I felt underwhelmed for most of the film, but there were a few nice moments.
I saw the trailer but didn’t read anything about it beforehand. I was pleasantly surprised, then, to see that the bad-guy monsters were Rodans (Rodan x Evangelion, anyway). At the start I was expecting Watanabe to be the character from the original Rodan film (who was a geologist working for the mining company), and was mildly disappointed when his name was said, though I was then pleased that he was Dr. Serizawa from the original 1954 film.
However… what a waste! Watanabe is a good actor (also the only male Japanese actor Hollywood will consider casting, apparently, but that’s another topic) and like you said, all he gets to do the rest of the time is look shell-shocked. Though he does get to say “Gojira!” which was nice. Nicer would have been something similar to the character’s role in the original film.
I would have enjoyed a film starring Watanabe and Cranston working together. Like the two scientist characters in Pacific Rim. Instead Cranston dies, and Watanabe barely has anything to do besides object to the use of nuclear weapons… which would be enough, if the objections and his role were given more screen time and purpose (more on this in a bit).
I understand why they (they being studio heads presumably) thought making the main character GI Joe with a nurse for a wife and a kid would be a good idea. But I cared more about the Japanese tourist kid on the train in Honolulu than anyone in the main character’s family (besides Cranston who had already died), and was hoping for a minute that he’d become a main character (he’d be the main character in a 60’s/70’s Godzilla film 
).
Not that it matters in a Godzilla film, but there was some bizarre geoscience here in a very basic sense I couldn’t stop myself from nit-picking while watching (since there was a lot of time to think, like you said):
- First, it makes no sense that there was a nuclear power plant literally right next to a volcano (and Japan doesn’t need American consultants like Cranston’s character to know that).
- Second, it makes no sense that the miners wouldn’t have known about an enormous cavern beneath their pit mine (this is more forgivable in the original Rodan film, when geologic exploration technology was far more primitive).
- Third, ignoring the fact that Yucca Mountain does not actually store any nuclear waste (though that means if, today, the government needed to hide a nuclear monster carcass, that’s probably where it would go), the storage would be well below the surface (in the root of the mountain, below ground level) and not right near the surface as depicted. The only reason for this was obviously so they could have the surprise of opening the door to open sky.
- Finally, I’ll skip the detailed analysis but the way they used seismic waves was odd for many reasons.
Anyway - getting back to the topic of objecting to nuclear weapons, I think the film made one good decision here. Despite the Fukushima parallel, they didn’t attempt to make a case against nuclear energy (which certainly would have happened if this had been a Japanese production, and was the main theme of the 80’s/90’s films). Changing the origin story like they did, though, while clever, also completely subverts the original point of Godzilla from 1954… and manages to take away a lot of the weight behind Watanabe’s objections to nuclear weapons, even though his objection is Hiroshima (i.e. real-life and relatable).
His objection becomes “well, we tried it and it didn’t work”, not any real philosophical or whatever objection to nuclear weapons. There was a shot showing what looked like a predicted fallout pattern from the detonation showing that most of the bay area would be contaminated, but bizarrely this wasn’t actually commented upon. The captain mentioned earlier that fallout risk would be minimal so Watanabe could have raised an objection here if the filmmakers had wanted him to.
Anyway - I took a class on Godzilla in college (which I’m sure I mentioned to you before, Donald) and I could certainly go on and on about this stuff. But the point is, ignoring all that stuff (which you usually should when watching Godzilla movies), the film was lacking as a Godzilla movie. I liked some of the action and destruction scenes, including the bridge/tunnel scene - though I think they were hoping it’d be a lot creepier than it was. I appreciated that they were going for a certain kind of atmosphere but it didn’t quite work for the most part, despite some cool shots involving lots of smoke and fog (a nice touch in San Francisco). And Godzilla didn’t really have the right sort of presence and ended up being unexciting.
