Godzilla

It’s been a while since I’ve seen a movie that you can talk about so much and so well. Judging by some of the reviews already, some are already enthralled by the creative team's pious reverence for the Japanese original (atomic breath!), others by the director's method of following the peripeteia of the giant monsters always from the position of an anonymous humanoid, others by the transformation of the central character into a giant monster who deserves our love but is never able to return it. I too must confess that when, at the end, the camera chased the sinking Gojiru, but did not go underwater with it again, I was moved by my smallness and insignificance compared to a creature so perfect and wise, who would no doubt never have known of my feelings for him and I would have pursued him to the ends of the earth. And I’m not into chubbies. Edwards fully lives up to what we expect from an aspiring indie director when someone injects 160 million into his veins. It's packed with auteurism and individual ideas. I liked the incorporation of crucial scenes from modern video games (fighter jets falling from the sky à la Modern Warfare 2, a submarine being blown up in the jungle with an insectoid creature in the background – Crysis, soldiers jumping out of a plane into the rising sun – Battlefield 2), I loved the religious rapture of the pidihumanoids towards something so vastly unreachable, I loved every entrance of the giant lizard onto the scene (flares), I was tense during the silent scene on the railroad bridge, I enjoyed the incredibly destructive picnic of the ancient creatures in San Francisco. No point then in addressing the total lack of logic or the unnecessary main human storyline right after Bryan Cranston jumps in. The movie should have been shot entirely from the perspective of random bystanders. Ken Watanabe and Sally Hawkins (for her, of course, as usual) were practically unwatchable. But these are minimal compromises compared to what the film offers. I can understand the lower rating – this movie really doesn't shine when you watch it on a bus with your cell phone. (02.09.2014)

I won't be so critical as to not see any mistakes in this film, there are quite a few of them in terms of logic, but this is still a movie that is based on kaiju films and essentially on B-movie production, where the story is usually a bit secondary and it's mainly about the monsters. I like that they are the main focus here because the human characters are not worth it. I was hoping that this would be somewhat like Japanese classics and in fact, it kind of fulfilled that for me. The American scenes also contribute to it, but the monsters are the winners and that's simply beautiful. I was expecting a messed up film, but I'm really glad with the result. (17.05.2014)