The old Godzilla movies made by Japan's Toho studio between 1954 and 2004 were B-grade monster movies. They were cheesy and primitive, for the most part, but displayed the charm of inventive filmmakers who were trying to transcend the limitations of budget and technology by having a guy in a rubber lizard suit trample model cities to make the illusion work.
It's an attitude that Gareth Edwards — director of the new Hollywood reboot of Godzilla — should understand. Edwards made the intriguing indie science fiction film "Monsters" in 2010 for a mere $800,000, doing the special-effects work on a laptop. His new "Godzilla" cost more than 200 times that amount, yet has little to show for its budget. Godzilla still looks like a guy in a rubber suit — perhaps unavoidable due to the original anthropomorphic design of the monster — and the film takes forever to get what the punters paid for: battling monsters.
This "Godzilla" is 10 percent monsters, 90 percent bad acting. The most monstrous thing might be seeing Bryan Cranston, in a role as poorly written as that of Raymond Burr's in the 1954 U.S. release of the original "Godzilla." Cranston plays a nuclear engineer investigating seismic activity near a Japanese nuclear reactor when a massive tremor hits, causing a meltdown. There's also a tsunami and radioactive no-go zone likely modeled on the Tohoku catastrophe, and this casual use of 3/11 imagery may seem in poor taste to some.