Watch the latest (so far) Godzilla. The one with Elizabeth Olsen as someone's wife and someone else's mom, and some other guy as her husband whose dad was Bryan Cranston, who survived a meltdown at a nuclear power plant and 15 years getting arrested various times only to die just as he got ahold of proof that something exists. Oops, spoiler alert. Sorry. But the movie was really dumb and I don't care and you shouldn't either.
That "something" turned out not to be Godzilla, as most normal people would have guessed, but something else that looks like... shit, I have no idea what it looks like. But after an hour, Godzilla actually shows up and is on screen a total of eight minutes in two-hour movie, despite being the title character (I looked it up).
I'd read that the one thing that saves this movie is the focus on the monster fights, which of course is what monster movies, especially Godzilla movies, are all about. Seriously? Every time they started fighting, the camera would cut away to the people's reactions, or flying planes, or buildings crashing down. Godzilla would just be grabbing one of the weird-ass looking things and taking a bite when the camera cuts away. Someone apparently read somewhere that not showing the monster and letting the audience imagine things heightens the suspense and stuff, but didn't get to the part where once the monsters show up and fight, you're supposed to actually show it.
So anyway, it was a two-hour movie supposedly about Godzilla, but it was really about some guy named Ford Brody, his dad Joe, his son Sam, his wife Elle (who looks like Elizabeth Olsen), some random Japanese kid who Ford takes care of during a monster attack but who runs off to his parents later and is never seen or mentioned again, some Japanese scientist (who looks like Ken Watanabe), David Straithairn pretending to be an Army General, two giant weird-ass monsters who get a lot of screen time, and oh yeah Godzilla who gets the least screen time of all.
Nice job setting everything up to actually be realistic and believeable (as much as they can be in a Godzilla movie), but they had a freakin' hour to do it, so I would hope so. As far as delivering the goods, I'm sorry, but why even call the movie Godzilla? Why not call it "A Whole Lot of Background and Boring People and Oh Yeah Some Godzilla Too"? Oh, because that would be too long. I get it. So they just called it Godzilla.