Godzilla: King of the Monsters
2 stars
Director: Michael Dougherty
Starring: Kyle Chandler, Vera Farmiga, Millie Bobby Brown, Ken Watanabe, Ziyi Zhang, Sally Hawkins, Charles Dance
Duration: 131 mins
Class: 12A
KRS Releasing Ltd
The monster Godzilla has been a fixture of pop culture since first appearing in Japanese film writer and director Ishirō Honda’s 1954 eponymous film.
A terrifying and lethal prehistoric sea monster awakened and empowered by nuclear radiation, the character has now become a mainstay of pop culture entertainment. Over the 65-odd years since its birth, Godzilla has appeared in many Japanese and Hollywood films, books and video games. It is back in this latest Hollywood iteration, the third film in the so-called ‘Monsterverse’ (starting with 2014’s Godzilla and followed by 2017’s Kong: Skull Island. Yes, that Kong… and the two are scheduled to have a monster showdown in 2020 with the unimaginatively titled Godzilla vs Kong…)
Godzilla: King of the Monsters pits the assorted scientists and soldiers of Monarch – the secret government crypto-zoological agency tasked with studying the creatures – against a plethora of gargantuan monsters.
These monsters are ancient species that rise again from the darkest depths to wreak havoc on all mankind.
The monstrous menagerie includes Godzilla itself, and newbies Mothra, Rodan, and the supremely powerful three-headed Ghidorah. As the members of Monarch prepare for the ultimate battle to save mankind, they begin to suspect that the monsters’ intentions may not be merely blind destruction but something more intelligent – and ultimately necessary.
A mess of a movie
From its opening scenes to the final showdown between the two behemoths, Godzilla: King of the Monsters is a mess of a movie. It starts with the discovery that many of these monsters have lain dormant in oceans’ depths around the world, then a device that communicates with the monsters is introduced, and then there’s the ultimate theory that Godzilla may actually be causing the destruction purposely to balance the forces of nature (a theme visited with much more success, nuance and believability in the final two Avengers’ movies).
It’s a disjointed and poorly-written plot, hurried and incoherent and exacerbated by the deafening cacophony of the action scenes that come at the audience thick and fast.
It is structured on scene after scene of the various monsters duking it out with one another as deserts and volcanos erupt and cities are flattened. There are aerial fights, car chases and underwater collisions. Oh, and there is a giant, glowing moth-like creature…
Not that any of this is badly done. With the technology available nowadays, it is rare to have sub-standard CG effects in a film like this. Fans of the monsters will have a ball but it doesn’t disguise the lack of coherent plot narrative or engaging character development that many audiences may expect.
Speaking of characters, the extensive ensemble for the most part faff around exchanging dialogue that is peppered with pseudo-scientific mumbo jumbo. The extensive cast of familiar faces feels like a throwback to the disaster movies so prevalent in the 1970s – à la The Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure. Naff those films may have been, but at least the cast of characters in them were given a chance to leave some emotional impact. No such luck here.
They all do their best, yet they have little meat to chew on from the script by director Michael Dougherty, which he co-wrote with Zach Shields. Kyle Chandler, Vera Farmiga, and Stranger Things’ Millie Bobby Brown (probably the best thing in the movie) play a family torn apart by the events around them.
Bradley Whitford does his usual quippy thing, Sally Hawkins is completely wasted – before disappearing, Charles Dance does the British baddy piece, and Ken Watanabe as Dr Ishiro Serizawa and Zhang Ziyi as Dr Ilene Chen respectively seem to be there to do little more than add international flavour.
That first Godzilla film – actual title Gojira – has become a cult classic, not because of its depiction of the creature and its destructive nature, but more importantly for its bleak and powerful message about the tragedy of nuclear war – this was less than a decade after the cataclysmic events of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Somewhat predictably, that message has been diluted over the decades – to the point that here, the use of nuclear weapons is celebrated as a good thing, with nary a hint of subtlety or solemnity about their repercussions.
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