Cinema Report #19 - Godzilla
What do you expect from a Godzilla film? A big monster that roars a lot and destroys cities by walking through them … or perhaps more than one monster doing that.
Well, this was delivered - and in addition you got a (human) hero who struggled to make peace with his father, who in turn struggled to come to terms with the death of his wife for which he felt responsible, but which was in fact the fault of a big monster (not Godzilla). So there might have been a bit too much human problems in this one, but the monsters looked nice and behaved according to their nature, too.
I don’t mind a bit of realistic story within a monster-movie, but I would have liked it better if the first monster would have shown up sooner. It also seemed a bit odd that Godzilla had quite a lot of facial expressions and body language to offer while the other monsters were so alien that there was hardly any possibility for that. I wondered if two very different teams had designed them.
It also was rather annoying how stupid the humans were. Honestly, those monsters left huge trails of destruction wherever they went, but nobody thought of looking for those from above - instead they always had to go and look on the ground where they had broken through a wall … or a mountain … and only then did they spot the trail.
The most stupid idea was, however, that the humans kept feeding the monsters - with radioactive weapons nevertheless. I really don’t expect anything intellectual from such a film, but this didn’t make any sense at all. In the end, they even all got poisoned by radioactivity, because the final bomb went off far too near to the city, but of course that wasn’t mentioned at all.
There were some nice ideas in this film, like the hero being a bomb-disposal expert and he knew how to handle an analogue timer that wouldn’t get stopped by the monsters EMP attack. Too bad that they weren’t properly used, because in the end that only meant that the bomb could not be deactivated by radio signal and it was the only time the hero could show off this special skill.
Well, this was delivered - and in addition you got a (human) hero who struggled to make peace with his father, who in turn struggled to come to terms with the death of his wife for which he felt responsible, but which was in fact the fault of a big monster (not Godzilla). So there might have been a bit too much human problems in this one, but the monsters looked nice and behaved according to their nature, too.
I don’t mind a bit of realistic story within a monster-movie, but I would have liked it better if the first monster would have shown up sooner. It also seemed a bit odd that Godzilla had quite a lot of facial expressions and body language to offer while the other monsters were so alien that there was hardly any possibility for that. I wondered if two very different teams had designed them.
It also was rather annoying how stupid the humans were. Honestly, those monsters left huge trails of destruction wherever they went, but nobody thought of looking for those from above - instead they always had to go and look on the ground where they had broken through a wall … or a mountain … and only then did they spot the trail.
The most stupid idea was, however, that the humans kept feeding the monsters - with radioactive weapons nevertheless. I really don’t expect anything intellectual from such a film, but this didn’t make any sense at all. In the end, they even all got poisoned by radioactivity, because the final bomb went off far too near to the city, but of course that wasn’t mentioned at all.
There were some nice ideas in this film, like the hero being a bomb-disposal expert and he knew how to handle an analogue timer that wouldn’t get stopped by the monsters EMP attack. Too bad that they weren’t properly used, because in the end that only meant that the bomb could not be deactivated by radio signal and it was the only time the hero could show off this special skill.