Godzilla: King of the Monsters Review

Godzilla roars into theaters this weekend for what seems like the upteenth time. Like seriously, there's a lot of these things. A quick Wikipedia search tells me that Japan has made 32 Godzilla movies with Hollywood having now done three. That's 35 Godzilla movies that have been made. And I've seen three of them in theaters in the last five years, the 2014 "Godzilla," "Shin Godzilla" in 2016 and now "Godzilla: King of the Monsters." OK, fine, I don't know how many of the 35 have actually hit theaters, but still. That's a lot of Godzilla movies. I'm certainly not going to call myself a Godzilla aficionado, but I enjoy myself a good Godzilla movie. There's a lot of people who complained about the 2014 "Godzilla." I thoroughly enjoyed it, though. In this now connected Monsterverse, I also enjoyed "Kong: Skull Island" in 2017. I'm excited for the two to clash in "Godzilla vs. Kong" coming March 2020. And yeah, I was pumped for this one. The trailers promised me a clash involving Godzilla, King Ghidora, Mothra and Rodan and I was sold. Those three are some of the more iconic Godzilla enemies and seeing them all come together in a glorious, high-budget, modern, CGI clash sounded like the perfect summer blockbuster. I mean, what more can you want?

Now I've seen a lot of negative reviews aimed at this movie. I've looked through a lot of them and watched plenty on YouTube and they all seem to be saying the same things. The plot is boring and the human characters are uninteresting. Yet most of them who have given it a negative review because of that will openly admit that monster fights were spectacular. I try to process all of that and I ultimately end up facepalming. I mean, what did they all expect going into a fracking Godzilla movie? An Oscar-winning drama? The next "Jurassic Park"? Nope. Not me. I just wanted to see some spectacular monster fights and all the reviews, both positive and negative, told me that I was going to get that. So I was excited. I mean, sure. I like myself some intricate plots, complex characters and deep themes. In comparing for my Christopher Nolan ranking coming soon, I just barely watched both "Inception" and "The Dark Knight" in the same day. But when it comes to watching movies, I feel like like I'm very good at compartmentalizing my expectations. Want to watch a romance? Sure. Let's melt my heart. An action movie? Perfect. Let's have some great choreographed actions sequences. A Godzilla movie? Great! Let's get some good monster fights. It's that simple.

But OK. You want to talk about characters in this movie? Fine. Let's do that. At the center of this film, we have a family. They lost one of their children during the events of the previous Godzilla movie, which has put a rift in their relationship. The parents, played by Kyle Chandler and Vera Farmiga, have split and also have different ideals as to how to deal with Godzilla and the other Titans that are showing up. This leaves their daughter, played by Millie Bobby Brown, in an awkward position as she tries to figure out how to make sense of everything. Meanwhile we have some mustache twirling villains who want to destroy humanity by giving the planet back to the Titans while the dumb military people are still stupid enough to think that they stop the Titans on their own, despite the fact that none of their ammunition has done a dang thing. This makes for a whole heck of a lot of side characters that include Ken Watanabe, Ziyi Zhang, Bradley Whitford, Sally Hawkins, Charles Dance, Thomas Middleditch, Aisha Hinds and O'Shea Jackson Jr. in various roles among all this. But that trio of Kyle Chandler, Vera Farmiga and Millie Bobby Brown are our main three that we care about and three of them do a fine job. I don't see the big issue there that so many have been complaining about.

Perhaps I didn't have many complaints in that regard because I didn't need much out of them. The human characters are there to fill space in a Godzilla movie since you can't have the movie be 100 percent monster fights. That would be a bit overkill. Thus as long as the humans are serviceable, I'm typically not going to have a whole lot of complaints. In fact, Millie Bobby Brown owned it in this movie. I kept expecting her to use her telekinesis powers from "Stranger Things" when things got intense, but alas this was the wrong franchise as she's just a normal girl here. But all was well. She was fantastic regardless. And everyone else was perfectly serviceable. Yeah, sure, there were people making dumb decisions, some there solely to be the monster experts to clue the audience in on the background and history of our monsters, while plenty of others were there to be monster fodder. But there wasn't any characters who particularly annoyed me. They all did their job of filling space until we got to our next monster fight. And that's that. There's no one here giving an Oscar-worthy performance. There aren't a lot of noticeable character arcs. This isn't a character study by any means. But they did their job. They collected their paycheck. And I am perfectly satisfied.

Enough with all of this boring human nonsense, though. Onto the monsters. As I was sitting here watching this grand spectacle take place, the biggest thought that came to my mind was that we live in a very privileged era of cinema. There's so much technology at our hands that we often take for granted what an incredible opportunity it is to see a Godzilla movie like this. Yes, a lot of the older Godzilla movies are a lot of fun and have their own unique charm to them, but in this movie Godzilla is more than just a puppet or a badly animated creature that everyone is pretending to be scared of. He looks like a real thing. Like an ancient mythical monster came to life and we captured real life footage of him. It's incredible. When you go watch this movie on the biggest screen possible, my hope is that you can take it all in and truly appreciate how far we've come with modern cinema. Don't sit there and whine like a privileged American that the screenplay writers didn't make the human characters as interesting as they could've. Marvel at the fact that these animators have created some of the best CGI monsters in the history of cinema with this film. And not just Godzilla, but monsters that are as beautiful and majestic as Mothra while also being as terrifying as King Ghidora.

Speaking of the latter monsters, I loved how each of them got their moment to shine. We start by seeing the evolution of Mothra. She starts by being this giant larva thing. After our eco-terrorists burst onto the scene, Mothra manages to escape and cocoons herself under a giant waterfall. Then we shift gears to Antarctica where King Ghidora is frozen in some ice. For some reason the eco-terrorists think it's a good idea to free this terrifying three-headed monster. They'll come to quickly regret that, I think, but before we get to the others, we get a quick battle between Godzilla and Ghidora. Then it's off to Mexico where we free Rodan from a giant volcano. This guy might be my least favorite of the four major Titans in this movie, but he's still pretty awesome and the sequences of him emerging from the volcano are awesome and we get some fantastic fight sequences with him as well as the destruction of this poor Mexican city. After freeing Rodan, the focus is back on Mothra where she emerges from her cocoon, becoming the majestic queen of the monsters. I was in pure awe at this. She was so gorgeous and I loved her. But now with the three of them, along with Godzilla, getting their proper introductions, it was time to let them free and watch this movie soar.

The rest of this movie is pretty basic and simple. I'll state the obvious that I'm not going to spoil anything, but at the same time there's honestly not a whole lot to spoil here. Hopefully you've come to this movie to watch these monsters all fight and you're going to be vastly rewarded in that regard. I won't say who is on whose side, but there's some teaming up to stop a certain Titan that is the main antagonist. There's also plenty of inter-Titan drama that makes this movie really intense while life for the humans is probably feeling like the Apocalypse is happening. While these four Titans are the main ones in this movie, there's plenty more around the world who rise up and thus a lot of destruction, especially in Boston where the brunt of the action takes place. Those people who are Red Sox fans are certainly not going to be the happiest people on Earth as Fenway Park ends up being the center of everything. Let's just say that in this reality the Red Sox will be looking for a new stadium to play in following the events of the film, at least on a temporary basis, if you know what I mean. But yeah, all of this is phenomenal. They did a great job of setting all of these Titans up, then giving them all plenty of screen time in some extremely entertaining fight sequences.

All in all, this movie delivered exactly what I expected from it. Godzilla squaring off against a bunch of other giant Titans in breathtaking fashion. Is it a cinematic masterpiece that I'm going to watch every month for the rest of my life? Of course not. But it didn't need to be. I just wanted it to be a fun Godzilla and that's exactly what it is. No Godzilla fan expects an Oscar-winning screenplay or Oscar-worthy acting in order to be entertained. So people can whine and complain about that all they want, but I'm fairly confident that a Godzilla fan is going to get exactly what they want out of this Godzilla movie. Like several other movies from this summer already, this is a fun summer movie that was meant to reward fans of the franchise. Do you hear Marvel fans saying that "Avengers: Endgame" was a horrible movie because their time travel rules are confusing? Do you hear Pokémon fans saying "Detective Pikachu" was a horrible movie because the plot was a bit generic? Of course not. Just like those two movies, Godzilla fans shouldn't be too stressed out about how amazing the human characters are in a Godzilla movie. They just want to see Godzilla, Mothra, Rodan and King Ghidora square off in epic fashion. So if you're a Godzilla fan, go see this. My grade for the movie is an 8/10.