Team Rodan checking in.
Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019): 9 out of 10: Godzilla: King of the Monsters is the direct sequel to 2014’s Godzilla, a film I have mixed feelings about. I hate the Godzilla scenes, but I also hate the scenes without Godzilla. This time around, the desperate attempt at creating a movie universe Monarch, is still tracking the existence of giant ancient creatures called Titans, humanity is still making very poor choices around things the size of skyscrapers, and Godzilla finds himself facing a new global threat when several of the world’s most famous monsters begin waking up.
And that is about all the plot synopsis you need. There are monsters. There are humans trying to explain the monsters. There are other humans trying to weaponise the monsters. There are several cities that probably wish they had better zoning regulations against monsters. Most importantly, there is Godzilla, and unlike the previous film, the camera is actually allowed to look at him.
The Good
Let us get the obvious thing out of the way first: Godzilla: King of the Monsters has monsters in it. I know this sounds like a fairly low bar for a movie called Godzilla: King of the Monsters, but after the 2014 film, I am not taking anything for granted. That movie treated Godzilla like a shy actor in a PG-rated erotic thriller. A wink here. A bit of tail there. Maybe a tasteful glimpse if the lighting were right. This film, by contrast, understands that when people buy a ticket to a Godzilla movie, they may in fact wish to see Godzilla.
It is not simply a matter of screen time either. You can make an excellent Godzilla film without wall-to-wall Godzilla. Godzilla Minus One barely has Godzilla in it, and honestly could probably have a little less Godzilla and still be fantastic. Shin Godzilla gives us endless scenes of Japanese bureaucracy and somehow makes that more compelling than most action sequences.
There are even some of the older Godzilla films where the absence of Godzilla is partly compensated for by sexy Japanese women in very strange outfits pretending to be aliens. So no, the problem with the 2014 film was not just “not enough Godzilla.” The problem was that when Godzilla did show up, the movie acted embarrassed to look at him, and when he was not around, the human material did not hold the screen.
King of the Monsters clearly heard that complaint and decided to answer it with a bullhorn, a nuclear warhead, and a three-headed space dragon.
The movie has Godzilla. It has Mothra. It has Rodan. It has Ghidorah. It has enough city destruction to make a property insurance adjuster fake his own death and move to the woods. Mexico gets it. Washington, D.C. gets it. Boston really gets it. Various underground labs and secret bases get it. There are monsters waking up, monsters fighting, monsters flying, monsters glowing, monsters screaming, monsters causing international incidents merely by existing. This is the kind of monster movie where the plot does not so much escalate as repeatedly throw another building into the air. And I appreciate that.
This is essentially a modern American attempt at those glorious old monster-rally Godzilla movies like Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster and Destroy All Monsters. Does it have the same weird charm as the older films? Not exactly. I would still have appreciated a few Japanese women in space-alien cocktail dresses turning up to explain that Ghidorah is from the stars. But the movie at least understands the appeal. It knows these monsters should feel mythic, ridiculous, apocalyptic, and fun all at once.
Mothra is particularly well-handled. Mothra is a hard creature to redesign because there is always the danger of making her either too cute or too insect-horror grotesque. Here she actually works. She feels elegant, strange, dangerous, and beautiful. That is a difficult balance, and the movie deserves credit for pulling it off.
Ghidorah is also excellent. The film wisely leans into the grandeur of the three-headed monster. He feels like an event. Every appearance has weight. The storm imagery around him is often terrific, and there is enough personality in the heads to keep him from simply being a large golden special effect. Also, the film makes the correct decision to suggest that Ghidorah is not just another Earth creature, because of course Ghidorah should be from space. I do not know why this is important, but it is. Some truths are eternal.
Rodan is a little more complicated, but when he works, he really works. His awakening in Mexico is one of the highlights of the film. The sequence where he flies over the city and causes destruction just by passing overhead is exactly the sort of thing I want from a Rodan scene. I could have used more of it. Frankly, I could use a new Rodan movie. Give me ninety minutes of this giant fire turkey ruining real estate values and I will be there opening weekend.
There is a wonderful moment during that Mexico sequence where the film focuses on two little street urchins as Rodan flies overhead. Two soldiers heroically grab them and save them from the wind and fire. This is very touching until you remember that we have just watched approximately five hundred other children get vaporized, crushed, or slammed into stone walls.
These two are apparently special because the camera has selected them for temporary survival. Then, of course, the camera moves on, Rodan circles back, and everything behind them seems to become fire again. There is absolutely no reason to believe they survive once the movie gets bored with them. It is an old disaster-movie trick: focus on one face, make the audience care, declare victory, and ignore the fact that the entire background is still being murdered. I do not know why, but that made me smile.
The human cast is better than in the previous film, which is not the highest compliment but is still progress. Millie Bobby Brown, Vera Farmiga, and Kyle Chandler are all fine as the central broken family around which the plot revolves. The film also has a strong early twist that genuinely works. I did not see it coming. Kyle did not see it coming. Mothra probably did not see it coming. In a movie this big and loud, it is nice to have at least one human story turn that actually lands.
Charles Dance is also here, and he is doing exactly what you think Charles Dance has been hired to do. It is basically his Game of Thrones mode with a slightly different wardrobe and more monsters. That is not a complaint. If your movie has a morally severe older man delivering cold lines about human extinction while monsters wreck civilization, you could do far worse than Charles Dance. He knows precisely what movie he is in, or at least what corner of the movie he is in, and he plays it beautifully.
Ken Watanabe is also back, and he continues to sputter nonsense. He is like the Alan Alda of Kaiju films at this point.
Godzilla: King of the Monsters is a roller coaster. Antarctica, Mexico, secret bases, monster labs, underwater ruins, Washington, Boston, and Godzilla’s underground bachelor pad. Yes, Godzilla apparently has a little condo under the Earth. I am not making this up. He has mood lighting and everything. It is absurd, but it is the correct kind of absurd.
The Bad
The biggest problem with King of the Monsters is that the human characters are all over the map. Some of them are in a serious disaster movie. Some of them are in a military thriller. Some of them are in a Spielberg-style family adventure. Some of them appear to have wandered in from a Marvel writers’ room where every moment of mass death needs a quip.
There are two snarky comic-relief characters in the main group, which is at least one too many and possibly two too many. One is the awkward younger guy (Thomas Middleditch) who seems to have some sort of thing for Vera Farmiga’s character, and none of that works. The other is Bradley Whitford, whom I normally like a great deal. He is excellent in The Cabin in the Woods, and here he is clearly being asked to do a variation on that same snarky observer routine. The issue is not that he cannot do it. He can. The issue is that Godzilla King of the Monsters is not a Joss Whedon film, while Cabin in the Woods literally is. (A version of his character in 2018’s Destroyer would have been perfect)
Yes, Godzilla is inherently silly. But it works better if the characters play it straight within the reality of the film. We are in the middle of Armageddon. Cities are being annihilated. Thousands, maybe millions, of people are dying. In that context, constant snark can feel less like comic relief and more like someone making TikToks during the holocaust.
The supporting cast also suffers from having just a little too much character. Everyone has a bit. Everyone has a quirk. Everyone has a line. Everyone has a function. After a while, you start wishing Godzilla would step on the screenplay and thin the herd a bit.
This is especially frustrating because the film does occasionally kill off or sacrifice characters well. There is a nameless pilot who ejects and gets gloriously eaten by Rodan, or possibly Ghidorah, and it is one of my favorite moments in the movie. That is how you do it. Quick, clean, ridiculous, memorable. More of that, please.
The late-film attempt at sacrificial redemption for one character also does not quite land. Without getting too specific, it is hard to accept something as a grand moral gesture when the person involved is arguably looking at something in the neighborhood of three hundred million murder charges. At that point, a heroic death may be less redemption and more skipping the trial.
The Ugly
Some of the monster designs are not perfect. Godzilla himself is a little too roided-up for my taste. This is not unique to this film. I have had issues with a number of modern Godzilla designs. Some of this is pure nostalgia. I love the 1960s Godzilla look, and part of me will always prefer that version. I understand that a modern blockbuster cannot simply put a man in a rubber suit and call it a day, though I would respect the courage if it did. Still, this Godzilla sometimes feels a little too bulked out, a little too much like he has been spending the off-season with a personal trainer and suspicious supplements.
Rodan, as mentioned, looks a bit too much like a turkey. A terrifying volcanic turkey, admittedly, but a turkey. He still gets some excellent material, and he makes it to the credits, so do not worry, children. But the design never completely won me over. (It kind of reminds me a little too much of that marionette in The Giant Claw)
The movie is also overstuffed. This is partly a flaw and partly the point. It wants to be a greatest-hits album of monster chaos, family trauma, ecological anxiety, secret organizations, ancient mythology, military operations, and kaiju smackdowns. That is a lot of movie, and not all of it can fit cleanly.
The environmental argument is also shaky. The film toys with the idea that humanity has caused the Titans to rise and that the monsters are somehow nature’s corrective force. This might have more weight if Godzilla did not apparently have an underground lair with ancient architecture and a tasteful bachelor-pad glow. If he has been relaxing in his secret Earth condo all this time, I am not entirely sure we can blame humanity for every Titan-related inconvenience.
There is also the unavoidable tonal weirdness of cheering for monster destruction while knowing, technically, that every collapsing building represents mass death. The movie wants us to thrill to the spectacle, and I did. I cheered for Rodan. I enjoyed Boston being turned into a kaiju wrestling mat. Yankee fans, trust me, there is material here for you. Much like disaster movies (or a lot of eighties slasher films) that disconnect is part of the genre.
Still, if your main complaint about a Godzilla movie is that it contains too much monster destruction, you may be in the wrong theater.
In Conclusion
Godzilla: King of the Monsters is not the best Godzilla film. It is not as sharp as Shin Godzilla, and it is nowhere near as moving or as satisfying as Godzilla Minus One. Those are better films by a significant margin.
But Godzilla: King of the Monsters is a lot of fun.
More importantly, it is an answer to almost every complaint I had about the 2014 film. You wanted more Godzilla? Here he is. You wanted actual classic monsters instead of weird bat MUTOs doing Wonder Twins powers activate? Here are Mothra, Rodan, and Ghidorah. You wanted the camera to stop cutting away from the good stuff? Here are monsters fighting in full view with good lighting (Well dark rainy good lighting mostly but still entire monster in focus). You wanted city destruction? Please select from our international buffet.
The human material is messy, the comic relief is overdone, and several characters needed to be eaten. But the movie understands the assignment in a way its predecessor did not. It gives us giant monsters, apocalyptic stakes, beautiful destruction, and Charles Dance acting as if the end of the world is merely a disappointing board meeting.
Recommended for Godzilla fans, action fans, people who enjoy buildings exploding, and Yankee fans who have always wanted to see Boston receive a proper cinematic adjustment.
