Large-scale lizard entertains with less character in its wake

Your enjoyment of “Godzilla” will probably depend on your expectations.
If you had been led to believe that the storytelling was character-driven and impressive, you will be disappointed.

The movie’s plot focuses on a nuclear engineer (Bryan Cranston) and his son (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), a bomb disposal expert for the Navy. The pair tries to thwart the giant monsters wreaking havoc across the Pacific Ocean with the help of scientist Dr. Ishiro Serizawa (Ken Watanabe). For a human element, Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s character is also trying to get back to his wife (Elizabeth Olsen) and their son.

The plot’s main problem is the writing. The characters usually speak in clichés or melodramatic sound bites — that is, if they are not crying or shouting for their loved ones. As callous as that might sound, in a movie where tens of thousands are dying, there is never a moment where you are told why you should be invested in this particular family.

As a result, the scenes where our heroes try to rendezvous with each other end up being the boring ones you wish you could skip to get to the monster fights.
But boy, are they great monster fights. Director Gareth Edwards gives us spectacle that feels grander than the fare offered in recent, similar movies such as “Man of Steel” or the “Transformers” franchise.

Those movies made the mistake of throwing explosions at audiences non-stop.
“Godzilla” understands that, for a moment to be epic, it needs to be built to.
The movie balances large-scale monsters with quieter moments that build tension.
One such scene is the aerial troop deployment highlighted in the movie’s first trailer.
Here we see a few dozen soldiers jump from a tremendous altitude at sunset. Red smoke streams from them as they fall. Anticipation builds as we hear one trooper’s heart rate quicken as he nears the devastated city below.

These first-person perspective moments make us scan the screen for behemoth silhouettes, and they give the film a sense of scale other monster movies lack.
While it would have been nice to see some of the story’s characters and subtler themes further explored, the film definitely keeps viewers entertained, and it is a promising reboot to one of cinema’s seminal characters.