Godzilla: King of the Monsters (Spoilers)
One of my favorite things in all the world is Godzilla, whether he’s the dark horror of nuclear war or the campy, kung-fu Power Ranger of the mid 60s/early 70s. Even the TriStar nastiness in all its utter stupidity as merit (one, just one: the teaser trailer). (Except for the recent anime. I can’t stand those, which makes me sad.)
So of course my wife and I went to go see Godzilla King of the Monsters this weekend.
Caution, There Be Spoilers Here.
Context
The newest movie is the third installment in Legendary’s MonsterVerse, starting with 2014’s Godzilla, and followed up by Kong: Skull Island. Let’s be clear, I love every one of these movies, but only one of them is anything in any possible way considered good, and it isn’t one of the two Godzilla movies.
Good
Cinematography and Sound Design
All of these movies have great cinematography and sound design. Like GREAT. The subtle reinventions of Godzilla’s roar, the use of the original theme songs in the audio cues when a particular monster comes on stage (and playing around with those cues, shifting them from major to minor and vice versa) REALLY works.
Kaiju Looking Like Kaiju
Yeah, the current American version of Godzilla gets fat-shamed a bit, but the design philosophy was that it should look like it could be a guy in a suit, and honestly, the current version is my favorite in terms of character design. A lot of the special effects from yesteryear look damn goofy, partially because of technology, but also because of how the movie-going audience has changed, taste-wise. But King Kong, Ghidorah, Mothra, Rodan, and Godzilla look pretty badass in the Legendary movies.
Great Actors
I will pretty much watch anything with Ken Watanabe and Zhang Ziyi in it, and add onto that a host of other great acting talent who work their damnedest with some pretty outlandish dialogue. However, that leads to the next point:
Bad
Writing — Especially the Humans
The only movie in the Legendary series that gets the writing right is King Kong: Skull Island. Setting the movie as a Heart of Darkness story proved to be an excellent decision. By comparison, the two Godzilla movies have barely-there characterization (although the 2014 movie does a fairly good job overall). I don’t really give a damn about the human characters in King of the Monsters. Dr. Ishirō Serizawa and Dr. Vivienne Graham (played by Ken Watanabe and Sally Hawkins) come in from the 2014 movie, but both are underutilized in both movies and Dr. Graham is killed off in the first act because she spent some time saving the boring as hell protagonist. (To be fair to Kyle Chandler, he does his best with the caricature he was given.) We get a bunch of new characters, but most are window dressing—named extras that mostly somehow don’t die when everyone else around them is getting smashed, incinerated, or otherwise dead. Some of the new characters, such as Zhang Ziyi’s two portrayals, could have been super cool, but are left unfinished.
Internal Logic
It’s a kaiju movie, it doesn’t have to make sense, and I’m totally with you there. However, it must make internal sense. In 2014, Godzilla fights the two MUTOs and kills them, destroying Honolulu and San Francisco in the process. Now, it turns out all he needed to do was establish dominance? There’s even a MUTO female at the end of the movie bowing down to him.
King of the Monsters had another issue that was a big annoyance for me in the 2014 movie. In both movies, we are given a specific timeline for the detonation of a nuclear device (an actual bomb designed to lure the kaiju away from San Francisco in the first movie, and Godzilla himself in the second). We receive the timeline, and then we ignore all of the timeline. They say that Godzilla is generating so much nuclear energy he will explode like a bomb in 12 minutes. THEN, they go into the heart of the fight zone to get MilqueToast’s kid and the tech gizmo that is responsible for all of this bullshit, called the Orca, because whales don’t have it rough enough as it is. I’m sorry, 12 minutes is barely enough time to get everyone out of the blast zone, let alone go in, search around, get stepped on a bunch, run away, search some more, get more stepping, and then wait for evac.
Dr. Ishirō Serizawa died for these people? SIGH.
Verdict
I had fun. But let’s be honest, the genre has become mainstream, and we should be doing better. There is zero reason we can’t have a good script and good giant monster fights. Kong: Skull Island showed that we can, although that movie is not perfect: see the stupid, but cool samurai gas mask scene, or the horrible cruelty of Steve Woodward’s death vis a vis razor-beaked pteradons (which was also done in Jurassic World with similar distastefulness).