Back in 1998 me and the wife had our first date which was to see the Godzilla movie starring Ferris Bueller/Matthew Broderick so I coerced her to come see the new version for old times sake!
She agreed to come to the movie theater but only if she was could watch another movie instead which was God Is Not Dead so a compromise was made... At least the word god was in each movie as we sat in separate theaters on an estranged date of sorts! Lol
Anywho...
My reviews of Godzilla were pretty good if you compared it to the Christopher Nolan version of Batman Begins!
This was essentially Godzilla Begins as they crept away from the 1998's movie campiness and took the source material a bit more serious this time around!
Anyone going into this expecting too much over the top acting or even overdrawn out melodramatic scenes were not disappointed as they got most of the drama just about right... I mean this is about a giant lizard fighting other large creatures!
Sure the lead character Aaron Taylor-Johnson was basically a not so emotional action star but it sure beat Matthew Broderick's Godzilla using a human pregnancy test to prove that the main character was pregnant!
The only thing one might complain about is that Godzilla does not officially appear until halfway through the movie but so did Batman not appear in Batman Begins until halfway through the movie and that successfully relaunched the huge billion dollar box office sequels The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises!
Whether this means that the Godzilla sequels will be as successful as those Batman sequels is the question but this movie does open up the can of worms that Godzilla has arrived in the future on a pretty good note!
Yes there were scenes that probably should have been left out but overall they made this a pretty decent disaster movie similar to the first half of Spielberg's War of The Worlds starring Tom Cruise and Dakota Fanning racing across town to safety!
Long gone are the guys in rubber suits smashing model buildings on scaled sets and in are the high end special effects that should be the norm from here on out in this era!
Godzilla has visuals worthy of this point in time like the halo jump into combat zones and the enemy creatures that tag team bum rush him until he handles things Destroy All Monsters style!
Just as War Machine told Ironman in Ironman 2 he should probably lead with his main weapon so too should Godzilla lead with the fiery breathe next time but what he does to the last monster standing was truly a kiss of death!
The property damage reached levels of that in the Man of Steel final battle scenes so Godzilla could be viewed as a tentative hero who gained the people's trust at the end but needs to tread a bit more carefully next time he hunts down other destructive monsters!
Perhaps the government should make wide carpool lanes specifically for Godzilla to walk down as he hunts down future monsters to avoid any rush hour traffic accidental stomping!
I usually judge a movie best by whether I would sit through that movie twice in the theater and Godzilla does this for me!
It could be the nostalgia though as I waited for this type of movie years in the making and had hopes that Pacific Rim could provide this for me but even that Kaiju based movie stayed well within the campy zone far too many times!
Godzilla crushes the campiness most of the time and stays steadily within the serious zone but do not expect too much in the serious department because again it is a movie about giant monsters smashing each other into buildings and you have to give it the benefit of the doubt!
On another note I would have liked to see Bryan Cranston's character and Ken Watanabe;s character interact more on a scientific level bridging the gap between east and west but of course a spoiler alert keeps me from saying what happens to prevent that!
The next movie must feature Rodan, Mothra and King Ghidorah doing it big... If you did not like this movie just give it time on late night cable TV or bootleg DVD's and it will grow on you either as a box office hit or an above level B-movie that really delivers for what it is!
Godzilla Is Not Dead... Godzilla Begins... Either way Godzilla is in the house or at least smashing the house to smithereens but don't hate the kaiju hate the game!
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