Story: A giant, reptilian monster surfaces, leaving destruction in its wake as it strides into New York City. To stop it, an earthworm scientist, his reporter ex-girlfriend, and other unlikely heroes team up to save their city.
Have you ever had a movie ruin an entire genre for you? For many years, I avoided giant monster movies because of Godzilla (1998). For so long I genuinely thought all monster movies were like this one. I missed out on seeing Gareth Evans’ Godzilla (2014) and Pacific Rim, these are two (as I came to learn later) great monster movies.
Now, what makes a good monster movie, and more specifically, what makes a good Godzilla movie? First of all, and I think most important to have (in terms of visuals) is a good design of your monster. After all, it’s the main character and trust me, you do not want a badly designed monster to curse your eyes every time it’s on screen. Sadly, Godzilla has one of the worst designs out there, and that franchise has been running since the ‘50s. Godzilla’s arms are too long, its legs too thin, and then there's that weird wedge-shaped face. Compare that to 2014’s design and you can easily notice the difference in quality and faithfulness of the source material. Secondly there’s a matter of cast and writing. A good cast and a solid script for them to work with can make or break any movie. To be honest, action movies don’t need to have a great script for it to be a good movie, but too many plot holes and inconsistencies can completely ruin it.
To this day I still don’t know if the writers tried to make a funny action movie or an action movie with funny moments, either way it didn’t work for me, and I love bad movies, so that says a lot. I don’t mind when ‘’serious’’ movies hire comedy leaning actors, especially when they do a great job, but I can’t say Mathew Broderick (The Cable Guy) did it for me here, and it’s not really his fault but that script. I just can’t take seriously a man who everyone calls ‘’the worm guy’’. I did like Hank Azaria (Mystery Men) as the cameraman. I did find him genuinely funny especially when that bad CGI leg almost crushed him. See? I didn’t completely hate this movie.
Finally there's the special effects, and I know this movie was made in the 90s but Jurassic Park was made a few years earlier and their effects still mostly holds up. Also, the director (Roland Emmerich) made Independence Day two years earlier and it also has some great looking effects to this day.
I can excuse subpar acting, bad effects, and even a bad script if the action scenes are good. And I’m sorry to say, I could barely watch more than 20 minutes at a time without wanting to turn it off. Godzilla is boring on most parts, and cringey on the rest; and at 2 hours and 20 minutes it was a literal chore to watch this movie. My recommendation? Skip this whole movie, watch 2014s Godzilla, and wait for my review of that movie.
Here's the trailer:
Written by Confused_Coquí
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