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.