ROWR
So, Godzilla 2014 kind of sucks. Spoilers ho, but if you fear spoilers … ah, who has the energy.
I know this isn’t the common opinion. Between B+ reviews and mega box office, I can only assume they pump gas into the theaters everywhere else, because this movie — while kind of fun in a brain damaged way — is Dumb with a capital D which rhymes with B which stands for Big Time Dum.
For yucks, let’s point every completely insanely stupid aspect of this film:
- Radiation is apparently a white mist you can potentially outrun.
- Automatic radiation safety doors have manual overrides so heartbroken husbands can endanger entire cities while they hold the door for their wife who is trying to outrun the white misty radiation.
- Ancient ginormous monsters feed off of radiation, which apparently means they eat nuclear missiles like Heath Bars.
- Godzilla exists to bring balance to nature by destroying these monsters whenever they appear. Godzilla is simply a force of nature. Because reasons.
- After studying the radiation-eating monsters for 15 years, the scientists in charge know absolutely nothing about it. Not even how to kill it effectively. Nothing.
- The radiation-eating monsters emit a mobile EMP pulse that knocks out power wherever they go. Except sometimes it’s a pulse, sometimes a measurable “sphere of influence.” Despite being measurable, the armed forces continue to fly planes and drive vehicles into the sphere of influence just so we can see them drop out of the sky dramatically.
- The army also thinks shipping a nuke by train to the West Coast so it can be laboriously towed as radiation bait into the sea and then detonated to kill all the monsters is a better idea than flying a nuke way out of the (measurable) sphere of EMP influence and getting it to the bait spot the long way around.
- Nuclear missiles can be retrofitted with clockwork detonators. When the rigged nuke is found by the monsters, instead of eating it immediately like a Heath Bar as they with every single other radioactive element they encounter, they take it back to their nest for their offspring to feed on. Now the army has to send in a team of idiots to literally carry the bomb out of SF by hand, on foot.
- Elizabeth Olsen is in this movie, apparently to remind everyone that women do, in fact, exist. She is a nurse and a mother, because that is what women do (they can possibly teach grammar school as well) in the minds of Hollywood assholes. Elizabeth Olsen’s role could have been re-written to be a Golden Retriever the hero loves, and it would have been exactly the same.
- The other woman in the story is Juliette Binoche, who is the aforementioned wife running from radiation above, and is dead within five minutes, because that is the other role women can play in movies written by idiots.
- At the end, after the radiation-eating monsters are dead and San Fran is destroyed, Godzilla wakes up and is mysteriously treated as a hero despite the fact that he is Godzilla, and the fact that he almost died killing mortal enemies in a savage battle does not in any way mean he will not simply proceed to eating the citizens of San Francisco like Skittles. Literally a news blurb on TV as the monster is walking through the city proclaims it the savior of the city.
I could go on. Believe me. Some of the sequences are cool, and the sensibility seems right, but boy howdy a young chimpanzee could have come up with a plot that made more sense. In the words of Bill Hicks: Go back to bed, America.