Years matter sometimes. Take Godzilla: King of the Monsters. In the 1940s, this movie would have been AMAZING. But we’re running on over 60 years at least of monster movies now. We’ve seen Cabin in the Woods. We’ve seen King Kong. We’ve even seen an updated Godzilla recently. King of the Monsters takes a 1940s plot and sticks it into a 2019 film. As you can imagine, the results are pretty um, meh unless a 3 headed hurricane hydra is battling a blue lizard.
What is a 1940s plot? Introduce a bunch of random people with one character beat and have them eventually connect through Godzilla’s reemergence. We’ve got Dr. Emma Russell (Vera Farmiga) and her daughter Madison (Millie Bobby Brown), who’ve developed a way to talk to the “titans” who’ve been reappearing on Earth. They get captured by Eco Terrorist Jonah Alan (Charles Dance) who wants to “restore past balance” to the planet. This freaks out Madison’s estranged father Mark (Kyle Chandler), who tries to get his son back through the mysterious Monarch organization run by doctors Ishiro Serizawa (Ken Watanabe), Ilene Chen (Ziyi Zhang), Rick Stanton (Bradley Whitford) and Vivienne Graham (Sally Hawkins).
The monster combat is the highlight of Godzilla, as expected. Most of the creative goodwill of King of the Monsters actually went to the look of the 3 biggest monsters (though the movie mentions 17+ monsters, we really only spend a lot of time with 4). Obviously Godzilla looks great; the movie gives him a grey base with lots of color shading depending on the situation. Mothra was a stunning creation: a giant caterpillar/butterfly creation that radiates light and color, a nice contract with Godzilla and Rodan. Rodan is by far the highlight of the movie though. It’s birthed from a volcano and appears as a 3 headed hydra crossed with a red dragon that travels via tropical storm. When the 3 beasts (along with a generic 4th pterodactyl looking creature) clash, I found myself becoming a kid again like all the people in the theatre, awed by what I was watching and rooting for more.
Look, I know that most people aren’t going to a Godzilla movie to hear human characters banter back and forth. But a great monster movie uses them to highlight some greater point of the times. In the past, the original Godzilla movies were warnings about nuclear proliferation. More modern Godzilla movies from overseas focused on how bureaucracy is unprepared for disasters. The King of Monsters goes down a bunch of rabbit holes (godlike control, government bureaucracy, interspecies coexistence) that dilute each other to the point that they don’t say anything meaningful in any way, relying on the talented cast to give weight to the nonsense. The dumbest, unintentionally funniest example is Vera Farmiga trying desperately to convince everyone what she’s doing makes sense, but every character points out the holes in her (read: the movie’s) plotting. Everyone here looks bored, except Bradley Whitford and Ken Watanabe, who amp the hell out of their characters. What’s most frustrating is there’s only a couple short fights until the third act of the movie, so we’re spending all this time with dumb characters that the movie doesn’t give a crap about, waiting until Rodan and Godzilla have their big showdown.
It’s clear that Legendary pictures wants to tie all its creatures into an Avengers like universe, leading to the heavyweight bout of Kong vs. Godzilla. The hardest part is over: I think most people are into giant creatures fighting other giant creatures. Now you just need to spend more than 5 minutes developing your humanity plot and characters, instead of hyping me all up to see Ziyi Zhang in a movie and waste her. How DARE you!