Godzilla: King of the Monsters

Godzilla: King of the Monsters has the finest technical credits available, including genius sound design by Erik Aadahl (an Oscar nominee for A Quiet Place), and some top-flight special effects to bring Godzilla and his monster kin to vivid life.  On the opposite end of the spectrum, we have the script, which is one of those jobs where it feels like the credited screenwriters got paid too much for their work.  Obviously, no one goes to one of these movies for the dialogue, we come for the monster fights.  Unfortunately, this is a movie that runs well over 2 hours, and it keeps the giant lizard off camera for a good majority of it.  It's like Godzilla is camera-shy about appearing in his own movie.

This is another movie where the production values look like they cost hundreds of millions, while the script was bought at the Dollar Store.  You know you're in trouble when the roars and screeches of the radioactive creatures who rampage throughout the movie are more entertaining than listening to what the humans are saying to each other.  Again, credit goes to the sound design, which is first rate.  You can feel every thudding footstep, and when Godzilla roars, you can feel it go right through you.  It's awesome.  But not awesome enough to salvage a movie that clearly needed a few more rewrites before it went before the cameras.  The filmmakers clearly knew how important sound was, as they literally built the plot around it.  There's a device in the movie called the Orca, which can communicate with the Titans, the towering monsters that pop up in major cities all throughout the movie.  The good guys want to use it to possibly calm Godzilla and his kin down a little, and maybe learn about them.  The bad guys (led by an eco-terrorist played by Charles Dance) want to use it to make them angrier, and save the planet by wiping out most of mankind.

The action picks up five years after 2014's Godzilla feature.  Society is still reeling from the destruction at the climax of that film.  Not that it matters, since the movie spends so little time on this aspect.  This is despite the fact that the main characters in the film are a family that has been broken up by a tragedy caused by that climactic destruction.  The family plot is centered on paleobotanist Emma (Vera Farmiga), and her teen daughter Madison (Millie Bobby Brown), who get captured by the terrorists early on, as Emma has the Orca when the film opens.  Emma's ex-husband, Mark (Kyle Chandler), is still haunted by the loss of their young son in the initial Godzilla attack, but must put his feelings toward the Titans behind him in order to save his family.  Despite the family drama taking center stage for almost the entire film, we learn so little about them.  Even Kyle's hatred of Godzilla, blaming him for the death of his son, is mostly handled by dialogue that goes no deeper than having someone say, "Dude hates Titans".

Even the rivalry between the giant monsters doesn't feel as absorbing as it should.  Basically, an alien three-headed creature called Ghidorah has come to our world to challenge Godzilla's status as King of the Monsters.  In all fairness, the big showdown between the beasts (which makes up the last half hour or so of the film) is quite the spectacle, and is one of the few times where director Michael Dougherty seems confident in what he's doing.  He's giving us what we've come to see, and he delivers in wonderful fashion.  Unfortunately, we have to sit through way too much stuff that just doesn't work in order to get to this.  The brief monster action scenes that we do get throughout the film leading up to the big show at the end just are not that thrilling.  In one scene, we see a city being attacked, and the movie keeps on cutting to a mom and her young son trying to escape.  Why?  No reason.  They play no part.  The movie just wanted to add a human element to the action scene, while at the same time forgetting to actually develop it into something worthwhile.

And if you want us to be invested in these human characters, then why make their dialogue and the roles they play in the story so trite and unfocused?  Each character exists to fill a certain purpose, but never develop into anything resembling an interesting personality.  You have the exposition dump characters, who seem to somehow know what Godzilla is thinking at any one moment, you have the comic relief wiseguys, you have the stock idiot soldiers who stand in front of Ghidorah while it is clearly charging up to attack them, you have the war of words between the people who think Godzilla can help us, and those who want to see the giant lizard blasted with their latest military weapon...You get the idea.  Nobody says anything worthwhile, and nobody does anything that isn't carefully plotted out by the screenwriters.  We also get a lot of blabber about saving the environment, which sounds like it was added in to fool people into thinking the movie is actually about something other than the special effects.

Godzilla: King of the Monsters is a lot of money tossed to the winds of a screenplay that clearly wasn't ready.  Will it "win the weekend" at the box office?  Most definitely.  But I doubt it will have the staying power beyond opening hype.  It's a blockbuster that impresses you with how much it clearly cost to put together, while at the same time disappointing you that there's really not much to it.

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