I just got back from seeing “Godzilla” earlier this evening and, first and foremost, I think that it was well done.  Yes, I still brought my bourbon to the show, but it wasn’t a movie that needed alcohol to be enjoyable, I assure you.  I was surprised that Bryan Cranston (who was somewhat heavily featured in the trailer) wasn’t as big of a role as I expected, the kid from Kick-Ass (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) did a pretty good job…even though I didn’t recognize him from his Kick-Ass days.  I also thought that the girl (Elizabeth Olsen) looked like one of the Olsen Twins, and that ate me up throughout most of the movie; and, it turns out, that she is the younger sister of the Olsen Twins, so there ya go.  The acting was solid and I thought that the story was really good — much better than the last rendition of Godzilla (1998) that was in NYC….which also irritates me because Godzilla is supposed to stay in the Pacific; how would a giant monster like Godzilla get all the way to the N. Atlantic???? It makes no sense — and I liked the use of visual effects that you come to expect with movies nowadays.

The only thing that I didn’t like about it is one of my biggest pet peeves, when it comes to this genre of film: military engagement.  Come. On.

In EVERY monster or alien movie, the first response is always to try and shoot it.  Usually with machine guns. Which, are you sitting down?, NEVER works.  And why should it?? The monster is the size of a building….how is an assault rifle going to inflict any notable damage to it??  It is such a simple-minded tactic that it always bothers me.  It’s like Denzel says:

The only thing that the initial (futile) strike ever accomplishes, in these movies, is it angers and annoys me — probably more so than the monster that is destroying the city.  That, or it gives confidence to the invading force of just how silly and ill-equipped we are for the battle.  It is one of my biggest pet peeves in the genre and I wish that, for once, they would make a monster/alien movie where someone tosses out the unlikelihood of that first strike being successful.

Inevitably, the answer then becomes “use bigger weapons” and, sometimes it works, but usually it doesn’t.  The military response is remarkably predictable and you know it is going to fail from the get-go, which is what makes it annoying because, if this was a real event, I imagine (and hope) that they’d be more creative and intelligent with their reaction to the invading force.

For example, in Independence Day, after the initial strikes against the aliens failed (up to and including nuclear warheads) to penetrate their force fields, THEN they figure out: “Oh hey, what if we turn the tables and use their tactics — the commandeering of our satellites — against them by giving the mother ship a virus that then is sent to the ships destroying us down here?” And, ya know what? It worked — we were able to disarm and destroy the mother ship, and level the playing-field on the ground.  It was the confidence-boosting game-changer that then allowed us to do what we probably should have thought about way earlier in the movie:  their “death beam” thing is the ONLY unprotected part of their entire ship, and, thus, the ship’s really only vulnerability.   We should have attacked that point much earlier in the movie (or tried it) but, no, the military-minds were more adherent to the low-percentage-success-rate of trying to shoot it down.  C’mon…it came here from LIGHT YEARS away!! Why would you expect our technology to be able to match theirs one-on-one? It makes no sense.

Anyway, to conclude, I don’t want to say too much about Godzilla, out of fear of spoiling some plot detail, BUT it was a good movie.  I didn’t pay $15 to see it at a real theater*, but for my money, it was a really good movie that I enjoyed and that I recommend.

*I am not really a picky viewer, in terms of IMAX or communal couches (a la Cinetopia) and other such frills like that; just so long as it is a clean theater with comfortable seats, I can make do with a big screen and a better sound system than my place can provide.  Therefore, I am partial to the St. Johns Cinema which is close to my house.  It has the big screen, the better sound system, is conveniently by my place, AND has a $5 matinee and $7 regular admission.  Why pay double elsewhere for the same movie?  That just makes good sense, to me.

-Ryan.