Tuesday, March 12, 2019

Godzilla (2014)

I'm admittedly no expert on Godzilla movies - giant monster movies have never really been my thing - but I did find the way they handled the battles between monsters kind of interesting.  I like the shots that establish the scale of the creatures compared to everything around them. Godzilla asleep in the middle of the city with seagulls circling his big noggin, or the MUTO scarfing nuclear torpedoes.

The movie mostly sticks with one character who is trying to get back home to his family, and is basically stuck on the same course as the MUTO. So he keeps briefly getting caught up in its path of destruction, and we catch glimpses of it stomping past them, oblivious to the ants scurrying around. The monsters casually destroy bridges and buildings the way you or I might walk through a spider web.

Maybe even more casually. When Godzilla breaks part of the Golden Gate Bridge by simply placing one paw on it, the big guy doesn't thrash around trying to shake loose the wires the way I've seen coworkers freak out when they walk into a web.

Humanity is so badly outmatched, the best they can do is run for their lives, or try to come up with cockamamie plans to maybe defeat the monsters with only some casualties. Then when those plans get casually upended by the monsters, people have to scramble around some more to try to fix the situation.

So that was alright. I didn't really care about the main character, Bryan Cranston's character's son, trying to make his way back home to his family. I could not tell you any human character's name from this movie for $10,000. If I did, it was because I guessed something like "John", and it turns out yes, there was a character named John in the movie.

(I checked IMdB. There is no character with the name John in the movie. No 10 grand for me!)

So the parts of the movie that are just focusing on these specific characters when they are dodging falling debris or giant monster feet are the parts I tune out real fast.

5 comments:

thekelvingreen said...

There are some amazing visuals in this, but yeah, I can't remember much about the characters, beyond the weird use of Cranston.

The sequel looks to be considerably more bonkers, but we'll see if they manage to grind it into boringness.

CalvinPitt said...

I didn't know they were doing a sequel. Or did I? I might have heard about another Godzilla movie, but not associated it with this one. These are supposed to be in the same universe as that King Kong movie that had Sam Jackson and John Goodman a couple of years ago, right?

thekelvingreen said...

Yeah, I don't think this Godzilla film was intended to be part of any extended universe, but then Marvel showed it working and now everyone wants a part of that. Kong: Skull Island -- which isn't bad -- established that Godzilla and Kong are part of the same universe, then we've got a Godzilla sequel this year, and a Godzilla versus Kong film the year after.

CalvinPitt said...

Yeah, I saw Skull Island at a friend's a couple of summers ago. I enjoyed most of the characters who weren't Tom Hiddleston or whoever the female lead was.

Between this, Jurassic park, and Deep Blue Sea, Sam Jackson continues to have a poor survival rate when he tangles with nature, though.

thekelvingreen said...

I haven't seen Captain Marvel yet, but based on the cat in the trailer, I think I can guess how Nick Fury loses his eye. At least he survives the encounter!