Godzilla

[Worf101]

"Godzilla" - C-Minus - Loving the Japanese original (sans Raymond Burr) mere words cannot express my utter and complete disappointment in this latest iteration of the "King of the Monsters". The producers took two lamentable trends in current movies superheros and "man saves his family against all odds while the chite hits the fan for everyone else" and grafted them together to produce a wholly distasteful mish mash. They turn Godzilla into a superhero in a forced clumsy fashion while the "man saves family" backstory is as uninteresting as it is unnecessary. Basterds... they got me again!
Worf

[Kam]

i was split on this. i thought Godzilla was the best developed character in the movie. What Gareth Evans got right was the action scenes with Godzilla. Since the old raymond burr one, he cut the action in wide angle and finally showed the battle to scale in a way to really appreciate it. and in a way that transformers could learn from. there wasn't any frenetic quick cutting or extreme closeup to hide the fact that you don't care about what you're seeing.

i liked seeing Godzilla as the 'hero' since i had always rooted for Godzilla to win. Especially in that 1998 piece of dreck. i was so hoping Godzilla would kill everyone in that one. Here, you had a reason for Godzilla to win. Side note though, i still wanted Mothra to kill everyone.

The whole man saves family story was terrible. and what a waste of ken watanabe.

[3LB]

Saw it yesterday in IMAX 3D and enjoyed it very much. Best Godzilla movie I've ever seen, barring the original. It is indeed a nod to the Toho legacy and reduces the '98 US version to irrelevance. Not that it's flawless or anything; you couldn't say anything bad about this Godzilla that you couldn't say about the ones that came before (after the original). It has the usual inconsistencies that a lot of action movies of this type have and the subplot is as predictable as it is 'played' but ultimately, this one only has the former Godzilla movies to compare to and I doubt I'd ever seriously consider watching any modern incarnation of Godzilla that featured dudes in rubber suits stomping on balsa wood cities and toy trains after seeing how well it can be done with CGI. I maybe wished it had more of the wrath of Godzilla element that the first movie had (not really pleased with the sentimental ending) but overall, I think this one advances the brand and that's all you could expect at this point. First time since I was a kid that I sat through an entire Godzilla movie without feeling sheepish about it.

If I have one major nitpick: while I wholeheartedly recommend seeing this movie on as big a screen as possible, I found myself underwhelmed with the 3D effects. Seemed like a waste of the extra expense.