It seems ages since we had a big blockbuster film that wasn’t superhero based, so I had been looking forward to the release of Godzilla. The previous attempt at making a big budget American Godzilla film, in 1998, was widely panned but it is a film that I have soft spot for, for all of its faults.This version is louder, bigger and has much better special effects, as you would expect. The plot is fairly standard Godzilla stuff, a prehistoric creature awakened by nuclear tests / power plants ends up in a battle with other enormous ancient beasts.
The action is very well staged by the director of the low budget horror, Monster, Gareth Edwards, and the entire film clips along mostly at an agreeable pace. Our main hero is played by Aaron Taylor- Johnson, who is fine, if a little wooden. A bit of class is added by the great Sally Hawkins and David Strathairn in supporting roles. Additionally, Juliette Binoche surprisingly makes a very brief appearance.
There are a few very corny moments, mostly involving the inserting of kids into the story-line clumsily, and two contrived reunions involving those children and their parents. Also, the script does have a number of clichés in, mostly uttered by Ken Watanabe who has a thankless role as a Japanese scientist on hand to explain the technical mumbo-jumbo to the assorted military types.
However, those problems can be easily ignored, and this movie is a lot of fun – I saw it in 2D, and am not sure what 3D will add so my advice is to save your money on that but see this on the big screen.
Rating 6.5 out of 10