Godzilla: 13 Moments That Prove It's The Stupidest Great Film Of 2014

13. Everyone's A Cliche

It is of course to be expected that a monster movie so invested in its own heritage and in the traditional vocabulary of genre movies, but at times Godzilla feels like the monster movie equivalent of The Cabin In The Woods, where every character we meets has a label slapped on their forehead, displaying what stereotype they will be playing. We have the wounded conspiracy theorist (much better this time than Matthew Broderick in Emerich's version of the film), the wife and child left at home (which scores double as she's a nurse), the ghost (of Juliette Binoche in this case), the gruff, functional army general, the quirky scientists (Ken Wattanabe and Sally Hawkins) and the assortment of grunts who will inevitably barely make it past their opening sentence before they're smushed. If it weren't for the quality of the cast, the characters could very easily be taken out of the SyFy channel rip-off of any under-performing monster movie, because there's no imagination behind them. There's nothing new that makes you think that the human cast even mean anything, which is remarkably at odds with Edwards' clearly written agenda that they matter the most.