Godzilla (2014) Review

 Hello everyone. Welcome to the sixth anniversay of my channel and the first review of 2022. I hope you all had a Merry Christmas. Also, Happy New Year! It's no secret at this point that I am a very big Godzilla fan. The main draw of these movies for me is seeing giant monsters knocking down buildings and stepping on cities and causing collateral damage as they beat the snot out of each other. There's just something so humourously awesome about guys in giant monster suits destroying model cities and then wrestling with each other. I also like the special effects for the super abilities for the monsters and the fireworks they used for explosions. I just love that stuff and I find it entertaining. The Godzilla franchise has also crossed over with the King Kong franchise, which just so happens to be my second favorite monster movie franchise. But I'll talk about King Kong in another review

Why am I talking about Godzilla and King Kong? That's because they both appear in a cinematic universe from Hollywood known as the Monsterverse, which is a crossover universe featuring the two most famous monsters. This review will be the first part of a four part series reviewing every single movie in the Monsterverse. I have already reviews Godzilla: King of the Monsters and Godzilla vs Kong before, but I will be reviewing those movies again when we get to them. For now, I'm going to review the first entry of the Monsterverse that came out almost eight years ago as I am recording this. Released on May 16, 2014, the movie is Godzilla. 

This would be the third movie to be simply titled Godzilla, the first being the original Godzilla from 1954 and the second being the Hollywood Godzilla film from 1998. This Godzilla movie from 2014 got good reviews from critics but mixed reactions from fans. But what do I think of this movie? Well, this movie was the first Godzilla movie that I ever watched. I saw it at the movie theater with my dad when it first came out because I thought it looked awesome judging by the trailers. What did I think afterwards though? Well, it's pretty good. I guess. My expectation for this film at the time was a spectacle with lots of action and special effects like I was usually accustomed to. Instead what I got was the opposite, in that there is more scenes of the human characters talking than there are monsters. I get that this is so the story can be moved along, but come on. I don't want to watch humans talking. I want to see some action. And the monster action is so few and far between. It's like, just as soon as you think you are finally going to see Godzilla kick some monster butt, they just cut away! What's up with that?! It's just a bunch of build up and teasing to the big climax of the film, and boy did this film have an awesome climax. There was one interesting character that I did enjoy in this film, which is Bryan Cranston's character named Joe. But he gets killed after the first 45 minutes! So if you're expecting a big action movie, you're going to be disappointed like I was. It's more like a disaster movie with dialogue

There are things I did enjoy about this movie though. I think that the design for Godzilla is much better than the design we got in the Hollywood 1998 movie. He actually looks like Godzilla. Bulky body, dorsal fins, atomic breath, everything. So when I finally did get to see him in the climax of the film, it was so awesome. That's when you get the staple of Godzilla movies, the monster fights, with monsters clobbering each other and causing city destruction. I just wish there could have been more of it. Granted, in some of the other Godzilla movies, Godzilla doesn't appear that much either. I don't know. I guess I just wasn't feeling the plot of this movie in particular, and it doesn't help that this was my first introduction to the Godzilla franchise. I suppose if you prefer Hollywood movies over Japanese monster movies, it's a decent place to start, but I think there are other films in the Godzilla franchise that make better starting points. 

So at the end of the day, I would say it's a decent disaster movie and a decent Godzilla movie. Not super duper, but decent. It all depends on your expectations. If you like disaster movies with humans talking, you'll probably enjoy this movie more than I did. If all you want to see is monster action, you'll be disappointed. I personally like the other three movies in the monsterverse more, which we'll get to another time. I hope you enjoyed the first review of my Monsterverse review series. God bless.