Godzilla: King of the Monsters
I am so fucking pissed. Godzilla: King of the Monsters is a turd. A shitty masturbatory Hollywood exercise trying to pass as a monster movie. It uses the name King of the Monsters, but barely proves that, and is pretty God damn stingy with these so-called monsters he supposedly lords over.
The grassfuckers in Hollywood say they love Godzilla, claim to be big fans. The producers probably even went out and bought vintage Gojira T-shirts on Melrose to prove it. But if they are fans, though, what the fuck are they fans of: all the boring talk between the actual battles? Murky shots to obscure cheap special effects? They sure as hell don’t seem like fans of monster battles or silliness.
This movie feels a helluva lot more like they’re big fans of melodramatic Hallmark horseshit, pinching pennies and whiny-ass characters so one-dimensional and generic. The movie has no fucking clue what it wants to say, but it sure says it a lot.
It’s like a guy who says he loves popcorn shrimp and thinks that to prove it he should take a dump in the steam tray at Golden Corral. This is no way to treat something you love. This is monster abuse. This is audience abuse. This movie is as toxic as fuck, whiny as all get out and sour as April cherries, but not in any interesting way.
In its opening scenes, a divorced dad (Kyle Chandler) is trying to get over the grief of losing his son in the great Godzilla attack of 2014 by taking photographing wolves in the forests of Colorado. We don’t have wolves in the wild here. If the asswipes who made this movie can’t even be bothered with that Google-able detail, what the fuck can they do right? Very little. It isn’t relevant to the story that he’s in Colorado, yet they tell us.
Note, none of the characters in this movie were in the 2014 one, even the movie starts with the assumption that they were heavily involved in that story. It’s really fucking weird when they keep referring to what happened in that movie.
The movie is completely and totally confused about what’s important about monster movies. It’s not people talking. And yet, it spends precious time having characters spout scientific mumbo-jumbo. The dialog veers from third-grade biology lessons to flat-out bullshit. Who the fuck knows why? This is a movie about giant monsters fighting. We don’t need justification, just say, “Oh, shit, there are monsters fighting!” Then put the camera on them.
We’re expected to relate to the grieving dad even though the sole emotion he expresses is one of chronic constipation. He is thrust into a quest to rescue his ex-wife (Vera Farmiga) and daughter (Millie Bobby Brown). Farmiga looks like she just discovered blood in her stool, and Brown has found another role where she just has to be determined and scream a bunch.
Anyway, mother and daughter have been conned into helping an eco-terrorist (Charles Dance) in his quest to wake up dormant monsters that will demolish the world and return it to its natural order. Dance even has a speech that somehow lasts about four hours, even thought the entire movie is a little over two. He berates humans for reproducing and wasting resources. It’s what I imagine douchebag screenwriters with no science background piss and moan about while flying around on a private jet and drinking Fiji Water.
Anyway and finally, Monsters!
No, not yet. There are still lots of military men, more fake scientists, and lots of scenes in war rooms because those are cheap filler. They have long conversations that are hard to follow because they’re based on no logic. Aisha Hinds plays a soldier with the thankless task of yelling “Move, move!” and “Be careful!” She’s tough because she’s bald. That’s garbage. I know for a fact that being bald doesn’t equal being tough. All you gotta do is carry a cattle prod into a retirement home to see that. Bradley Whitford plays a man with terrible dad jokes, all said with the aggressive confidence of the real estate office asshole. He probably tells women on elevators they have nice tits and chews gum with his mouth open. We’re supposed to like and be amused by him. That’s how sad this move is, and how little it wants to be good.
Eventually, we do get to see monsters, sometimes in motion, but mostly frozen or sleeping. While Godzilla: King of the Monsters references seventeen, only eight make it to the screen, and four of those have brief cameos, mostly shown on TV monitors. This is not the Battle Royale I expected, more like an undercard tag team bout in a small Midwest rodeo arena. The four with the biggest contracts are the King, Rodan, who is a reptilian raptor, Mothra, a giant moth with radioactive wings and King Ghidora, a three headed-dragon from outer space. Well, anyway, that’s what the scientists said, even though they mostly talk out their asses.
Godzilla hates Ghidora, who wants to fuck shit up and can control the other monsters. If Godzilla can defeat him, the rest of the monsters will go back to sleep. Only Mothra is on the King’s side. She’s sort of sweet for him, she she tries to mix it up where she can.
Great, now we’ll finally get to some monster beatdowns! Well, sort of. In motion, the monster CGI gets a little iffy. Ghidaora looks inconsistent, and the fighting is done in blurry closeups or in the dark. The climactic battle happens in a cost-conscious heavy rain. And even when monsters do fight, the movie cuts away to that stupid fucking mom, dad and daughter. Hell, there’s a battle scene I wanted to watch, but the camera puts the fucking family in the foreground.
I also want to mention that midway through the movie the scientists discover Atlantis. Seriously. The movie would have been fine without this and it doesn’t add any monster mashing. It’s just another worthless sidetrack away from monsters.
As a kid, I watched a fuckload of Godzilla movies on Channel 9 after school and before my parents got home. Then, I watched some more after they got home and started yelling at each other. The movies followed a pattern: Some new menace arrived, maybe a Smog Monster or a Mecha-Godzilla, that the army couldn’t stop. There would be a lot of gnashing of teeth and dudes in military uniforms talking. Those parts of the movies were boring as shit, a good time to pull the heads of your sister’s Barbies or go see if her lipstick in a tube shaped like a root beer float really tasted like a root beer float. It didn’t.
But when Godzilla started brawling the wait was worth it. Toho went balls to the wall. Men in rubber suits jumped around, flew and stamped their feet in tantrums. Godzilla beat the shit out of Smog Monster, disemboweled him, trashed some buildings, took down some power lines, stepped on a few tanks and demolished whatever else the Toho model builders cooked up. There was glee and joy in the destruction. They were having fun.
There is little fun in King of the Monsters. While it follows the pattern of holding back the action for most of the movie, it’s much less fun, less knowingly silly. Worse is that when fights finally happen, they’re throttled, brief, murky and dark.
There are a few fine moments, such as when a fighter pilot ejects himself directly into an awaiting Ghidora mouth. The way Ghidora’s heads bickered was amusing. Ghidora getting two of his heads stuck in a building so Godzilla could tar the remaining one was good, as was when the King ate one of Ghidora’s heads. Mothra has one great moment when she sacrifices herself to radiate a fading Godzilla. Also, while the American Godzilla looks too damn bulked up, he at least always looks sort of annoyed, just like the original.
But what I just described is maybe a minute total out of 131. It is definitely no way to treat a king. If the pricks who made this movie truly loved Godzilla they would have given us more of what we wanted. And it’s not scientists standing around bullshitting, or tired-ass family problem horseshit. As it is, Godzilla: King of the Monsters is like that Golden Corral buffet: a promise of a limitless cornucopia but all the best stuff is buried way, way in the back, and they expect you to fill you up on garbage before you even get to it. Two Fingers.