Godzilla: King of the Monsters
Ten Second Review: I really can’t recommend spending any time or money to watch this film. Any stand out scene will be available on YouTube eventually and will be just as good without the context of the whole film!
Growing up I had a giant Godzilla puppet. It was a piece of merchandise from the 1998 film and I absolutely loved it. I vividly remember having it on my bed along with whatever plush toys were also important to me at the time. I thought the film was so cool, I thought Godzilla was so cool and I thought my puppet was so cool, and I wasn’t wrong. When I recently rewatched it I was struck by the fact that its not a particularly great film but it has a quality that I still really enjoy and a story that I actually think functions (even if it goes about as you might expect it). It makes for a decent rainy Sunday afternoon film if it happens to be on and it does what you expect for a creature feature from the 90s.
Godzilla: King of the Monsters picks up 5 years after the last film in the series. It starts by taking stock of the world political situation post these titans rearing their ugly, beautifully computer generated, heads. When I say “the world” what I mean is America as the film makes mention of other countries throughout without ever actually feeling like you’ve left the states. Some branches of government want to research the creatures and others want to blast them to oblivion; seems about standard for the human approach to new things. As more titans begin to wake form their millennia long slumbers, conflict starts brewing. If the human race is to survive, we will have to hope some of the titans are on our side.
What do you get when you put the scripts from every monster movie and creature feature from the past 70 years through a script writing bot? I’m not sure, but at least that film would have the selling point of a rather unique creative process. This film is a painfully formulaic and infuriatingly convoluted mish-mash of a mess of storylines and big ideas. There is a great saying that a camel is a horse designed by committee and this film is most certainly a painful victim of that. Unfortunately, whereas a camel manages to walk away at the end, this film barely limps to an increasingly tiresome conclusion that I have little doubt will have most viewers scoffing while checking their watches.
I will say that little to no blame can be placed on the acting. It is fair and the only times it can really be called into question you realise that you aren’t judging the actors but the script they were given. I think the cast as a whole puts in a good effort but I can only imagine that they knew how bad their lines were. I would love to know if Charles Dance ever turned to the director and said “You know I was in Game of Thrones? When I say things like “Long live the king” it looks like an oddly meta reference.” or if he turned up and took his cheque while internally smirking.
The CGI is admittedly great! It doesn’t always feel weighty, but for the most part it feels as though the actors are engaged in a real scene and these titans are going head to head as they destroy cityscape after cityscape. Watching the 1998 Godzilla and then seeing this really only serves to highlight two things; CGI has come a long way and CGI does not, on its own, make your film good.
The story starts off fairly manageable, but as it progresses the characters make increasingly random, moronic and uncalcutlated decisions that the film doesn’t seem to bother to try and explain. To really examine them here would be to spoil the whole thing, but if you choose, for some unbeknownst reason, to see this film, take a beat whenever the characters make a decision and really ask yourself why they did any of what they do. This is accompanied by a script that, as I have already mentioned, is painful to listen to. It’s one of those pictures where you can guess the next line for most of the film and you could write a synopsis before going to see it and come out pretty happy with yourself.
I really can’t suggest this film to anyone. It is neither good enough to be enjoyed on its own terms nor bad enough that it has to be seen. It is a distinctly mediocre film, with occasionally beautiful imagery, and consistently angering writing. While I don’t know you personally, I am sure you have better uses for your time and money. If you don’t, then please give that money to an endangered animal charity and spend a couple hours taking a walk in nature being thankful that titans don’t roam our Earth, and that people don’t talk as if they were reading out a mad-lib.
