Godzilla starts really strong, but some puzzling decisions later on mare the monster movie experience

The beginning and set up are far and away the best part of this 2 hour movie. Bryan Cranston is great, as usual, it’s exciting and suspenseful half hour or so. They tease each of the active monsters really well and the reveals are terrific. The monster designs are really cool and the sense of scale is perfect. Godzilla looks and sounds awesome, his blue fire breath a sight to behold!

The problem is the constant cutting away from Godzilla when it really matters. What starts as effective teasing and foreshadowing turns into annoying and confusing edits. For example, when Godzilla first confronts the winged monster, they growl at each other, Godzilla starts to approach and…they cut away to what some humans are doing. We miss the entire confrontation and have to figure out what happened between them. It doesn’t make any sense. At that point we have a good impression that Godzilla is a protector, his goal is to throw down and the other monster knows that. They have a biological history, the animal kingdom with beasts bigger than skyscrapers. Why didn’t they show Wings quickly fend off Godzilla and get away (at this point Wings is on a mission, but we don’t know what it is. He avoids a direct Godzilla confrontation for a reason). This happens more than once where we are robbed of what we want to see and get “aftermath” shots of the path the monster took to get away instead.

Then, we get the final fight which is great, but it was super dark at times so it’s hard to see and again we get these long cuts away from the fight to see what the “hero” humans are doing. The whole megaton bomb angle was completely mishandled (stick with the diffusing, the boat to sea is implausible nonsense) which upped to the stupid factor to an unnecessary level. There is a lot of stupid things going on actually. The “monsters checking out the hero” thing was really awkward too. Sorry, I don’t think these things are going to notice and pick out a person who is the size of an ant and eyeball him like it’s something out of The Lion King (and he’s everywhere! He reaches the most important places at the exact right time and survives multiple war zones that kill hundreds). Then there is a scene where a group goes to check on a object that’s in nuclear waste storage near Las Vegas. They go door to door and come to a vault with light pouring out of it. They open it up and the entire back of this buried facility has been obliterated. A gigantic crater with tracks leading away from it. No one noticed that happening? It went down before the group showed up (no hint of the destruction in progress) so they went into a half building without even thinking, “that’s weird”. It’s stupid.

For everything Godzilla get’s right, there’s a dumb decision that pulls it back. I have to put Pacific Rim head and shoulders above this one. Disappointing.

As a videogame to movie adaptation, Need for Speed is successful. But that videogame tie in also what holds the movie back from being really great. There’s a lot of try-hard to be cool dialog that can be hard to put up with and an overall goofy tone that takes away from the experience.

In my typical review framing, I’ll talk about what I liked the most. It’s a great looking and sounding movie. Kinetic and clean direction, eye catching cinematography with gorgeous cars and locations. I really appreciate and admire all of the practical car stunt driving with the added CG to sweeten things up a bit. The races and action scenes are a blast to watch.

They pulled a lot of visuals right from the game, the final race travels through many of the locations that you blast through in some of the videogames recent releases. The movie gets the feel of the games and runs with it. Which is also it’s biggest problem.

The movie is basically a revenge picture with all around good guy Tobey vs the colossal jerk Dino. The drama is all set up with Tobey being the underdog with his lovable (and talkative) friends surrounding him. They always rally around their friend to help him out. The driving in the Need for Speed games is really amped up stuff with cops, planes, helicopters, barricades and a pack of drivers in the most exotic cars on earth trying to run you off the road. They transfer all of that into the movie so airplanes and choppers constantly appear out of nowhere. The way drivers get messages and the GUI of the pause screen is almost directly lifted from the games into the movie too. It’s hard to take anything seriously…a lot like a Michael Bay movie.

There’s nothing truly bad about Need for Speed, it just goes through the motions. The plot is nothing special and the characters are nothing special. I think car nuts will really like the action scenes as those are done really well and what Need for Speed is for anyway. It’s one of those movies that you don’t seek out, but if you see it on HBO, you’ll check out because you have nothing better to do.

This marks the 2nd cinematic take on Stephen King’s novel, Carrie (1976, with a sequel in 1999 and a TV movie in 2002). With the brilliant Chloe Grace Moretz in the title role, this tale of telepathic revenge has a lot going for it (how cool is that poster? Great idea).

I’ve seen parts of the 1976 Carrie and have been meaning to read the book for ages (I’m well overdue to dipping my toes back into King’s waters) so I go into this knowing the basics and don’t know what was changed from the book. The most obvious is bringing the story closer to present day with cell phone use. Despite seeing iPhones and such in the hands of teenagers, the time period of the movie felt like it was taking place sometime in the 1990’s.

It’s a really straight forward movie. Carrie White is an outsider at her school because of her mother (home schooling, super religious). She doesn’t have any friends and does come off as bit weird (she does have telekinetic powers, but no one knows it and she’s just trying to understand them herself). But she is a good girl. She wants to belong and just be a normal kid. After a humiliating experience in the showers after gym class, Carrie is at her lowest. Sue, who was part of the mob mentality in the showers, regrets what she did and wants to make up for it. She decides she’s going to skip prom, asking her boyfriend to take Carrie instead. Show her a good time, make a positive memory from her high school days. Carrie’s mother is completely against it (to say the least) and tries to stop Carrie from going. In the infamous prom scene, Carrie is humiliated again by one of her classmates. She snaps, cleaning house in the process.

I think this is promoted as a horror movie (and Carrie does obliterate quite a few people), but I didn’t find this scary at all. It is really sad. Carrie is a girl who never got a fair shake at life. It’s easy to paint her mother, Margaret (Julianne Moore) as the villain, but her past is wrought with tragedy as well. The real problem is Chris. That girl is grade A lunatic. The movie ends on a total downer to boot.

I think the weakest part of the movie is that it feels a little thin. Small glimpses at character backgrounds and Chris is such a nutter it’s hard to believe she does what she does. They insinuate she’s a spoiled brat, but the murderous glee she shows is something else. Aside from that, it’s a well made movie. Chloe keeps knocking her roles out of the park, she’s such a great actress. Really believable, she’s a major asset to any movie she chooses to work on. It’s well shot (aside from one camera shot/edit during a fight with Carrie and her mother that I’m pretty sure makes no sense physically) and the special effects are really good. Lots of practical work mixed in with CG and the deaths in the final act are  creative and well done.

While I think they hit all the right marks…was this reboot necessary? Aside from adding social networking to the bullying angle, it’s really no different. I’d say it’s worth a watch if you are interested.