Film Review: Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019)

Directed by: Michael Dougherty
Written by: Michael Dougherty, Zach Shields, Max Borenstein
Starring: Kyle Chandler, Vera Farmiga, Millie Bobby Brown
IMDb Link

I've been a massive fan of Godzilla ever since I was a kid. I mean, what's not to love about a giant, indestructible dinosaur with atomic fire breath? That said, I feel a bit like a victim of my own hype for this film. In a lot of ways, this is the Godzilla film I've wanted to see for the past five years, but the parts of the film that didn't work for me felt amplified by the standards I held to the parts that did. I'm probably going to be harder on this movie than I should because of this, so just know that I recommend this movie: It's Godzilla, I love him, any and all of his movies should be watched.

Five years after the events of Godzilla (2014), the world is still grappling with the idea that monsters exist, and that the secret government organisation Monarch has been hiding that fact for a long time. Struck by the death of their son amidst the chaos caused by Godzilla and his adversaries, Mark (Chandler) and Emma Russell (Farmiga), key members of Monarch, go their separate ways to deal with their grief, Mark abandoning Monarch altogether and Emma burying deeper in to her work, and bringing her daughter Maddy (Brown) with her. More giant monsters have been discovered slumbering beneath the Earth, labelled "Titans", and their discovery allows Emma to create the Orca, a machine that can communicate with them, which becomes a problem when Eco-Terrorist, Jonah Alan (Charles Dance) wants to use it to awaken the Titans and destroy humanity.

It's an awfully convoluted excuse to get Godzilla to fight more monsters, particularly his biggest classic adversary, King Ghidorah, a three-headed golden dragon that breathes lightning. If that's all you're here for, then you'll get it, but you'll have to do a seemingly inordinate amount of waiting.

It's not that there's a lot going on between the fights, it's just that what's going on between the fights is a bit of a slog to get through because it's slow and messy and unfocused. Character motivations are always vague and don't hold any emotional weight because they largely go unexplored, there's a big spiel made about restoring balance to the planet that rings hollow because it's not what either of the characters fighting for that actually want. It's not like the performers are bad, either, they just don't have much to work with in terms of actual character material. Farmiga and Chandler both play their grief with genuine pathos, each of them doing their best to verbally and emotionally communicate the journeys of their characters, but that's them making the most out of what they're given. Dance's Alan also gets to be a wonderful screen presence that has essentially nothing meaningful to say, dropping a bit of verbal evisceration and then leaving the movie when he's no longer useful.

Then there's a constant tightrope walk between showing the military as incapable and showing them as altruistic; no matter what the situation, the soldiers are shown to be self-sacrificing to a fault, and yet they're also always the butt of many a macabre joke. It feels like the movie is trying to both call back to the classic "military is useless" trope that is so prevalent in the Godzilla series, but can't help find ways to undermine that trope. This itself is more a distillation of one of the film's more pervasive issues, its tonal inconsistency. The film is constantly undercutting its human moments with humour, and while that can work, it's never clever here; when the moment Ghidorah gets named is cut short by someone saying "I think she said 'gonorrhea'", it nibbles away at the film's weight, which is itself predicated on the deification of these big monsters.

Speaking of which, enough complaining; this is a Kaiju movie, any and all misgivings about the film can be ignored if the pure spectacle of giant monsters fighting is appropriately spectacular, and it's not like the human side of the story was a total waste.

The fights in this movie are incredible. The monsters are given such power, such weight, that the act of them clashing causes shockwaves, flying over a city causes its utter destruction, and simply existing causes unparalleled storms. These beings and their wondrous extravaganza are the product of pure imagination, a lifetime of thinking about how these monsters would look and act if given the blockbuster treatment brought to life in the biggest way possible. There's no way to truly express in written word how good the action is here, it's better explained by a kid smashing toys together, that's the only way to understand the utter joy that takes place on screen.

There's also more to the monsters than just their fights, each of them is given real personality that accentuates their actions; they are less monsters and more animals who think they're people, blown up to gargantuan performances. There's Godzilla, of course, whose indestructible exterior belies a soft heart and intelligence; the main character's arc is completed under the premise that he can believe that Godzilla is more than a monster, and it works entirely because of how much effort they put in to anthropomorphising the big lizard. Ghidorah gets three distinct personalities among his heads; the left-most being bullied by the middle head is the sort of little character tick that didn't need to happen for the sake of a fight, but it adds so much to make the big guy feel 'real' despite being something as silly as a three-headed golden dragon. Rodan is similarly realised, his cockiness and side-switching tendencies being the sort of things that make him the Starscream of the Godzilla Monsterverse. Then there's Mothra, the best thing in this movie that isn't named Godzilla. She's such a kind a gracious thing; even when she's being manipulated to hurt people the most she can do is throw them in to soft webbing, and yet she's just as much an absolute ruler as the rest of them going toe to toe with Rodan despite the fact that she's a giant moth and he's a giant pterodactyl made of fire.

The work that went in to making these ridiculously silly creatures work as emotionally engaging characters is a testament to how much the people working on this film love the material. This is just as present in the soundtrack as anywhere else; the music is a modern realisation of so many classic pieces, the original Godzilla themes getting updates that turn them from melancholic orchestral pieces in to triumphant battle cries, and everyone's little leitmotifs getting their place within this overcrowded movie. It's clear that there's a lot of love and passion poured in to this movie, and while that's obvious in the way the monsters move and fight, there is one moment within the film that I think best reflects the respect with which they were trying to approach this story.

Late in to the film, Godzilla is gravely injured, and the only way to revive him for one last fight is with a nuke. The man that goes down in to the ocean with the nuke to revive him, Dr. Serizawa (Ken Watanabe), ruminates on the need to make peace with the demons that create our wounds. It's an obvious metaphor for Mark to consider as he tries to reconcile playing a part in saving Godzilla when he's spent so much time wanting Godzilla dead, but this goes deeper than that. Godzilla started as a metaphor for the ravages of atomic warfare, the literal embodiment of the pain and horror that so many Japanese people had to experience, and yet his success has turned him in to a pop culture icon in Japan, and a cult icon across the world. The final moments of the very first Godzilla film had a Dr. Serizawa dive down in to the ocean with the intent to kill Godzilla, and 65 years later, we have a Dr. Serizawa dive down in to the ocean to save him. It's a beautiful reflection of how Godzilla has fundamentally changed over time in the cultural consciousness, a love letter to everything he has meant since his inception. This isn't the best Godzilla movie, or his most well told story, but in moments like these, the intent is clear, and it's impossible not to feel the adoration the filmmakers have for the King of the Monsters.

The Short Version: The film is so well visually realised that it demands to be seen on a big screen, and the symbolic weight behind it is a treat for fans, but even some of the film's best moments aren't given their full impact because of a pervasive and uneven human story that never feels as alive as the monsters.

Rating: It's still frickin' GODZILLA /10

Published June 2nd, 2019