Godzilla: King of the Monsters

The 2014 Godzilla film directed by Gareth Edwards was certainly a divisive film. Being a separate universe to the films created by Toho and acting as a redemption for the universally hated 1998 American film, it seemed to win people over with its visuals, build-up, and climatic final display of kaiju action, but everybody agreed that the story, characters, and writing were not up to standard and left the film feeling pretty uneven. Even with this shaky reception, its success at the box office meant that Legendary could enact their plans of creating a cinematic universe for the Godzilla-verse, with the 2017 film Kong: Skull Island, acting as the origins for the titular King Kong, and even providing Godzilla a follow-up sequel in 2019 titled, Godzilla: King of the Monsters.

Five years after the events of the first film, the world debates whether to exterminate the titans after Godzilla caused mass destruction during his battle in San Francisco, with Dr. Ishirō Serizawa (played again by Ken Watanabe) being one of the few advocating for their survival. On the other side of the world, Dr. Emma Russell (played by Vera Farmiga) has discovered a new dormant titan named Mothra but is unable to study her further as she and her daughter Madison (played by Millie Bobby Brown) are abducted by eco-terrorist Colonel Alan Jonah (played by Charles Dance). Madison’s father, Mark (played by Kyle Chandler) learns of their capture and decides to work with Serizawa and the rest of his team including mythologist Dr.  Ilene Chen (played by Zhang Ziyi) to track them down but discovers upon arriving that Emma has sided with Jonah, believing that the titans will heal the damage that humans have caused to the earth if allowed to roam free. This hypothesis is dashed pretty quickly once they summon an alien-titan creature known as King Ghidorah, which severely wounds Godzilla and causes all the other titans to rise and attack various parts of the Earth. With their one line of defence out of commission and clearly being outclassed by this godly display of primal power, what other options do humanity have to defend against this colossal ancient threat?

Receiving a similarly mixed reception as the first film, yet failing to replicate the same commercial success, Godzilla: King of the Monsters feels jarringly similar to its predecessor in both pros and cons, which leaves audiences with a feature that while inoffensive, also proves to be rather unmemorable and not deserving of such a bombastic title.

The problems with these movies don’t seem to be a case of misunderstanding or misrepresenting the source material, as it’s very clear that the people attached to this franchise really like and care about Godzilla and his universe. The fact that they wanted to shape it into a cinematic universe is ambitious (if a little repetitive of the current trend of movies nowadays), the various actor cameos allows obscure talent the chance to involve themselves with big-budgeted projects that’d usually be closed off to them, the amount of call-backs to older films (whether it’s a chosen monsters, an elaborate backstory or even a specific musical motif) feels specifically placed for only hard-core fans to recognize, the movie was even dedicated to executive producer Yoshimitsu Banno (who also directed the 1971 Japanese film, Godzilla vs. Hedorah) and original Godzilla suit performer, Haruo Nakajima, who both died in 2017, so there’s clearly a passion and love for this brand. The problem mainly comes down to execution, which is causing a bit of a divide in the fan-base. Despite failing with critics, audiences seem to still be entertained by these features, probably because they offer a specific kind of Hollywood destruction that isn’t as widely seen in the form of monster mayhem (with the closest being that of a comic book film). The movie was heavily criticized for its plot, characters, writing and tone, but was praised for its visuals, action and musical score (the exact same markings its predecessor received), but instead of realizing their failings and trying to remedy those qualities while holding onto what they got right, they resort to doubling down on the bombastic action and visuals, and further ignore the plot and characters in the hopes that nobody would notices.

It’s hard to find an easy fix to this issue as actively ignoring one element in favor of the other doesn’t solve things yet audiences have made it clear that they have no love for the human element of these films, so featuring them only seems to cause more problems. This indifference to its narrative means that it feel like watching a patch of fog whenever the film tries to plod along with its story, as nothing registers as engaging, any attempts at emotion or development are pretty laughable, and despite featuring aspects that feel similar to older Godzilla films, the seriousness with which they portray these themes doesn’t make it feel consistent with the rest of the film’s tone. Regardless, it’s not made better here and is doubly not helped out by its direction. Michael Dougherty has mainly worked on niche horror films like Urban Legends: Bloody Mary, Trick ‘r Treat and Krampus, with a few writing credits for Superman Returns and for a couple of the Fox X-Men films, and this paints a pretty clear picture as to why he wasn’t a great choice to lead this film. It feels oddly paced, tonally messy, contains a screenplay with very little attachment or investment (more than likely coming from fellow screenwriter, Zach Shields, and story writer, Max Borenstein, who’ve also only had minimal work outside of these MonsterVerse films), and offers very little in terms of freshness in order to help it stand out amongst other monster films.

The monsters are usually viewed as the most interesting characters in a Monster film, and while humans do need to be involved for these stories to work, it’s safe to say that people are more likely to recollect large stretches of scenes featuring the monsters but struggle to recite a single line of dialogue spoken by any human cast member. This film did recognize that people were angry at the lack of Godzilla in the previous film, so he’s not only featured in this movie a lot more and arrives much sooner, but he’s joined by other iconic monsters from his series, including Mothra, King Ghidorah and Rodan, so it certainly isn’t lacking in kaiju involvement. While they are featured more and are designed well in this new universe, none of them really exhibit any defining personalities traits outside of their powers, and that does limit how interesting they are to watch for long stretches of time. Godzilla has the benefit of several films building him up that he at least has some sort of identity, but the others really just feel like gigantic toys used to blow things up, which they do effectively but greatly limits their potential in a shared universe.

They’re at least more memorable than the human characters, with main characters so bland and forgettable that their names aren’t even worth putting to memory, a supporting cast packed with recognizable faces who do very little, and a villain and evil scheme so out of left field that it’s almost annoying how dumb they look when it backfires (surprisingly wanting to commit mass genocide through kaiju destruction is going to have some side effects and won’t result in world peace). The only people with any sort of investment are Ken Watanabe, who’s a holdover from the previous film and at least established a sense of connection with Godzilla, and Zhang Ziyi, who is given a bit of backstory tied to one of the other monsters which doesn’t get explored much but is at least intriguing. The movie that could’ve been offered if they ditched people like Kyle Chandler, Vera Farmiga, and Millie Bobby Brown (who feature in a familial plot that results in each of them looking either selfish or borderline psychotic) in exchange for these two and more focus on the villain (wasting a talent like Charles Dance is criminal) is far more tantalizing than what was actually delivered.

From a visual standpoint, the movie does offer more action and visual spectacle than the last film which relied more on build up and anticipation until the climax which, while working in theory, left a lot of people feeling unsatisfied, so it was another element that needed to be readjusted. For the most part, the action scenes are well done, as they have great scale, the clashes contain cool moves and moments that utilize the creature’s size, prehistoric-like designs and unique powers sets in a flashy manner, and due to the excessive amount of kaiju present in this story and the rampant global chaos, it feels dramatically upped in stakes and energy.

The effects are also relatively decent, as even if they’re not strong enough to look convincing or realistic, they look expressive and believable enough that it doesn’t just feel like watching digital code when they’re fighting. However, the camera work by Lawrence Sher and the overall visual clutter can sometimes make it hard to see what’s going on, especially with an ugly blue filter covering the screen for a good chunk of the running time. It’s almost ironic how over-saturated this film is in that specific color tone, as the previous film almost look devoid of color due to its stale greys and smoky atmosphere, so despite this sequel actively putting in more life and color, it chooses to focus so heavily on one specific tone that it starts a feel a little generic after a while (even the trailers and poster make it very clear how much they love blue). Once and a while, there’s a fairly well-lit and vibrant shot of the monsters fighting but most of the time, it’s not a very nice-looking movie.

Godzilla as a franchise clearly has potential given its past success as one, and even if the track record of this MonsterVerse has been mediocre at best and forgettable at worst, it deserves some credit for being one of the few recent attempts that didn’t immediately crash and burn. Godzilla: King of the Monsters will offer exactly what you’d expect out of this film, something that is perfectly watchable and a harmless waste of time but will quickly leave your memory and would be better suited to watch clips of rather than the entire thing. The characters leave zero impression, the story is a joke, the writing isn’t attempting to fix any of the mistakes, and even the monster fights have blemishes of fault within their otherwise decently handled instances. This isn’t a great movie by any means (it’s debatable whether or not it’s even good), but for what it sets out to achieve, it does it fine. While it may have shown off the King of the Monsters, it’s safe to say that this film will never be the King of anything.