Movie review: Godzilla

I watched the movie "Godzilla" today. It has an IMDB rating of 4.5. It fully deserves its rating, but people have missed the point. People reviewing it say that it is a rip-off of the "classic" originals which I haven't seen and frankly don't want to see. I don't care whether this offends the "finer" sensibilities of these "critics" who make classics out of movies because "they are so bad they're good".

The reason why this movie causes stomach ulcers is not its cinematography or screenplay or CGI. It is not its bad acting or ludicrous setting. It is just because it is plain irritating. I honestly can't recall another movie in which I felt like taking a gun and finishing off the hero(es) myself.

The cameraman - he made me so angry that I had to pause the movie for a while to control my anger. The dumb idiot runs after the monster and stands in its path. Then he wears a look of horror on his face as the monster's foot bears down on him. Why the hell does he run into its path and then act horrified? If I felt like hitting him at that point, I later hated him so much that I wanted to shoot him. While the godzilla egg is hatching, the heroine and the cameraman are standing beside it. She says "run!" and the subhuman says "One minute! I've gotta record this!" Why should he live? Nuke him I say.

Later, they are escaping from the monsters which are pursuing them closely. The cameraman then stops and tries to collect his camera which has fallen on the floor. When he managed to escape, I felt cheated. I am sure the audience would have been more pleased if the monster(s) had taken him in their mouth along with his precious camera and crushed him to pieces. If he values his camera more than his life, why should he live?

The hero - he should have been killed a thousand times. In the entire movie, he goes around seeing the monster every now and then. Yet each time, his mouth opens like a cavern and he looks surprised. He stands rooted to the spot and watches the monster emerge from the subway (yes, the subway). He could have run 50 meters and hidden in a doorway in the time he had. Instead, he stands and watches the surface of the road crack. Then he waits for the monster to surface; all the while his pupils are dilated. We are then treated to an entirely avoidable scene where the monster looks him in the face. It offends my sense of "survival of the fittest". He should have been either fed to the monster or tied to one of the missiles and shot at it. At least we would have been spared the sight of him buying boxes of pills at a medical store and then finding out that the monster is pregnant using pills meant for humans. "Similar hormonal patterns" my foot.

The heroine is a whiny nuisance. She could have been used much more efficiently as fodder for the monster. She is so manipulative it made me sick. She takes tapes which have "Top secret" written on them in big red letters (yes, really!) and later cries and says it was wrong. While everyone is running away from the monster, she slips and falls. The hero turns back and rescues her. Every time I see this stunt pulled by the director, two more minutes are sawed off my life because of the resulting surge of anger.

One scene which illustrates this is when the monster surfaces from Madison Square Garden. The group of four people stand and watch wide eyed as the monster confirms that its children are dead. They wait while it becomes angry and looks closely at them. They still look at it in awe. Then one of them says "what do we do?". The other replies "I think we should run". I have an alternate line for him. He should have said "Look around for some ketchup and onions. Let's garnish ourselves".