A. H.

I usually don't waste my money at the movie theater. More often than not, I end up disappointed. Not this time, however. Godzilla Minus One was an amazing film that combined a compelling humanistic story with the thrill of kaiju. This movie puts American, big-budget studio films to shame. I definitely recommend seeing this film in theaters.

The acting, production value, etc. is good. I wish I could say the same for the story. The problem comes down to writing - its boring. I found myself constantly nodding off during the show. I get it. The writers want to explore the dark side of humanity and then give us the redemption arc - how we are weak and how we fall back onto religion or misguided beliefs in order to explain why bad things happen to good people, until some people are willing to fight back at the very end. Generally, a good story, except I've seen this story a hundred times before and told in better ways than this. See e.g., "The Mist" by Stephen King. It is utterly and disappointingly predictable. Just for once, I would like to be surprised. The recent "Dracula" series on Netflix was great because of how the writers went away from convention and wrote a character - Sister Agatha - that was unexpected. She was strong, smart and didn't fit into the typical vampire-story mold. Here, there was no such character. And there was little interaction. Sure, characters were in the same scenes and rooms together, but there's not much interaction if out of two characters, one speaks 90% of the time while the other just sits there not doing anything. What this show needed was for the writers to have the imagination and the courage to give us something we haven't seen before. Unfortunately, we were just fed a slightly different, but primarily same, story that was lifted out of the writer's recycle can.