1998 version. “Pacific Rim” and the “Transformers” franchise have made me skeptical of any film involving large creatures that fight... but I believe that “Godzilla” could be the film that inspires producers to revive the monster genre by CGI and motion-capture to show it in a way that we have never seen.
[Pictured: Godzilla. That is all.]
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