Godzilla: King of the Monsters delivers on colossal action — shame about everything else
Hollywood may never make a Godzilla movie as good as Gareth Edwards’ 2014 reboot.
The British filmmaker, fresh from his acclaimed micro-budget debut Monsters, had a clear instinct for how to bring the iconic kaiju to life. The whole film is in service of conveying the sheer scale of its ancient star, the awe he inspires and the power of what he’s capable of.
The first entry in what is now Legendary and Warner Bros’ MonsterVerse is restrained too. The decision to hold back on showing monster-on-monster action until the final act made that thrilling climatic battle all the more of a rush.
Anyone who was left wanting for monolithic violence however, have had their wishes answered by Godzilla: King of the Monsters. From the off there are plenty of titan tussles. The problem is that these scenes are the only parts of this long-awaited sequel that don’t disappoint.
Another criticism often leveled at the 2014 film is that Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s lead is bland and charmless. He is. He is, because Edwards and writer Max Borenstein understood that Godzilla movies shouldn’t waste too much time on their human characters. Tickets to see these films are sold on the promise of ridiculous, unfathomably large monsters pummeling the shit out of each other - not deep character work.
This doesn’t mean there shouldn’t have been more to Ford (yes, that is his name) but what’s worse is the decision King of the Monsters takes to shift to having far too many characters instead.
The plot here involves Vera Farmiga’s character creating a device that allows humans to communicate in a very basic way with the Titans they’ve found around the world. That device ends up in the hands of people wanting to create global monster carnage, and you can probably guess what happens next.
That sounds simple enough on paper. It is not in practice.
This all plays out with a bumper cast. There’s enough to Millie Bobby Brown and Kyle Chandler’s leads that they might have worked, but supporting them is a network of bit characters that serve no purpose other than to spit exposition and wheel out one-liners that land with the subtlety of Godzilla’s size 10,000,000,000 feet.
King of the Monsters gives its humans too much focus, but also gives them too much input in the how the story pans out. Humans in Godzilla movies shouldn’t be much more than bystanders - witnesses to the chaos and helpless despite their best noble and not-so-noble efforts. They should attempt to control things, but those attempts should be largely futile.
As Ken Watanabe’s Dr. Serizawa put it in the 2014 film: “The arrogance of man is thinking nature is in their control, not the other way around.” The sequel goes back on that, and it’s a mistake.
It’s not the biggest mistake the film makes however.
[Spoilers follow — but I’ve kept the language as vague as possible]
At the end of the film’s second act, the film commits what feels like a cardinal sin for this franchise, when the humans successfully use nuclear weapons as a solution to a problem.
As most people know, the original Toho films were a way for Japanese filmmakers to address the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki when they couldn’t do so directly. As the success of those films made clear, it was also a way for Japan to process the horrors of those fateful attacks.
While nuclear energy has lead to solutions in these films before, notably to power Godzilla up, I don’t believe this has been done deliberately on the part of the human characters before. The scene is given an interesting, character-based context, but one that can’t escape the fact this is an American film made with American money.
This is an American Godzilla film in which people use nuclear weapons to positive ends, and that feels wholly inappropriate.
[End of spoilers]
It’s a misstep amid many, in a film that’s the hyperactive sibling to a tense and masterful predecessor.
There are cool story beats that gleefully glean some of the most ridiculous and memorable aspects of the franchise’s history, but ultimately the human side of the story is too overbearing.
It’s a shame, because when the attention turns to the action those scenes are a blast and lovely to look at. A major central set piece revolving around the emergence of the volcano-dwelling Rodan is so good, it could end up being one of the best action scenes of the year.
On their own the scenes people have actually paid to see work well, and they look gorgeous — evoking the best of Edwards’ film. The problem is that the narrative weaving these scenes together is convoluted and overwrought, and the script conveying it is colossally stupid. Even the best intentions of its talented cast can’t overcome the turgid dialogue.
So the Godzilla film with great action but not much of it is brilliant, but the follow-up with great action and lots more of it is rubbish. How does that work?
Godzilla 2014 did more with less. It was perceived to have a greater focus on the shallow characters that featured heavily in the scenes in between the eardrum-rumbling scraps. But the focus isn’t on those characters, they’re just present as the film moves its pieces into position.
We learn next to nothing about Ford and his family, but we do see how the Mutos work, learn the role each Titan has in proceedings, see the ground-level effects they have on Hawaii, and find out about the desperate and foolish plan the military has put together to solve the problem at hand.
The intention is to give audiences a better understanding of the scale and destruction about to unfold. Seeing what happens when these monsters are around from a human perspective lends a greater context to the grander, wider shots of city-wide destruction.
In King of the Monsters, the scenes between the action distract rather than compliment, and unfortunately that action just can’t make up for how turgid everything else in the film is.
