Godzilla - King of the Monster Movies
It’s pretty damn good
Ok so going in the movie, Mr. Mustang told me the rotten tomato ratings at that time (Friday, May 31st) was hovering slightly above 40% so already I was prepared to see a terrible monster movie. Leaving the theater, I wanted to hunt down every single critic who gave this flick a horrible review and tell them they are wrong. Sure the plot was simple and the writing was bland at times, it seems people forgot that they were watching a monster movie. Why do people put nostalgia films like Godzilla on such a high standard yet shrug their shoulders when they don’t give the same criticism towards a Transformer movie.
** Light Spoilers **
Right off the bat in the first 5 minutes, the movie gets pretty dumb pretty fast but that’s ok and I don’t mind that. When a movie has dialogue and characters this dumb so early in the movie, it tells the audience what the overall tone for the film will be and that’s perfectly fine because it’s honest with itself. What took me by surprise though was how many good actors were in this movie who clearly signed onto this project for the hefty paycheck. There is oscar nominee Vera Farmiga, Millie Bobby Brown who plays Eleven from Stranger Things, and Charles Dance who is now famously known as his performance of Tywin Lannister from Game of Thrones. All these people are fantastic actors but the director never really used their talents to their full potential and that’s a real shame - especially Charles Dance who plays the villain.
This is a direct sequel to the 2014 Godzilla movie and clearly the producers took note on the audiences complaints about the first movie, the two biggest being was having human characters we would actually care about and having more monster fight scenes. King of the Monsters took those two suggestions and multiplied it by 100. Instead of having cardboard cutouts of human characters from the 2014 film, we now have human characters with motivations and goals but now there are too many human characters with stupid goals. In the 2014 film, the audience got one fight scene with Godzilla versus the ‘MUTO’ where now in this movie we have...well, geez I lost count how many fight scenes there were, 12 maybe? 13? There were Certainly more than 2014 Godzilla and all of them were gold star fantastic.
What I didn’t like
I want to talk about the human characters first - even though they are miles better than generic army grunt husband and generic nurse wife with a stupid young son, I felt like the 2019 humans should of had more depth to them. Some of the side characters had some of the dumbest dialogue I have ever heard but there are some side characters that had the best dialogue but they didn’t stay in the movie for long.
The twists. It seems every movie now in our modern age has to have twists to keep the audience guessing but it’s not really a twist if you reveal it in the fucking trailer. The start of the movie shows a mother scientist and her teenage daughter working for the good guys but it’s quickly revealed that not all is what it seems - that may seem like a spoiler but if you watch any of the trailers, you witness one of the key ‘betrayal’ scenes with a sappy monologue montage which brings me to my next complaint.
The main character’s arc and motivation is dumb. Dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb. I don’t want to label her as a genocidal maniac but basically she is A-OK about letting millions if not billions of people die and bring the collapse of modern civilization just because ‘human be cray’. What annoys me the most is her reasoning - because she lost her son to Godzilla in the 2014 movie, she now wants more monsters like Godzilla to assist in reducing the human population...wat? I was confused to say the least but hey, at least she teamed up with Charles Dance so that’s neat.
What I Do Like
Monster fights. That’s about 90% of the movie honestly and all of it is glorious. It is impossible and down right boring to have 100% of a movie be fight scenes (see John Wick 3) so the film adds in human plot lines to give the audience something else to chew on but every Godzilla vs another monster was cool as shit. I was also impressed on the movie’s reasoning on why there were so many fight scenes because having Godzilla just randomly be the ‘good guy’ fighting for the humans seemed a little far fetched.
I love the wide variety of monsters the movie features in the film and the exposition about why each one is on the planet with their own goals and motivations. My favorite (like I imagine 90% of the audience) would be Mothra and every scene she’s in are unbelievably beautiful in every way.
The subtle nods and callbacks to the previous Godzilla movies (especially the 1954 film) are fantastic. There is a poetic scene that is a mirror image of a famous moment in the 1954 Godzilla but instead of someone sacrificing themselves to bring down a monster, this scene was used to revive one. There were so many hidden easter eggs that I don’t want to list them all but if you are a fan of the franchise like myself, it’s fun to go hunting to spot them all.
Overall
The first five minutes of the movie lets the audience know to throw reason and logic out the window and to just enjoy the movie. The science doesn’t make sense, the character motivations flip on a dime and the dramatic twists aren’t that twisty but the monster fights are what make this movie. In the end, think of it this way: when it comes to giant skyscrapper tall monsters fighting in heavily urban city landscapes - does it really matter what the ants on the ground are plotting? Do the ant’s goals and motivations really make a difference to the giant monsters fighting over who’s top chicken? No, in the end the giant monsters don’t give two shits about humans and that’s the point of the movie. After all the character’s scheming and plotting throughout the movie, it doesn’t affect the outcome of the final battle and I love that about the movie. We are all just ants in a larger world and all we can do is simply watch and enjoy the battle among the titans.
Will I see this movie again? Fuck yeah I will.
Grade: 8/10