Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) - Review Thread

I don't care. I loved it.

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Audience score at 90%

www.rottentomatoes.com/m/godzilla_king_of_the_monsters_2019

If you go buy Kong skull island on blu at Best buy or Walmart they are giving 8 bucks on Fandango towards this movie. The total cost is 8 bucks too so could just be a free lil Kong bonus.

What's the over/under on Jet Jaguar being in the third movie?

Just finished watching this.  Wow!  That was amazing.  That was amazingly amazing!  That was so amazingly amazing that I think I'd like to steal it!

I'm gonna save you the waiting on this one, Neverending.  I have no current plans to see this in theaters.

And from the box office numbers so far, neither do most of the people who went to see the last.

Godzilla: King of the Monsters(5/30/2019)

Me and Godzilla go way back. When I was a kid, I’m not sure what age range but probably before I was even ten, I would take every opportunity to watch the original Toho Godzilla movies when what was known at the time as The Sci-Fi Channel. I didn’t even really watch the 1954 original that much, it was mainly the many sequels from the 60s and 70s that I was watching (what I would later learn was called the Shōwa Era of the series). However, unlike other childhood obsessions like the Universal Monsters of the James Bond series I never really stuck to the Godzilla movies. Part of that is that the world was not still supplying me with new ones (it wasn’t until much later that I learned that they were still pretty regularly making these things in Japan without exporting them) and partly because, well… those movies are kind of hard to defend objectively. I watch old clips from some of them and I can pretty easily see why someone not nostalgically inclined towards them would just laugh at them, hell I do myself even if I still have some warmth for them. On some level my blinders towards the flaws in these movies even extend towards the questionable American remakes. As dumb as Roland Emmerich’s 1998 Godzilla movie is and as dull as elements of the 2014 reboot was it’s hard to complain about them with too much of a straight face once you’ve established affection for, say, a movie where Godzilla fights a robotic version of himself built by space gorillas alongside another monster brought to life by a lady singing a very long j-pop song. And it was with all this baggage that I arrived at the opening day of the sequel to that 2014 American Godzilla film: Godzilla: King of the Monsters.

This sequel is set at least five years after the evens of the 2014 Godzilla and eschews most of the cast from that movie. Here we follow the Russells, a family that was in San Francisco when Godzilla fought the two MUTOs and lost a son during that attack. Years later they’re split up. Mark Russell (Kyle Chandler) is now focused on his career as an animal behavioral expert while his ex-wife Emma Russell (Vera Farmiga) has begun working for an organization called Monarch, which studies other giant creatures called titans which have been discovered in the time since the first movie. As the film starts Russell is studying a giant larva which has just hatched and is using a device she has invented called the ORCA which is meant to communicate with these titans through subsonic frequencies. Right as she’s taming mothra her operation is attacked by a group of Eco-terrorists led by a guy named Alan Jonah (Charles Dance) who steal the ORCA and kidnap both Emma and her daughter Madison (Millie Bobby Brown). With the device lose and potentially able to wake up the wrong titans, Mark is brought in to help track the terrorists down and avert disaster.

Let’s get this out right away: this movie has a terrible script. More specifically it has terrible characters. The guy Kyle Chandler plays is just the worst kind of Hollywood “hero.” He has a murky background, his brashness is constantly rewarded by the script, and he seems to continually be allowed to be in the middle of things by authority figures despite not really having any qualifications besides the fact that he’s trying to save his daughter. His wife isn’t much better. There’s a shred of a good idea in making the villains environmentalist extremists who believe the titans should reign but the movie doesn’t develop the idea properly at all and their motivations ultimately just seem completely stupid. The dialogue isn’t much better; it mostly consists of rote exposition and while there aren’t many attempts at humor the ones they do try either fall flat or maybe elicit a small chuckle at best.

So, terrible movie, right? Well, not exactly. If there’s anything redeeming about this script it’s that the things that are bad about it are bad in a way that’s kind of generic and unobtrusive. You look at them, you know they’re bad, but they aren’t so groan-worthy that they completely distract from the rest of the action. In a way they almost in keeping with the lackluster human stories that were always there in those early Toho films and they also don’t take up nearly as much screen time as the only moderately superior human stuff from the 2014 movie. And that “rest of the action” in the movie was for the most part very strong. The main thing being added to the movie are additional kaiju including three of the most famous monsters from the franchise: Mothra, Rodan, and Ghidorah and each time one of them comes into the movie it’s an event to behold. Mothra is beautiful and has a pretty good theme behind it, while Rodan is ferocious and immediately leads the airforce on a thrilling chase sequence. Then of course there’s Ghidorah, who is a major fan favorite. Whenever this dude would show up in one of those old movies you knew you were in for a treat. He didn’t have much of a personality, but he was a really good design, you always knew when he was on screen that there were three Japanese dudes just off frame holding fishing poles to control the three heads in unison. Seeing that creature rendered on screen in 2019 with top of the line Hollywood effects is just kind of amazing and the movie makes the character properly intimidating.

So what we have with this movie is some of what I would consider very good action filmmaking that’s propping up a lousy script. I don’t think that’s an entirely bad thing; cinema isn’t literature, movies don’t entirely live and die by their writing. Of course that’s true about a lot of bad action movies, so why am I using these old “leave your brain at the door”/“They made it for the fans!” type of excuses for this one? Well, the joke response is that those other movies don’t have Ghidorah in them, but in some ways that is how I feel. I don’t think this is pure fanboyism either, I think the majesty of these kaiju and this history behind them does transcend some of the film’s more pedestrian shortcomings. Beyond that though I’d say part of it is an expectation game brought on by the early reviews. I get why those other critics were not impressed: the larger ambitions of the 2014 film combined with those trailers set to “Clair de Lune” and “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” promised something a lot more sophisticated than this and if I hadn’t been primed for lowered expectations by the film’s 39% Rotten Tomatoes score I would probably have been less inclined to focus on the positives as well. Also, I think critics today really demand silly movies like this kind of signal their intentions by telling a lot of jokes and sort of winking at the audience in ways that this movie doesn’t. I, however, am not always on board with that approach (see also my against the grain enjoyment of Man of Steel) and at this point generally find it refreshing when stupid movies take themselves very seriously. So really I get why this thing isn’t getting the strongest of reviews, it kind of deserves it, but if you’re the right kind of person there is plenty of fun to be had with it.

*** out of Five

While you guys argue over why this movie sucks or not. I'll stick to the amazing animated series from the 90's

www.syfy.com/syfywire/the-90s-godzilla-animated-series-was-way-better-than-you-remember