Godzilla was surprising on so many levels:
1) Juliette Binoche
2) Her being in the movie for 10 minutes
3) Bryan Cranston’s very un-Malcolm in the Middle performance (we don’t get Breaking Bad here)
4) Him being in the movie for 20-25 minutes (I wanted to see more of him being serious!), and
5) Godzilla is the freaking good guy!?
Spoilers aside, I was expecting an hour-and-a-half of a dinosaur stomping on a city and puny humans trying to stop it. Yannoe, stereotypical monster movie fare (or as I like to say, an Ultraman movie sans Ultraman).
What I didn’t expect to see was TWO OTHER monsters, and that Godzilla would be the one to take them DOWN!
All this came to me in the scene where Ken Watanabe says that Godzilla was listening in onto the MUTOs’ (I can’t remember what it stood for, but fun fact: this guy from Adventure Time, Adam, has that as a surname) radar pingings / communication / whatever.
Coolest. Realisation-setting-in-halfway-through-the-film. Ever.
I watched this movie with the giddiness of someone discovering everything for the first time, having not seen the Godzilla film from the 90s (but having this vague impression that it was like Jurassic Park). I also slightly overexcited myself by mistaking the first MUTO to be Mothra, just because it took flight. I also got a kick out of seeing Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Elizabeth Olsen together as husband and wife in this film. They’re gonna play brother and sister in the second Avengers movie! Ooooo!
But I’m getting sidetracked.
The great Godzilla reveal was grand, coming out of the water, causing a tsunami, and to see his chunky legs stomp past buildings in Hawaii. There’s a bit of a slow burn until we get to see him in his full glory, but I didn’t notice it much as I was still reeling over the number of monsters in the film and Godzilla being the good guy.
The movie tries to balance a nature vs nurture message (the MUTOs only wanted to breed), but no one really gives a cow when three monsters are duking it out and causing the same level of destruction as Superman and Zod did.
[Reminder to self: Settle Man of Steel review.]
And with a far cooler Fatality take-down! I mean, pry open mouth, breath nuclear down throat, anyone?!
Short review is rather short. I enjoyed this movie a lot. 8/10.
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