Long time fan of Godzilla here and I have to say I found this movie to be incredibly underwhelming in many ways. While what was there was really good and well acted it just didn't deliver on the beats that I've come to expect from a Godzilla film.
The biggest issue is the lack of action, or rather the teasing of a massive battle only to get a cut away to something I didn't really care about and added a whole lot of nothing to the film over all. The biggest example of this is Godzilla's reveal on Hawaii and the first "fight" with the M.U.T.O. which is setup to be a great clash only to suddenly cut away to Ford's son watching the news where you get about five seconds worth of awesome looking fighting just so we can see his wife looking upset at the TV after she hadn't been paying attention to it. I'm fine with a lack of action but don't dangle it in front of my face then yank it away at the last possible second.
To me it just felt like there wasn't enough Godzilla in this movie and I don't care what anyone else says this is his damn movie. The human element has to be there but it shouldn't be to a point where it is dominating everything that is happening. The final fight gets setup, we see the fight start to unfold, then it cuts away to Ford and what he's up to instead of focusing on the far more important monster battle that is taking place. It's like this film had Cloverfield syndrome where there's this massive aversion to keeping the monsters on screen because clearly this isn't why people came to see it.
The actors do a great job, I enjoyed the story behind everything, loved the design and tone of the film, it just needed more. Where something like Pacific Rim didn't shy away from the action and left things to the background at the right points like Mako's memory of the Kaiju attack when she was a little girl, Godzilla felt like it was content to spend 90% of the movie teasing a monster battle but never actually delivering on it and even when it did it couldn't help but cut away to something else now and then leaving the fight scene in limbo so when the audience could finally return to it they weren't sure what was going on or where things had progressed.
This is a good movie but it's not a good Godzilla movie I'm afraid. The potential is there and part of me wonders if there is a director's cut which contains the fight scenes instead of the cutaways. I walked out of the theater tonight wanting more but not in a good way. It was awesome to see the big guy back in action and having his old abilities back but Godzilla felt like he was playing second fiddle to the human characters which are hard to invest in when you keep getting the tease of Godzilla and the M.U.T.O throwing down.