Jurassic Yawn: Godzilla Lumbers Through the Motions...

Sigh. It pains me to say it, but Gareth Edwards' Godzilla is a crashing bore. I'd really been rooting for Edwards to cement his reputation after his terrific debut with the micro-budgeted Monsters,  but as valiant an effort as Godzilla tries to be, Edwards' vision and his enthusiasm for his beasts is weighed down by a screenplay that takes forever to get out of first gear, and a leaden cast that's woefully in need of charisma. With Bryan Cranston on board, I was all set for Godzilla vs. Heisenberg, but Cranston's appearance in the picture is all too brief, leaving things to trudge onward with his son, beefily inhabited by a frequently mouth-breathing Aaron Taylor-Johnson. His Ford Brody is a military family man with a young son and a doe-eyed wife/nurse played with earnest emptiness by Elizabeth Olsen. Ken Watanabe is the pseudo-scientist trying to help unravel the mysterious seismic catastrophes that herald the arrival of long-dormant M.U.T.O. - "Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms." Ford spends the entire movie trying to reunite with his family while exhibiting a complete absence of self-preservation.

The opening credits are slick and attention-getting, combining a fast-moving series of newsreel headlines and redacted text fraught with mystery and foreboding. The movie these credits promise takes at least ninety-minutes to get there, when finally, finally we get to see Godzilla himself throw-down with the Cloverfield-critter nemesis that turns Hawaii and San Francisco into F.E.M.A. disaster areas. The third act of Godzilla is fairly entertaining, with some impressive visual effects and the dynamite H.A.L.O. sequence we've all seen in the trailer. Kudos to the second unit guys and the animators - the screenwriters and the cast, not so much. Some of the performances are so leaden it's hard to believe you're seeing the best take available.

Edwards can handle visual effects and conveying fantastical events in a realistic way - which may be part of the problem, as he seems so intent on keeping a serious tone, that a plodding sense of boredom ensues, which only Godzilla himself helps dispel in the finale - the human characters certainly don't. There are never any moments of genuine fun and eruptive glee - Edwards could learn from Pacific Rim on that score, an infinitely more entertaining movie. Godzilla's characters make Independence Day seem like Richard III.

Edwards is moving on to a Star Wars spinoff movie and will eventually direct a Godzilla sequel. The best thing he can do is scrap this cast and have fresh screenwriters give us an entirely new roster of characters - ideally, someone we can actually care about.