Godzilla

Actors:  Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Bryan Cranston, Ken Watanabe, Elizabeth Olsen, Juliette Binoche, Sally Hawkins, David Strathairn

Rating:  8 out of 10, This current movie is sneakily very, very good.  I’ve always taken the stance that the name “Godzilla” should always be uttered with a deep guttural Japanese accent.  It was therefore with intense pleasure that the first time it was said in the movie was in just that fashion by the excellent Japanese actor, Ken Watanabe. This flick is successful because it stays with the human story and uses the huge monsters as a plot device instead of the focus.  Godzilla emerges as nature’s response (much to San Francisco’s detriment) to two large nuclear feeding monsters called MUTOs.  The monsters are forces of nature and the movie is about the way humans would react to this immense challenge.  There are no sinister corporation rabbit holes to explore.  There were some pretty dumb tactical decisions made but this was obviously done to keep the story moving forward.  The young actors were especially good, the Olsen twins’ younger sister and Kick Ass himself, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, were effective as the young couple the story centers around.  You wouldn’t want to stand around his character in a thunder storm though as wherever he happens to be standing is ground zero for something extremely bad to happen.  This is definitely the best Godzilla movie ever made which says a lot, nostalgia wise.

MVP:  Taylor-Johnson in his best performance since the first Kick-Ass