chimera-4

I really wanted to like this after the travesty of the 1998 reboot and while Gareth Edwards' other flick Monsters was a good solid effort with good human drama this falls short on a number of levels the most unforgiving being that it's just plain boring. The reason for this I think is that besides the opening centered on Bryan Cranston's character and situation you really don't care about anyone else in this movie and it takes toooo long to kick off.

Even Godzilla who shows up fully far too late in the game after a series of frustrating near and minor reveals (one of which literally has Edwards shut the door on what had built up to be the kicking off of the main event, teased with a split second of monster on monster action before shutting us out)just seems like a giant punchbag/wrecking ball for the other monsters and there just isn't enough of him or enough characterisation to make us give a sh*t. He turns up out of nowhere for no good reason and then just disappears like nothings happened at the end.

In my opinion the painfully slow burn hurts this. I mean it's not like we don't know what Godzilla looks like from either the myriad other movies before it or even from the trailer for this one. Lets face it if you go to see a Godzilla movie you want lots of monsters a$$kicking each other to kingdom come and breaking sh*t all over (admittedly there IS plenty of destruction) you don't want to have to wait three quarters of the movie to see it.

On the acting front after the strong drama at the beginning the young lead just can't compete with Cranston and you feel that black hole throughout the rest of the movie. You initially feel like you might actually be getting A list performances but that ends quickly and you're left with exposition and flunked by the book emotional beats.

On the plus side Godzilla himself looks phenomenal and the FX are awesome as are the fight scenes but overall I think this movie is a disappointment.

Why has Terry Gilliam shafted us with this travesty. What we have here is a complete and utter mess. While the premise is an interesting one the movie is basically a one trick pony that goes nowhere. The acting is abysmal (apart from Christopher Plummer) even from big name stars. The FX and imagination on show is impressive but there's just nothing to gel it all together. An hour into the movie I found it so excruciatingly painful to watch that I left.

From the trailers it looked like Gilliam had gone old school again and given us a memorable fantasy along the lines of Baron Munchausen but alas it wasn't to be. You may argue that you can't judge a movie on the merits of only half of it but even if it got better after the half way mark the first half was so bad that I neither cared nor held out much hope.

Come on Terry, I know you can do better than this.....