I know I’m a little late on a review, but I wanted to write this up anyway. – Contains spoilers!

In all honesty, I was a little stunned when I came out of the movie theatre. I swore we bought tickets to the Godzilla movie not the Brody family saga.

Bryan Cranston is shown within the trailer, brilliant! It HAS to be good! Within the first quarter of the movie, he’s dead!?

The movie doesn’t revolve around Godzilla, so much as the Brody family. Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston) is a big wig at a nuclear power plant in the Japan, where his wife Sandra Brody (Juliette Binoche) also works. Due to unknown reasons, Sandra dies in an accident that Joe was trying to warn people about. All on Joe’s birthday!

Fast forward 15 years, Ford is in the US Army and is a bomb tech specialist with a wife, Elle Brody (Elizabeth Olsen, younger sister to the Olsen twins) and young son Sam Brody (Carson Bolde). He’s just come home from a deployment only to hear that his father has been arrested in Japan. Ford jets off to Japan to bail out his wacko father, only to be convinced to break into the same place to try and get some data on old floppy disks, exposed to the elements for 15 years… It goes on.

Basically Godzilla doesn’t get enough screen time for my liking. You could have exchanged the family for any other family, anywhere in the world and it’d have been equally as insignificant to the overall theme of the movie. It was really disappointing. When Godzilla did appear on the screen, it was really well done.

The fight scenes while good, could have been extended and perhaps put throughout the entire movie building up to a final fight. The excitement you feel when your boy goes into a fight, you know he’s going to get his backside kicked, but he’ll come out the victor (his name is in the movie title!) you’re just waiting for it to happen was there, but it wasn’t as good as it could have been.

Pacific Rim was a movie that comes to mind. It didn’t pretend to be a movie about anything other than big monsters fighting. Godzilla should have been more about big monsters fighting than the Brody family. Godzilla also should have used his fire breath more, it felt a little “oh yeah, level up!” towards the end, or as though he was toying around with these two huge bugs and only took them serious when he started to get kicked around a little. It felt a little disjointed. Oh yeah, I can do this too.

I’m a huge fan of Ken Wananabe, he played Dr. Ishio Serizawa, and he could have had a bigger / better role in the movie as well. He’s a specialist. The army calls upon his knowledge but then totally ignores it anyway. His knowledge of big bugs and Godzilla could have been used in a more narrative way to move the story along rather than trying to force an all American family.

– Overall it was a decent movie.
– Could have been much better.
– 6/10.