Movie Review: Godzilla - King of the Monsters

Godzilla: King of the Monsters [2019]

A bit of a shorter review compared to my usual movie review fare, but I watched this movie over the weekend and, well... it's pretty fun, although I can definitely see why the critics absolutely savaged this movie. It's the sequel to 2014's well-received Godzilla movie, and set in the same continuity as Kong: Skull Island, as part of Universal's Kaiju movie series. 

And... and it's honestly quite a neat little feat that they managed to essentially introduce three of Toho's more famous Kaiju from the Godzilla series -- Ghidorah, Rodan and Mothra -- and make them feel relatively well integrated to the established mythology of the established universe. I won't delve too much into breaking down the movie, but it's pretty neat that they use the established "Titan"-monitoring organization Monarch as a shorthand to release multiple monsters into the world. The movie is also amazing from a visual and musical standpoint. The score is on point, and even moreso than its two predecessors, the Titans genuinely feel like walking natural disasters. The literal storm that Ghidorah brings around him as he shoots out lightning, or that one scene of Rodan leisurely gliding down a volcano and wiping out a town in his wake... all pretty badass. The fact that all the monsters got their time to shine is also a huge plus. The fight between Godzilla and Ghidorah in the Antarctic, that horror show when Godzilla nears the Monarch base, Rodan slaughtering the human jets, Rodan's short smackdown against Ghidorah, Ghidorah summoning a bunch of random Kaiju we get to see in a fast montage (that spider-squid thing is awesome... is he Kumonga?), and of course, the final battle in the city. 

The music and score is also pretty great, particularly the integration of Godzilla's old theme combined with a chanting choir. That's awesome. 

And I could go on and on and talk about how well-done the integration of the monsters are, and how while it is still a movie about Godzilla fighting King Ghidorah, the other two monsters still feel like they have a huge point to them, y'know? Rodan, as a threat Monarch has to deal with at the middle point, ends up fighting Ghidorah to establish that the Titans can and will fight for dominance, and is also the first to bow down to the big dragon and later on fight alongside it as its minion. Mothra perhaps got the rawest deal, and the movie uses her coccoon to essentially forget about her throughout the movie, and then after breaking free she sort of disappears and reappears depending on what the movie needs, but she does get to take down Rodan all on her own. That last scene where she has a last stand and essentially use her energy to power up Godzilla is perhaps a bit iffy, though. 

And... and a huge complaint about this movie is that it's so damn long, because there's so much going on with it. I felt particularly fatigued when we went through the whole submarine scene to reactivate Godzilla, and I really wished the pacing was a bit tighter on that front. There are many times in the movie where the plot hinges on "okay, we have to wait for this to activate that", and there are definitely some non-Kaiju-related action scenes that felt kind of redundant. And as much as I unabashedly love the very Japanese moments of Godzilla getting "powered up" and entering a Burning Godzilla form, he went through a power-up twice in the movie, first with the nuke and later on with Mothra's sacrifice, and I really wished they could've integrated the two into a single scene. 

I also do feel like the human drama in this movie, while well-acted, felt... rushed? The movie is already long as it is, and adding even more to it will bloat it up even further, but let me tell you that I really, really did not give a shit about the Russell family drama. Kyle Chandler plays Mark Russell, and Vera Faminga plays Emma Russell, and... and Emma's character in particular is a bit of a mess, due to genuinely confusing motivations, and very, very fast heel-face-turns that felt telegraphed too badly and pretty poorly executed. Stranger Things' Millie Bobby Brown play their daughter Madison, but she really sort of alternates between being just a scared little girl and being bizarrely competent for a little girl. And while the focus on the plot device being the ORCA, a Titan-communicating device invented by the Russells is pretty interesting, the fact that you can essentially turn supposedly-intelligent monsters like Ghidorah and distract them with a worldwide dog whistle is honestly not something I would really care for, especially all the way to the finale. 

Also, Charles Dance plays an eco-terrorist leader that Emma comissions to help her release the Titans to purify the world, but he's sort of pointless and quite literally disappears halfway through the movie. Serizawa, played by Ken Watanabe, is the holdover from the 2014 movie and essentially acts as the 'big good', and gets a heroic sacrifice, but the rest of the human cast are... there. There's a badass reasonable colonel lady, there's a scientist lady and a happy bearded scientist and an older scientist, and they all sort of fall into the same ball of "you do your job as background characters well but you're redundant".

The main motivation of Emma (before she goes into a huge "oh shit I've fucked up" bit) and Charles Dance's character is that they view humanity as being too destructive towards Earth's well-being, and releasing the mosnters to 'control' the human population will bring it back to balance, but... y'know, it's really hard to sympathize with them at all since they sort of unleash giant lizards to literally wipe towns off of the planet. The random inclusion of the fact that apparently the Kaiju will cause plants to grow after they rampaged felt like a bit of a shoehorned little detail that is just there to make Serizawa's fanatical insistence that there is good in the Kaijus' existence in the natural order make sense... and I honestly feel like we could've had more about this, y'know? About how humans had coexisted with Kaiju like Mothra and Kong in the past? Maybe they defened Earth against aliens like Ghidorah? I dunno, I feel like we could've had a better thematic thing going on with the 'good' monsters being actually good and protective of mankind or Earth, instead of a vague shrug that "they make plants grow behind them". 

It's like... it's kind of weird, where the movie wants to really craft this awe-inspiring mythology that these Titans, the likes of Godzilla and Ghidorah, are revered and viewed as gods and the originator of myths, with different characters noting that they might be Earth's "antibodies" to destructive species like humans, but at the same time they're also easily distracted with a small noise-making laptop? Sure, communicating with Mothra is one thing, and using it to rile up the other monsters is neat, but the fact that it was so relevant in the climax sort of irked me. 

There are also a couple of other facts that felt sort of randomly shoehorned in, and I love them because they're sort of callbacks to the source material. Like the Oxygen Destroyer, or the fact that Ghidorah comes from space as an 'invasive species', or Mothra turning out to be a protector of mankind or whatever, but for the casual movie goer these are just sort of plot twists that came out of nowhere and they have to roll with it because GIANT MONSTER MOVIE. It's not as bad as some of the logic hoops that your post-2007 Transformers movie asks you to jump through, but it's still there. The movie was trying to do too much, but it's clear that the directors recognize the main focus should be on the monsters fighting each other, so everything else feels pretty superficial.

Still, despite my complaints about this movie, it is still a genuinely awesome movie to experience. The continuity is pretty tight with the movies in its continuity, the take on the Kaijus are faithful to the original work while still taking its own spin on them, and despite everything else that it has going on against it, the action scenes are awesome. I didn't think I would be able to take a three-headed dragon shooting lightning out of its wings fighting against a giant nuclear-breathing fat dinosaur seriously, but here we are. Sure, the human drama is not as strong as it could've been, but honestly, I really had wished the writers had simplified the human parts a lot and focused more on the monsters. Maybe instead of the Russell family drama, have the movie's emotional point be more about Serizawa's relationship with Godzilla, or one of the main characters (Madison?) befriending baby Mothra? Or something? Still a pretty badass visual spectacle nonetheless, though, and definitely something that's caused me to be bitten by the Kaiju bug once more. Maybe we'll do a bunch of Godzilla-related movie reviews somewhere down the line. I don't know.