Franchise that I have no real interest in? Check. Hollywood reboot? Check. This is exactly the sort of summer blockbuster that you couldn’t pay me to watch. I relented in this case only because the trailers actually looked sort of good, seeming to make a case for this being an environmentalism film instead of just a monster romp, plus word of mouth on Broken Forum was reasonably positive. Unfortunately sometimes first impressions are correct and I should have stayed away from this pile of crap.

It does start out with some promise of being decent. I already knew that Bryan Cranston was in it due to the trailers but was happily surprised when I recognized Juliette Binoche. Of course, scant minutes later they went and fridged her character, in a running away from an explosion scene no less, and I decided then and there that this is a terrible movie. I was right too since it’s all downhill from there. In a nutshell, the story is about humans waking up primordial monsters due to messing around with nuclear energy and the monsters wreck havoc until the heroic Godzilla steps in to stop them. The puny humans try various plans to fight the humans but basically none of them work.

Director Gareth Edwards doesn’t have much of a track record except for a low-budget monster movie that won some measure of acclaim. He’s frequently praised for succeeding a sense of the massive scale at which gigantic monsters operate. I’d also credit him with mastering the teaser reveal shot of a style reminiscent of Steven Spielberg in which a narrow view of a scene suddenly opens up to a wide expanse. Unfortunately he seems to be a bit of a one-trick pony since he uses this shot on at least three separate occasions with each use being ever more ludicrous. It simply does not make sense that the soldiers find out that a giant hole has been opened into their nuclear waste disposal site from inside the tunnel when everyone outside can see it plain as day.

Worse, he teases and then fails to deliver. When we finally see Godzilla confront another monster, our natural reaction is to lean forward in anticipation of an awesome smack-down. But contrary to all the rules of narrative drama, the camera cuts away to a television news report and the next we see of the other monster is its back as it flees. The director even does this more than once. In another scene, we see our young, white male soldier protagonist, surely the most boring possible character the writers could have come up with, clinging to the ruins of an elevated train after having saved a child from falling. Evidently the director thinks that watching them extricate themselves from this precarious position must be boring because we instantly warp to the next day with everyone safely on the ground.

The actual fight scenes are relegated to the last twenty minutes or so. They’re on the okay side, nothing that particularly stands out but not terrible either, except that after being teased for so long we can’t help but feel cheated. The contrast with Pacific Rim is impossible to ignore. That film too opened with a teaser reveal but it moved quickly to deliver solid action. The biggest difference however is that Del Toro knew how to ramp up the awesomeness with every subsequent battle scene. In this one, it feels like they had nothing to show save for this one good fight and so just held on to it for the end.

As disappointing as the action is, the human drama element of the movie is incomparably worse. I actually rather liked Aaron Taylor-Johnson in the first Kick Ass but he’s just terrible here. It’s incredibly frustrating to see a cast of actors who you know are capable of great performances being brought low by an awful script and an inept director: in addition to Cranston and Binoche, Ken Watanabe, Sally Hawkins and David Strathairn are all performers who have done great work. As such it pained me to watch Watanabe stuck with the same furrowed brow expression on his face for the whole movie and Strathairn spouting ridiculous lines as the too dumb to live U.S. military officer.

The only good thing about this movie is that it instantly made all of the other films that I’ve watched recently seem much, much better. As my cinephile friend once mentioned, it’s useful to watch crap like this once in a while to calibrate your expectations. Make no mistake: this is the worst movie I’ve watched in a long, long time.