I respect your opinion, but I judge monster and comic book movies differently than serious film. I went into Godzilla looking for mindless fun, and found it.
I wanted mindless fun too - but I didn't find it! Instead I got a hero with literally no personality at all (his sole defining trait was the ability to defuse bombs, which in fact he couldn't do), characters who served no purpose of any kind (why was Sally Hawkins in it at all?), major plot points (e.g.
the existence of Godzilla) glossed over quickly in brief moments of info-dump, and worst of all, even Hal from
Malcolm in the Middle made into a boring 2D stereotype (yes, I'm vaguely aware he's been in other things since then). That's before we even get into the flaccid plot with key points that defied any kind of logic ("No, don't leave the city safely with the trained, professional evacuation crews! Stay there while the giant monsters stomp towards it, and I'll come and get you out, even though I'm hundreds of miles away, because you're just a weak girl who can't go anywhere by herself!"). Oh, and the promised "This explosion will make the nuclear tests of the 1960s look like firecrackers" in the event looked rather less impressive than the real 1960s nukes they showed going off during the opening titles. The whole thing was boring, partly because of weird illogical flaws, partly because of flabby pacing, and partly because it utterly failed to make you care about the characters.
I got the impression that the script must have been through a number of radical changes and still retained vestiges of earlier plotlines that had been scrapped. e.g. the existence of the second monster being dissected in Nevada, before reanimating and escaping, sounds like it should have been an exciting and key plotline, but it evidently got drastically shortened into a boring bit of exposition and a single scene - astonishingly anticlimactic given how much fuss was made about the discovery and escape of the first monster. I think that at an earlier stage, the two scientists had probably been the main characters, perhaps with a larger role for the Bryan Cranston character, and that the Monarch organisation had been much more important; they got mostly cut out to make way for a more macho hero; but instead of being removed altogether were just hanging about not doing very much. They all became completely irrelevant once the monsters were on the move. Ken Watanabe's sole purpose seemed to be to have someone Japanese say "Gojira" before spending the rest of his time staring in horror, mainly into empty space.
Also there was a woeful lack of humour. As one reviewer said, to have a gigantic bloated monster stomping its way through the Vegas strip and not manage even a minor visual gag about Elvis is bordering on the criminally negligent.
(I'm really just annoyed with myself for not seeing X-Men instead.)
) to stop them. They eat atomic bombs and the military kindly delivers. Godzilla saves San Francisco. Though Vegas is wrecked.
