Well I went to see the new Godzilla this past weekend and I was pleasantly surprised. It was a great monster movie but it kind of felt like Pacific Rim with a more memorable monster. There was some decent action but there were huge plot-holes. The acting was decent enough with Bryan Cranston chewing scenery like crazy. The male lead was fairly wooden but he was about 100x better than Kit Harrington.
The movie revolved around 2 weird creatures spawned by nuclear power that menace San Fransisco for some reason. I'll call them Kaiju's because they reminded me of the Kaiju's in Pacific Rim. One huge plot hole I saw was one Kaiju escaped from a Filipino mine and then went all the way to Las Vegas to get to the nuclear storage facility at Yucca Mountain. Why it didn't just take a shorter route to China or Japan (who also have nuclear waste storage facilities) I'll never know. The Kaiju also doesn't have wings so I guess it walked all the way from the Philippines to Las Vegas over some stretch of time.
The plot was fairly strait-forward. It pretty much amounts to Cranston is a nuclear scientist and a Japanese reactor melts down and messes up a nearby town. I.E. Fukushima. He has a son that joins the Navy and becomes a bomb disposal guy. They travel around and meet Ken Watanabe who plays a Japanese scientist of some sort. His role pretty much boils down to furrowed brow and reaction shots to the CGI monsters. He does utter "Godzilla" for the first time in a way that made people in the theater laugh.
The rest of the movie has them travel around and watch as Godzilla destroys Waikiki, the flying Kaiju destroys the Honolulu Airport, the other walking Kaiju destroys Las Vegas and then everyone destroys San Fransisco. The various characters dodge monsters and Aaron Taylor-Johnson tries to unite with his wife played by Elizabeth Olsen.
The monsters fighting was what I came to see and for the most part I was not disappointed. There was plenty of Godzilla kicking ass and he was portrayed as somewhat of a good guy throughout the movie. He was there to provide "balance for nature." I would actually see another Godzilla movie where he might fight Mechagodzilla or Mothra or something like that.
Finally the plot-holes can take up a huge multi-point list but I don't feel like writing it. Suffice it to say there are many and you can probably make a drinking game out of them if you wanted. The one that was the most glaring was why Aaron Taylor-Johnson had to take the train with the nukes to San Fransisco. The nuke transport train (I have no idea why they didn't just use a B-52 or a B-1 to transport them) was controlled by the army for some reason. Aaron Taylor-Johnson was a navy man and for some reason the army guys didn't have their own Ordinance control guy so they took him along. If Aaron Taylor-Johnson wanted to get back to his wife so badly why didn't he just rent a car and drive to San Fransisco instead of taking the slow-assed nuke transport train? These kind of plot holes are rife through-out the movie so be ready for them.
In any case the movie is worth watching if you like monster movies like Pacific Rim and can overlook glaring plot holes. There are lots of monsters fighting and fearful reaction shots and Bryan Cranston does a very good job as always. It was also nice to see the real Godzilla return to the big screen and not that piece of crap lizard from that awful 1998 Mathew Broderick movie.
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