Godzilla

I just saw Godzilla with Harriet on Sunday night. It's rare that she's willing to see one of my "genre" films (she looks at me cross eyed when I use the term kaiju), but she expressed an interest after seeing a commercial, so ... date night. I think having Bryan Cranston in the film helped, she's a big Breaking Bad fan and we both loved him in Malcom in the Middle. And based on a recommendation, we saw it in 3D!

I enjoyed the film. It was interesting, made some sense (other than it being ridiculous), and seemed like a pretty good portrayal of how the world would react to these giant monsters. The effects were spectacular, and I think it really captured the size of these things. It was why the 3D version was recommended, and I think that was right on. The depth perception of the 3D effect made the monsters blundering and fighting among the buildings really effective.

The story really follows Ford Brody (played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson), a bomb disposal expert in the military, as he tries to get back to his family and keeps crossing paths with all the monsters. His performance was a little stiff, but that was somewhat in keeping with his military character's background, so not too off-putting.

You can probably tell that I'm not entirely enthusiastic about this film. Although I enjoyed it, I was a little ... well ... bored.  It seemed like the human characters were often fairly passive. That's not true throughout the film, and frankly, with creatures this size, that's probably the point, but I found I was most engaged when they were actively trying to stop the monsters, and not just follow them to see what they would do or making huge leaps of logic figuring out what was driving them.

I recommend the film, but it's not one I'll rush back out to see. It'll be fine to watch again with friends or family, but I doubt I'll even use it as background entertainment when I'm doing chores at home. That's one of my threshold tests for movies.