Sean Hodges

That’s a fair comment. I was more referring to the trend in critic circles to outright condemn the movie before it had actually been released on the grounds that previous Godzilla movies didn’t do well in the box office, which was a fairly common statement. I probably should have worded that better, all in all.

Granted, but Edwards also said that he did not want to do sequels, preferring instead to make a single solidly made film than set up a franchise. Clearly he changed his mind about that at some point, so why not about this too?

Someone actually analyzed the lengths of time Godzilla appears in both this film and the original, and found that he appeared in both films for roughly the same length of time.

Perhaps the problem doesn’t so much lie with the film, but with the fact that audiences don’t expect blockbusters to try to be anything other than Bay-style action these days?

That’s true, and a fair point. That said, I think the real crux of the issue is that Edwards was clearly trying to create a film that would feel familiar to people who’d watched the original Godzilla, and that’s why the pacing and monster reveals are similar.

I have to admit, he’s really made a career for himself. If only all of us fanboys were so lucky, eh?

In fairness, what wasn’t working about the Millenium Series wasn’t so much that it was the same as the old stuff, but that it was a series in which each film was a reboot of the entire franchise and thus there wasn’t much for audiences to latch onto. Some of the weakest Godzilla movies are to be found in the Millenium Series, in my opinion, All Monsters Attack notwithstanding.

Probably accurate, given that Godzilla fans are notoriously hard to please!

I definitely think they need a more solid writer for the sequels. That said, it seems unlikely that the “less is more” approach will be used in future films, as they’ve already established Godzilla now; what’s more likely is that he’ll keep the human drama element in the movie while simultaneously building up the enemy he’s chosen for Big G in the next few movies, I reckon.