The poor development of characters hinders the films emotion, and lacks in the area that it tried to make its strongest. His character is played with great emotion but we never really know why, and when we gain a brief look into the history of his character through a quick exchange of words and a few glimpses of a watch the moment never really hits home because when we initially meet him in the film, he is just thrust into action along with everyone else. Although the performance is decent, Watanabe can’t fix shoddy writing. He understands the purpose of this gargantuan beast, who he refers to as a god, and is desperately trying to persuade the Navy to allow Godzilla to put nature back into balance. Ishiro Serizawa, who provides the audience with an emotional connection to Godzilla. Ken Watanabe gives a fine performance as Dr. There isn’t enough time for Johnson and Olsen’s chemistry to develop because they barely spend any time together on-screen this suffocates the motivations of our hero to tirelessly make his way back to his family, and provides for a pretty basic film experience for a film that was supposed to be driven by its human characters. For example: We are given one scene to establish an emotional connection with Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s Ford Brody and Elizabeth Olsen’s Elle Brody, before Ford is called away to start his adventure in Japan. Outside of Bryan Cranston’s Joe Brody, (who was underutilized) all of the human characters are drastically under developed. Borenstein never reached into the depths of his characters to develop a story around them, but more so used them like pawns on a chessboard slowly and blandly moving around the King in ways that could make sense, but ultimately are put into place for no reason at all. Ford Brody saving children, running from giant monsters, and disarming bombs for most of the film. The script felt more like a 90’s action flick instead of a modern Disaster/Giant Monster epic and as a result, we are given the heroic efforts of the always well placed Mr. The dialogue between characters comes off as cliché and sort of cheesy, events have little to no weight behind them because of poor use of a great first act, and characters are just thrown into situations for no other reason but to be in the action. Borenstein hasn’t really penned anything worth noting, and the same goes for Godzilla. There are something’s that I didn’t understand about the way that Max Borenstein wrote his characters but I’ll cover that in a moment. The film could have played better if Edwards could have created the films own identity, rather than borrowing so heavily from Jaws. Yes, it was a cool idea to look at Godzilla from the perspective of humanity dealing with a natural disaster, but that shouldn’t have pushed the creature that everybody wanted to see into the background. It really leaves you wanting more Godzilla, and less Ford Brody. Why spend so much time keeping the principal attraction in the shadows when the entire world already knows what he looks like?Įdwards tries to make his film almost too much like Jaws, rather than giving us long shots of Godzilla tearing apart his enemy and reducing San Francisco to rubble after his full reveal, we are given more Ford Brody, the United States Military, and the human story with Godzilla and his battle to balance nature as the background for humanity’s struggle to deal with, and accept what nature was actually throwing at them. This is especially upsetting because in the digital age we live in, we were subjected to A LOT of pictures of Godzilla in full and glorious view which rendered the tension building, while well done, pointless. ![]() The moment was well done and built up to perfectly, but this is where Edwards starts to falter.Īfter the big reveal, Godzilla returns to tease the audience with short segments of footage until the climax of the third act, we almost see the other creature more than we do Godzilla. Gareth Edwards shows a heavy Spielburg influence during most of the two hour and three minute runtime giving us teaser shots of Godzilla here and there, building up to a full reveal at A Hawaiian airport where he faces his opposing creature on the runway. While Godzilla ended up being just an entertaining and satisfying film overall, it was actually kind of average.
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