This monster’s so dull you’d barely cross the road to avoid him
Godzilla: King of the Monsters
12A cert, 132 min Dir Michael Dougherty
Starring Kyle Chandler, Vera Farmiga, Millie Bobby Brown, Charles Dance, Sally Hawkins, Ken Watanabe, Bradley Whitford, David Strathairn, Ziyi Zhang, Thomas Middleditch, Aisha Hinds, O’shea Jackson Jr, Anthony Ramos
Somewhere in the ugly morass that is Godzilla: King of the Monsters, the most overqualified supporting cast in memory are trapped expectantly on sound stages, actively hoping they might be the next to go. Incineration or giant lizard foot? Mothra’s latest snack? Who cares? Charles Dance, Sally Hawkins, Ken Watanabe, Ziyi Zhang, David Strathairn and Bradley Whitford could have formed a support group, but it’s every thesp for himself in this shambles. Not only does any notion of pulling through it together get quickly abandoned, but even remembering who’s alive is a needlessly tough job for the audience.
Yes, the continuity in this flick is abominable, and the original director, Gareth Edwards, is long gone, but at least it starts out with some cursory idea of where the 2014 reboot left off. San Francisco: here it was that Godzilla helped humanity destroy a nest of winged beasts called Mutos, while also comprehensively trashing the Bay Area
and achieving his main goal – a $530million worldwide gross before merchandising. Lost in the fracas was a kid called Andrew, whose surviving family members (Kyle Chandler, Vera Farmiga and Millie Bobby Brown) are the main three… I mean, characters? Humans, who are new to the franchise. Let’s not go overboard.
Rest assured that Godzilla, dormant somewhere in the ocean depths, will rise again, while his ancient rivals in the kaijū genre (it’s Japanese for “strange beast”) will also roll out of bed, because they might as well. There’s a pteranodon thing called Rodan, there’s Mothra, and there’s King Ghidorah, a three-headed, hydra-like contender set on delivering triple-threat destruction.
What response from homo sapiens could possibly greet this WWF rampage? Gawping and pretend science, that’s what. Chandler and Farmiga’s characters, now estranged, used to work for Monarch, the secret, government-sponsored organisation that thinks these creatures, collectively known as Titans, are part of Earth’s survival system. The death of their son has jolted Dr Mark (Chandler) out of this wacky belief. Ten minutes into the film Dr Emma (Farmiga) is practically stroking its furry, mewling muzzle after finding the right frequency to make mummy noises in its language.
The film could get away with this silliness if it knew how to give us a good time. Hope stays alive in the occasional dialogue exchange, or might, if the depressed-looking actors noticed the opportunities they were missing. “Scanning the entire southern hemisphere – so far, nothing?” reports a tech guy to some army colonel (Aisha Hinds) after the beasts have gone awol. “Then scan the northern!”, she barks.
Dr Emma’s mad plan is to restore harmony to the war-torn ecosystem, but you’d much rather they’d started small, and simply restored balance to the actual film. It’s relentlessly sludgy and subterranean. Untold millions of man-hours went into all this writhing reptilian combat, and that’s just watching it. Incoming director Michael Dougherty (Krampus) is the one in the unenviable hot seat, but he can’t handle a budget this huge when it’s poured all over an assignment this vague.
The film makes you beg for the frisky B-movie shamelessness of its stablemate in Legendary’s Monsterverse – 2017’s Kong: Skull
Island, which had heaps of ideas for how to pull off a monster mash and keep actual peril in play. You never had any doubt, in that, which bit of a person had just been gnashed in something’s teeth, or why everyone was screaming, or why a giant spider’s leg down your throat might be unappealing. Next year, the two meet head-to-head in Godzilla
vs Kong. Godzilla, without a shadow of a doubt, needs to up his game, because this one’s so boring you’d barely even cross the street to avoid him.