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You have to give Warner Brothers a lot of credit for the marketing on Godzilla. They were able to effectively sell this film on merits that it doesn't actually possess. The advertising made the film look subtle yet tense with a remarkable aura of dread throughout. The actual film is just a plodding snoozefest that takes a whole lot of time to go nowhere. Director Gareth Edwards and screenwriter Max Borenstein mistake subtlety for actual nothingness. I commend their decision to make a blockbuster that relies more on the story and the characters than constant giant action set pieces, but in order for that to work you need to have a well-thought out screenplay and characters that the audience actually cares about. If Edwards and Borenstein wanted to make a character-driven film, they probably should've spent some time developing characters that were even remotely interesting. Every single character in Godzilla are pretty much drones. The film tries to play up the emotional stakes of the monster attacks on the human characters, but all of the characters are essentially mannequins with their inability to convey any sort of emotion themselves, so you could honestly could care less what happens to any of them. Call me a purist, but it's kind of hard for me to get invested in a group of characters that speak to each other like they're robots that just arrived on Earth. Pair these robotic human characters with a storyline that has so many holes in it that it makes little-to-no sense and the aforementioned painfully slow pace, and you have a film that is an absolute chore to sit through.
Even with a script that is so unholy awful, it's still miraculous that Godzilla managed to not even get a single good performance out of its cast. Not even Bryan Cranston-who is only in the film for 30 minutes and not the lead actor here like the ad's make him out to be- can muster a good performance. Cranston does however at least show some effort in his wildly overacted performance, the rest of the cast just looks dumbfounded the entire time. Aaron Taylor-Johnson is absolutely lifeless as the film's real lead character, Elizabeth Olsen seems to be confused by everything that's going on and Ken Watanabe and Sally Hawkins play perhaps the two stupidest scientists to ever grace the big screen. I honestly don't know how accomplished actors like Cranston, Taylor-Johnson, Olsen, Watanabe and Hawkins all manage to be terrible in the same film. At least the blank expressions that actors had throughout matched my face while I watched the events of this film unfold. Getting this many garbage performances out of a vastly talented cast is the most impressive feat Godzilla is able to pull off.
The effects in Godzilla are admittedly impressive, but they are essentially all for naught since the film's action is so sparse. Even when there is action, Edwards chooses to frequently cut away to focus on the film's human characters. Godzilla wracked up a $167 million budget and seemed to put a lot of time into the creature design only to have the monsters appear on screen in a few scenes. Films like Super 8 and Cloverfield we're able to get away without showing the monster until the latter stages of the film because there was a sense of intrigue present and there was an eventual payoff in getting to see the monsters at length in the latter stages of the film. Godzilla teases monsters numerous times and never allows the monsters to really get into the spotlight. It's honestly a shame that Edwards and Bornstein decided to put so little focus on the titular character and accompanying monsters. If they had actually given the monsters some uninterrupted screen time instead of just discussing them at length, they very well could've have been onto something. Godzilla is a poorly-crafted, scatterbrained film that fails to be remotely compelling for even a single frame.
1.5/5 Stars
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