‘Godzilla: King of the Monsters’ is an OK effort
Credit where it’s due: “Godzilla: King of the Monsters” is exactly what you think it is, nothing more and nothing less.
Well, maybe just a little more. But not much.
Director and co-writer Michael Dougherty gathers an impressive cast — it includes Kyle Chandler, Vera Farmiga, Ken Watanabe, Sally Hawkins, Bradley Whitford and, perhaps most impressively, Millie Bobby Brown. And all of them, to their credit, seem like they’re trying to take the whole thing seriously.
This is why they are good actors. Because
that can’t have been easy.
The film is a sequel to the 2014 “Godzilla,” and a MonsterVerse cousin
of “Kong: Skull Island.” It begins with a look back to action surrounding the 2014 movie, in which Godzilla, on his way to saving the world, trashes San Francisco.
Killed in the action was a small boy — the son of Dr. Emma Russell (Farmiga) and her husband, Mark (Chandler). They had invented a gizmo that allows for communication among the monsters, but now, five years later, they’ve split up; their daughter, Madison (Brown), lives with her mother. (The parents reacted differently to their loss: She dove headlong into learning more about monsters and their behavior, while he drank too much.)
Emma is successfully testing the machine, called the Orca, on a larval Mothra when Jonah Alan (Charles Dance), a former military man, bursts in with a crew and takes Emma and Madison hostage. After what he’s seen in war, he’s pretty much done with humanity and is happy to let the monsters wipe out the world to initiate a massive do-over.
Yes, the message here is just that subtle. Meanwhile Monarch, the group that has secretly been keeping tabs on monsters for years (we learned this in the 2014 film), and knows where Godzilla is, despite his seeming to have retired and disappeared, learns of Alan’s plan and swoops in to grab Mark to help find Orca and presumably save the day.
A battle is brewing, you see — there are 17 creatures lurking around the world. Emma and Mark have different ideas about the monsters and what their place in the world is, if any, which further complicates things.
There are some shifting allegiances, and the next thing you know Monster Zero, better known as King Ghidorah, is awakened. This is a bad thing — it has three heads, which grow back if they’re chopped off, and evidently in ancient times it was Godzilla’s rival.
Oh yeah, him. Dougherty doesn’t wait as long as the last film to show Godzilla (that took an hour; here we get a murky look about a half-hour in), but once again Earth’s favorite monster spends an awful lot of time off-camera.
And what about when he’s on? Godzilla is sort of the Incredible Hulk of the monster world — he seems like he’s on our side, but his brand of salvation is so random and flailing that at times you wonder if it’s worth the trouble.
There are some good ideas here, including the family drama. But they’re muddled and messy, often either fizzling out or just leading nowhere. Brown is quite good as Madison, a confused kid who isn’t sure which parent to side with. That confusion is understandable, but Dougherty makes the adults’ motivations so hard to follow that Madison’s actions are at times also somewhat inexplicable.
But enough of the actual acting and plot and such. You come to a Godzilla movie for the epic fights, and on that front, Dougherty delivers. The battles arent as incoherent as an “Avengers” movie, though at times it’s a little hard to follow what’s going on. King Ghidorah is an impressively menacing creature, and Mothra is an unexpected, if lethal, charmer. Lots and lots of stuff gets destroyed.
At one point a television reporter refers to the mayhem unfolding as the greatest disaster in history. While it’s taking place, that’s probably true. But if one thing is clear — and “Godzilla vs. Kong” is already on the books for March 13, 2020 — it’s that in these movies, there’s always more to come.