I actually thought the idea of catching small but powerful glimpses of Godzilla and it being sort of a incidental element of a smaller character-driven story was a cool idea (even if it's sort of a rehash of his earlier film Monsters). It just fell apart for me when the character stuff was a complete slog, which in turn made me impatiently wanting Godzilla to appear throughout the entire film. After the Bryan Cranston bits, it's like they ran out of story.
It was all tease for not enough payoff if you ask me. Plus faking a death more than once, like really? That and it was just way too slowly paced.
The teases and news reel clips were much more effective in my opinion. 9/11 and other world tragedies and natural disasters aren't scary to me if I see them from impossible angles over and over like the San Andreas trailers or The Day After Tomorrow. It's scary when I watch raw footage on youtube or documentaries. Perspective. Seeing Godzilla fight that monster on the news was fantastic and despite being a smaller view, it was still in full view, not much of a tease. And seeing a tornado approaching before closing the basement doors is more horrowing than just seeing it happen when we get to see it moments later (a la Godzilla 2014). Perspective can't be said enough.
The human element is perfectly enjoyable if you look at Godzilla as a metaphoric force born from
"How pretentious" etc etc. I get it. But it works well.
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Sequel talk: I once had an idea, but it's kind of small scale and it was before discovering my dislike of Sarah Harding so with that and Jw, some things need tweaking. But basically a rich Central/South American businessman shows off his caged dinos (that presumably escaped) in secret to a group of prospective backers to help fund the reverse engineering of them (or some such). But they get loose, attack, mame, kill, and flee into the jungles (either by "evil rival" or folly of man, whichever fits.)
Sarah Harding came in after receiving a phone call from the family of the businessman because she was friends with him and he was one of a few she disclosed the Site B incident with (he had so many questions, without her knowing it's because he actually had dinos).
So it involved tracking and capturing them on the mainland and returning them but the government had their own team hunting the dinos on the island and and threatened to pull out and "nuking" the island while our protagonists were still on the island.
I came up with that after seeing 3 so forgive me. I'd still like to see some of these elements (dinos on the mainland, maybe owned by folks in rudimentary pens).
