A boring build-up that wasn’t saved by the action-filled finale. The bulk of the film was spent slowly building towards the giant monster fight at the end. We’d get a tease of some action, and then nothing for a while. Then a few minutes of monsters, followed by nothing for a while. There were a lot of sequences where we apparently just missed the monsters ripping apart civilization, leaving us with only a shot of damaged structures as the beasts wandered away in the distance. Once Godzilla finally shows up, it looks like things are about to heat-up, but even then, they find a way to stall for time until the climactic battle takes place. And while this battle is really intense, it’s much too short. The plot is weak. It’s all over the place and takes a long time to put together the seemingly random events that have occurred thus far. The characters are generally boring. The great Bryan Cranston’s time is quite limited, leaving the rest of the film to focus on the much- less-interesting costars. Elizabeth Olson is pretty much just there to pop-up once and a while and worry about where her husband is, and Aaron Taylor Johnson seems to be there just to pop-up next to the monsters when they’re destroying stuff in the background. Ken Watanabe has a mystique about him, making him interesting and making the observations he seems to pull out of nowhere plausible. (This can’t be held against the film-makers, but there was something off-putting about knowing that the actors playing husband and wife here would be playing brother and sister in a major film next year.) There also seemed to be this tendency to just randomly put children into scenes right before monsters attack, trying to elicit a reaction from the audience. The special effects were really good, so when we do see the monsters and the chaos it causes, it looks great. I ended up seeing the 3D version, and felt that it added nothing to the film.
** out of *****