The arrogance of man is thinking nature is in our control and not the other way around.
A few summers back, I conceived of a project called "We're #1!" The idea behind it was that every weekend between Memorial Day and Labor Day I would look at the box office results on Monday morning and go watch whatever came out on top. If something was the #1 Movie in America over multiple weekends, then I would see it multiple times, even if I hated it the first time. It was to be an anthropological study to determine just what audiences responded to and why I did or didn't respond in the same way. For a number of reasons, "We're #1" never came to pass, partly because there are a lot of weekends between Memorial Day and Labor Day and I couldn't justify the expense (even at matinee prices), but mostly because I couldn't stomach the prospect of watching Transformers: Dark of the Moon once, let alone two or three times. (In retrospect, what really would have done me in, though, was the three weeks in a row The Help spent at the top of the chart at the end of the summer. That would not have been pretty.)
All this is my way of saying that I saw Godzilla, the #1 Movie in America, and it was just okay.
Directed by Gareth Edwards, whose microbudgeted debut feature Monsters I have not seen, and scripted by Max Borenstein, the 2014 edition of Godzilla clears the low bar of being better than Roland Emmerich's 1998 attempt to Americanize the prehistoric beast, but it doesn't rise that far above it. Place the blame for that on the thin characters, the weak plot, and the failure to get me to care much about either. It also doesn't help that the lead cipher (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is the sort that gets shuttled around from place to place purely so he can bear witness to events, not because his movements serve a narrative function. Furthermore, the intense focus on a character that doesn't develop in any way steals precious screen time away from other, potentially more interesting ones like his parents (played by Bryan Cranston and a criminally underused Juliette Binoche), the requisite scientists (Ken Watanabe and Sally Hawkins), and even the Navy admiral in charge of the whole mess (David Strathairn). It's all well and good that Taylor-Johnson is motivated to reunite with his wife (an overqualified Elizabeth Olsen) and kid, but if you're not going to play his Sisyphusian task for comedy (think Catherine O'Hara's frantic efforts to get home in Home Alone), then it's better not to show them at such great length.
At any rate, the real star of any Godzilla movie in the big guy himself, and while he does make an impression when he finally appears about an hour in, his thunder has already largely been stolen by the bat-like MUTO (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism) that hatched 20 minutes earlier. And even when Godzilla does enter the fray, seemingly intent on wiping out the MUTO menace, there's far too much of a delay before Strathairn heeds Watanabe's call to stand back and "Let them fight." That is, after all, what I paid $8.50 to see. (P.S. - I saw Godzilla in 3-D because that's what my companion wanted to do, but it's not necessary at all. This film will play just fine flat.)