GOJIRA!!!

  I went to watch Godzilla today, mostly because I was very excited about it, the trailers that have been released over the past few months had completely won me over and I could not wait when I found out they were released in Singapore. It was a rush but I managed to get tickets at Shaw Century, the seats were not bad too.

  To be honest, I had wild expectations about the movie. In fact I was borderline obsessive, I would refresh ImDB everyday and got really excited when I saw the rating climb as high as 9.3/10. Although it would be short lived.

  As I sat through the Transformers trailer that preceded the movie, I kind of went blank. To be frank, I had spoiled myself on some major plot details such as the presence of the MUTOs. But overall the my expectations just before the movie started were almost reduced to zero, except a tingling feeling inside me that said that it was going to be a good one.

  The movie started off slow, as it is with most monster-disaster movies, this did not overly concern me, as in a two hour long movie, they cannot dump everything in the beginning. However the plot development was spot on from the start, there was no overly boring moments, even the ‘normal’ and ‘human’ side was tense and kept people guessing. However they got into the action quite quickly, showing the first MUTO quite early on and the destruction it wrecked on Japan and Hawaii.

  Godzilla seems to be rather a shy guy in this film, the first few shots of him do not show anything much, except for a full body shot early on and a killer roar, just to let people know that he means business. The first few battle scene between Godzilla and the male MUTO are rather, for the lack of a better word, boring. They were shown in bits and pieces and were not very visually pleasing. However as the movies goes on the battles build up in intensity and visual effects until the huge payoff at the end.

  The movie is a visual spectacle, the visual effects are amazing, even among films of this century.  The battle scene were especially well done. However, I felt the fights were not ‘big’ enough. Don’t get me wrong, they were good, but I felt they were too short and had little depth. And the build up was slightly inconsistent. Unlike most movies, this movie might have benefitted being a bit longer.

  The ratings of the movie have steadily declined, this I expected. With this kind of movie it is hard to have a polarized opinion. People will inevitably like different things. I personally liked this movie, although it did fall short of my expectations, albeit they were insane.

My Rating: 7/10