Jean-Paul’s Rating: 2/5 stars

Bottom Line:  Look, it’s a monster!  Look, we’re ineffectively doing things!  Look, we’re making extremely stupid decisions just so there is some sort of story line!

What a mess this movie is.  It has only two things going for it.  One, Bryan Cranston is in it.  Two, a lot of the effects are pretty cool.  Number one doesn’t last very long.

I get that the theme of Godzilla movies is basically man’s hubris in thinking he can stand up to nature without nature bringing down the hammer of justice, but something interesting should really be happening when making that point.  Instead, this movie provides stupid rational after stupid rational for stupid action after stupid action.  Case in point, the Yucca Mountain scene.  Yucca Mountain, if you are not aware is where the U.S. stores all its nuclear waste.  There is more radioactivity happening there than anywhere else in the world.  One of the monsters is at Yucca Mountain and is pregnant for whatever reason and needs radioactivity to feed.  Instead of staying there, she rampages across Las Vegas and heads to San Francisco because the Army is carting a single nuclear missile by train to San Francisco.  This is all to be with her mate, who she doesn’t really need because she’s already pregnant.  Now, maybe they decided to skip the funky monster love making scene for the sake of time, but come on!

Then there are other stupid decisions like running busses full of evacuees across the Golden Gate Bridge even though it is clear to everyone that the other monster is heading straight for said bridge.  Oh, and there’s also the main character (who I will just call Not Bryan Cranston) who tells his wife and child who are in San Francisco to wait there and he’ll come and get them even though he has full knowledge that there are three monsters converging there.  Come to think of it, that would have made the story somewhat interesting if he was actually trying to get them killed because his marriage really sucked.

The only thing this movie has going for it are its cool special effects.  Even that is kind of spoiled by the fact that the entirety of the monster fighting scenes are done in darkness and are most often only glimpsed at in the background while our heroes are vainly attempting to be hero-y.

“Godzilla” would certainly be in my skip it category.  The special effects are not enough to save it.  Though, it may be one of those movies that, once you recognize the ridiculousness of it, turns it into a good movie.