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Long gone is the muddied politics and visual poetry of Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla, which found the titular kaiju providing salvation from humanity as a by-product of his own biological imperative to be alpha over all others. He wasn’t the benevolent protector of humanity as he became in many of Toho’s weirder sequels, but far closer to irradiated rage and psychological scars of the first film. Humanity was dwarfed an impotent to provide help in his presence, and we were mere ants in his battle with MUTOs. Humanity was collateral damage in their warfare.
Godzilla: King of the Monsters is more in-line with the weird, kooky, colorful stuff that Toho did to the franchise throughout the 60s and 70s. It’s big, it’s dumb, it’s a ton of fun. Just don’t think too deeply about many of the story beats or images on display, such as a character clearly inhaling a tremendous amount of debris or the ability of several characters to shrug off a radioactive blast and keep moving.
Of course, with a subtitle like King of the Monsters, I doubt a subversion take on the material was what anyone going into it was expecting. Consider my expectations matched as Godzilla battles with/against Mothra, Rodan, and King Ghidorah repeatedly in scenes of CGI overload and ludicrous physics. Who knew such towering beasts could move so limberly or bounce back so quickly?
No matter, I’m probably giving this too much thought. There’s a grand scale to these fight scenes that makes Godzilla: King of the Monsters one of the more visually comprehensible and borderline nihilistic summer blockbusters to come out in a while. We can be told that Godzilla is inherently a benevolent protector of humanity and the Earth’s ecology, but he sure does lay waste to the city with an ease and uncaring that seems to underscore the mythology of the character a near-deist entity.
It is when we focus in on these interesting world-building sequences and scenes of primal carnage and rage that everything works in sublime popcorn entertainment concert. It’s a damn shame that so much of the movie is preoccupied with petty family drama that just isn’t very interesting. There’s Kyle Chandler, Vera Farminga, and Millie Bobby Brown as the broken family with Brown stuck between the ideologies of her two parents and used as an unintentional pawn. Godzilla’s destruction of San Francisco killed their other child in a bit of a retcon to the previous film, causing Chandler to go into hiding with his research, Farminga to become something of an eco-terrorist hellbent on releasing these creatures to cleanse the planet, and Brown stuck in-between.
That’s some thin stuff to propel 132 minutes. Farminga is the villain of the piece, but she’s not a very interesting one. No sooner has she released Mothra, Rodan, and Ghidorah than she’s blinking at her own attacks and ideology. If she can’t convince us of the justice of her plan, then she’s not a villain worth investing in. Her eventually redemption is more perfunctory than satisfying as is her reunion with Chandler. We know these beats are coming, and they’re just kinda there because they must be.
Everyone involved in more concerned with the glorious spectacle, as they should be. If you’re not going to commit to your “kaiju as gigantic, lumbering metaphor” or “kaijus are actually eldritch horrors and pagan deities,” then just invest fully in their scenes of ever-escalating destruction. Bring on Godzilla vs Kong, coming in 2020. I’m primed for more mindless kaiju-versus-kaiju fun.
