Just saw it in 3d IMAX. Awesome treatment of the material, nice mix of scale, both in tone and in visual effects.
Saw it last night. It had some plot holes and the acting was kind of wooden but all in all it was a very entertaining movie.
The acting was wooden? It’s a GODZILLA movie. The actors and acting are irrelevant, and they should have dubbed all the actors with voices that don’t match the lip-movements at all. (That said, my wife and I are big Godzilla fans and will certainly see it soon.)
I thought it was a lot of fun, enough so that I could willingly suspend my disbelief. Why move an entire train of missiles when you’re only interested in the warheads, except for something cool to destroy?
Of course, the 2 on 1 monster fight was the best part of the whole movie. SPOILER ALERT: Godzilla wins.
I loved it. It’s not the 1954 Godzilla, but its probably as close as any movie made afterward will get.
If those things only fed on radiation, why did they even have mouths?
For the chunky style.
Loved it!
Sure, I guess nerds could pick holes in it all day long, but it was an enjoyable cinema experience and thats all that matters!
Wish young audiences would discover Gorgo, much better movie than any of the godzillas, though I love Raymond Burr’s shock and horror as he witnesses the destruction of Tokyo in the original zilla.
It was decent. The stupidity of the whole “moving the warhead by train” plot kinda strained credulity, but whatever. My only real main complaint is that I wanted a lot more fighting between Godzilla and the MUTOs (or the humans). The way Godzilla killed the second MUTO was awesome, but the movie definitely needed at least two more awesome moments like that.
It was very much like Gareth Edwards previous movie, Monsters.
It’s more about pacing, building tension and showing the monster and the aftermath from the point of view of the humans, while building to a huge climax.
It reminded me far more of Jaws(the original movie) than a traditional Godzilla movie.
Godzilla gets slightly more screen time than the shark from Jaws, but not by much.
In fact, some of the music struck me as very John Williams like and I don’t think it was a coincidence that the human hero was named Brody.
I’d go further but not sure if spoilers are allowed in this thread or not.
Aaron Taylor-Johnson has certainly grown up from the kid he was in “Kick-Ass”. But he has no neck.
I did like the movie, but the avalanche of wrongness overwhelmed me.
If they eat radiation, why did the NUCLEAR AIRCRAFT CARRIER pace Godzilla across the Pacific while the MUTO completely ignored it?
Godzilla goes deep and increases speed to 33 knots. The Admiral says he’s going to outrun them. NO HE ISN’T.
F22’s (or whatever they were) falling out of the sky is an interesting visual, but part of their tremendous cost is the expense of hardening them against EMPs. So no, that isn’t happening.
Likewise it was annoying as fuck to repeatedly show EMPs “frying” electronics, only to have them resume working the minute the MUTO got out of range.
Fly to the vault, open it up, find the back side of the mountain gone. Um, no one noticed that FIRST from the outside??? Oh, and the vault 30 feet away was just fine when the hole shown on the outside was much larger?
Nuke on the boat at the end. Maybe moving 10 knots at best. 5 minutes to detonation. Ok, so it would make slightly less than a mile before going off. Not even making the bridge let alone well out into the ocean like shown. Megaton yield? City fried.
I kept repeating “because that will work” during the movie. Small arms against the MUTO. Sure. Subway tunnels as shelters with 300 foot Kaiju walking around? Sure. Nuking something when you already know from experience that it won’t work? Great plan.
In response to the last point…
…they did say it was a more powerful bomb than any of the ones they tried to kill Godzilla with in the '50s, plus the MUTOs are smaller than him. Plus they were counting on the sheer force of the blast to kill them, not the radiation. That being said you’re right about the bomb not getting far enough away from San Francisco; it’s basically the Chernobyl of the West Coast now. I also wondered why the MUTOs even have an EMP defence, since they evolved hundreds of millions of yrs before it would be of any use.
That being said I loved it; defiantly worth seeing in IMAX 3D.
I don’t see movies like Godzilla for the dialog, acting, logic, realism or social massage. Who does, really?
I go for the special effects and 3-D fabulousness. That is all. I’m seeing it next week in 3-D and can’t wait.
The movie was fine the way that it is, the plot was a little rushed and the motivation of ATJ was…again…rushed (you’re crazy don’t go to the quarantine zone! “we have to go” “ok!”).
Someone upthread said that nerds would find something to nitpick and I am that nerd.
I just didn’t like the way Godzilla looked.
He had zero definition. His head/neck/shoulders were just one giant mass of flesh and it looked off-putting. His head was way too linear and his eyes were crazy squinty. I liked that he was taller than long (eat that Matthew Broderick), and I liked that he used his arms more. His fire-breath annoyed me. In the movies it was always more of a plasma beam, and it looked like it had true stopping power, but in this movie it was more fire-based and it didn’t look like it would actually hurt the MUTOs, especially not to the extent it did.
I complain, but it’s out of love. It was a good movie, the ending was so crazy and such a surprise that I couldn’t stand still during it!
Nitpick:
Raymond Burr wasn’t really in the original Godzilla. What happened was that part of the Japanese Gojira was chopped out and new scenes filmed with Raymond Burr. This was done when the movie was to be shown in the US, and they wanted a Western face.
I just saw the original two weeks ago and it was a somber, melancholy movie, with an anti-nuclear message(and that also got chopped for US audiences.) And how often, in American movies, does one of the heroes commit suicide
i second your comments.
I also think character development was woefully lacking.
There was character development?
Just got back from seeing it. Wow, that was one beautifully-filmed monster flick, starting right out of the gate, with the “redacted” look of the main titles. I particularly liked the Jaws-like ratcheting up of tension as the film progresses (while the nuke-delivery-by-train indeed comes off as rather silly, it enables the wonderfully white-knuckle sequence at the bridge), as well as the numerous visual elements that provided subtle callbacks to the original Toho flicks, while still advancing the story in the current version.
Weakest elements for me were the rather wasted performances of what, on paper, should have been an amazing cast (I mean, how often are you going to get Bryan Cranston, Juliette Binoche, Sally Hawkins, Ken Watanabe and David Strathairn in something like this?). I got a bit annoyed with what became some rather clichéd overuse of the “kids in peril” theme. And yes, the supposed origin of the monsters, their nourishment (living on ionizing radiation? Seriously?) and the military tactics were all fairly ridiculous, but really no more so than in the original. Anyway, I was there mainly for city-flattening, grounding-pounding, monster throwdown, and there the film delivered in spades. An instant classic, IMO, and at least in a dead heat with Pacific Rim as the best of its kind since the '54 original.
Lastly, kudos to the filmmakers for scoring the HALO jump with György Ligeti’s stunning “Requiem”, previously best-known for its use in 2001: A Space Odyssey.