Poor Script
It has already been mentioned that the characters in general were pretty worthless and boring, but it’s not really something that can be blamed on stale performances or inept acting. The script for Godzilla as a whole just feels lacklustre, with no one on board understanding how to create something that audiences can invest in. In a lot of ways, Godzilla is a movie where what you see is what you get. Nothing about the story is really explained in the trailers; all you know is that Japan’s legendary creation is going to wreak havoc on San Francisco and possibly throw-down with other monsters.
And in a nutshell, that’s a fantastic way of summing up the whole movie. Your human characters do irrelevant things and solely exist just because a movie needs characters, while the monsters fight. None of the protagonists in Godzilla even have an actual goal they are working towards, and it’s supported when Ken Watanabe explicitly states there’s nothing humanity can do other than let the monsters fight and see who wins. The closest Godzilla comes to having a protagonist do something crucial is Aaron Taylor-Johnson trying to get rid of a bomb, which he never even actually does. Like us, he just witnesses the monsters fight a lot before failing at whatever was he was attempting to do, and gets rescued.
Again, none of this would really matter if the human characters weren’t completely overshadowing the monsters in screen time. Watching Godzilla is like watching two different movies; one has the carnage you were anticipating while the other is just a bunch of human characters standing around and not knowing what to do.