1. Admittedly, it may have been the wife insisting on staying. Of course, I don't think she knew at the time that the plan literally involved ensuring all the monsters arrived safely at San Fran, whereupon they would have nukes detonated in close proximity. Again, this comes back to the husband not being sensible and telling her to get the hell out of dodge. But I really don't remember her objecting to being told to leave - he told her NOT to go to the shelters or be evacuated, as he would "be there by dawn". She eventually caved and let her kid get on the bus, but stayed herself to 1. be a nurse and 2. wait for her husband. Still shouldn't have been there at that point anyway, if he hadn't told her to wait.
2. So, make it UAVs. It doesn't *have* to be planes. And they did have helicopters there already. Then you have the excuse that they were only expecting to find the sub, not the MUTO, and the choppers take the hit. There was zero reason any military commander worth even minimum wage would *choose* to send jets out once the MUTO was identified. Great for audiences? Fine. But stupid in the extreme, and therefore kind of immersion breaking.
At the very least, a throw-away line of "Oh, we didn't think it could do that without eating a fuckton of radiation" or something? I dunno.
3. Sorry, going to have to flatly reject that as an explanation.
First, nowhere was it mentioned, or even implied, that MUTO-EMP was any different from any other EMP. In fact, there is no way you would *call* it EMP if it didn't do what an EMP does - and if it even *remotely* resembles EMP, it does not function like some kind of jamming signal for electricity - it fries electronics by virtue of a power-surge. Plain and simple. NO room for negotiation.
Secondly, the very first time the EMP is used - when it is breaking out of the containment, it is literally shortly after they refer to backup generators that shit comes back online. So, I contend there is no duration - especially as the EMP is accompanied by an almost zero-duration little visual effect, just like every other EMP blast in moviedom. There is no BATTLESHIP-esque permanent bubble until the field "dissipates" or whatever. It's a genuine EMP blast, as per intention of the dialogue and visuals.
Third - your explanation requires a LOT of speculation on behalf of the screenwriter/etc. A LOT. Which is not in any way indicated by anything said by any characters, at any point, or indeed by choosing to call it "EMP". Again, this is something which affects people who know something of EMP, and no-one else. But it's still a problem from that perspective. Movie-EMP is normally pretty dodgy, I'm just pointing out that it's also pretty dodgy in this movie.
4. I think you might have misunderstood my point on this one, so let me reiterate:
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The fact that they were being detonated near the cities were a time/survival trait. You have the MUTO's on land/ in cities causing immediate havoc...you need to get them away from civilzation as fast as you can. So you can't just drop something nuclear in the middle of the pacific and hope that they smell it and come running...you lure them by getting close and them moving far away
See, I don't object to using something nuclear to lure them in. I object to the unnecessary planned use of said nukes once the creatures are lured because...
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...there would be no other ordinance that was going to take them out in short order, easily moved around and deployed. They went with the fastest and most efficient, guaranteed-of-working option.
This is wrong. There is plenty of alternatives. Very easily moved and deployed.
They also picked an option which they...oh, wait, they didn't know it would work. They've dropped nukes on Godzilla before, and it
didn't work.
Now, as I said originally, I tend to agree with the military guy who said a modern nuke would fuck them up, regardless of whether they do in fact eat radiation or not. HOWEVER, not only is the footage used an example of the largest nuke the US has ever used - or indeed, CAN use (Castle Bravo was unexpectedly larger than planned, coming in at 15MT of TNT-equivalent, and nothing in the current US arsenal can do that), if we ignore that and assume it was a much smaller, kT-level nuke instead (as stated in-film, so giving the footage a hand-wave), what is to say that the use of a nuke isn't what allowed Godzilla to survive it? Perhaps the radiation was sufficient that it allowed him to live/healed his wounds, whatever.
Ergo, by using a nuke (unnecessarily) that is possibly actually smaller than the last one used to try and kill him, in close proximity to a MASSIVE city, they were being irresponsible and stupid. Throw in the fact that it may have something to do with using a large radiation-producing weapon to kill a radiation-eating monster that allowed Godzilla to survive last time, and I'm seeing serious plotholes.
Next: we only know that nukes in the past had not killed Godzilla. We have no idea what it takes to kill a MUTO, and at the very least should have been TRYING less self-devastating and likely just as effective weapons FIRST on the MUTOs, where possible. Where are the bunker-buster bombs? Where are the Massive Ordnance Penetrators, or Massive Ordnance Air Blast bombs? Where are the Tomahawk cruise missiles? The experimental railguns (okay, those might be difficult to bring into play in the time available, but whatever).
Seriously, the female had to walk from Las Vegas to San Fran - that's an hour and a half journey BY PLANE, and an almost TEN HOUR journey by car. Let's assume the female is slower than a plane, but faster than a car, so give i six hours to travel. That leaves plenty of time to drop all sorts of ordnance on the female MUTO to try and find something non-nuclear that worked, and I'm pretty confident that modern nuke-alternatives would have done serious damage to the MUTOs (and probably Godzilla), at the very least given sufficient repetition of attack. Instead of, you know, nuking a major city (and failing miserably) as a
starting point.
That's the crux of my issues here. I KNOW it has to be nukes, because it's a Godzilla film. I don't mind that. But even so the logical part of my brain *screams* at the horrifying disregard for alternatives, for some semblance of real-world military hardware even being *attempted* to start with.
And heck, I kind of even know why it would be *worse* to put other stuff in the film - modern military weapons would, in reality, probably rip Godzilla to shreds. If nukes can, theoretically, kill him, or the MUTOs, then so would a lot of other things in use today. Simple.
It's part of why I liked Pacific Rim, and Evangelion - those movies actually at least made it obvious that everything else *had* been tried. We haven't seen Godzilla since the 50's, and we're going straight for top-end nukes? C'mon...