Review of Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) by Hnestlyonthesly — 07 Oct 2019

It’s hard to sift through this film for anything redeeming, but–gun to my head–I guess I could say that it’s a lot like The Meg in terms of Chinese production money, dialogue, tonal confusion, and the multiplicity of sacrificial suicide runs. Godzilla: King of the Monsters was the first film I saw with my dad since coming back home. We saw it opening night with a bunch of people who also craved the emotional abuse of throttled expectations. King of the Monsters has a lot of things wrong with it, but if we think of it as a sibling to The Meg, it will organize some of our criticism. On the point of Chinese production money, this is Wanda Qingdao’s first major film, but by all appearances its attempts to mass market this movie in China had all the same effects as every other Chinese production house: no sex, not even the acknowledgement of the existence of sexuality beyond the existence of children, no drugs, no smoking, no gore, not even papercuts, and the obligatory first scene shot in China. It gives the movie a washed out, thin feel, like someone left it in the dryer for too long and the lint trap is full of all the realism and emotional stakes instead of lint.

The dialogue, like The Meg, is consistently snarky, almost weirdly so, as if all the characters are jockeying to be low-key funny, even in situations that don’t call for humor. Kyle Chandler’s character is the chief violator of this, asking cattily if everyone has forgotten he joined the team to find his daughter, rephrasing the potential genocide of Boston as such, “Let’s just say, in another five minutes it’s gonna get real bad for anyone who’s a Red Sox fan.” The general effect is one of tonal confusion. Godzilla is the wrong combination of breezy self-aware cheese and dour seriousness.

The original trailer to this film was a lot more honest about its trajectory and would’ve probably guided audience’s expectations a little better than billing it as a Rock ‘Em, Sock ‘Em of monster mashups. The heart of the film lies in its investigation of loss and grief within a family, and it’s only through this story that the vehicle of Godzilla works as any sort of relevant metaphor or commentary.

There’s a weird fixation with countdowns: 1 min til detonation, 30 sec til impact of the “oxygen destroyer” (ugh), 10 sec til Godzilla boops our window, 6 min til Godzilla explodes. It feels so strange to have someone call out how long we should feel anxious, and then to be told we have to wait 6 whole minutes before our hero may or may not explode.

I’ve got three things that may or may not spoil the film for you below, but I tend to think that there’s really not anything in this movie that’s so complex that it’s a spoiler. I’m genuinely confused about Vera Farmiga’s slideshow while she’s revealing the Evil Plan via the world’s clearest Skype call. When does she have time to put it together? Or is it just a cinematic overlay to drive home her point? Like, we the audience can see it but no one else? Can we see the images with a frame around them in the receiver room or are they always full screen? At one point she seems to make a bit of a Tokyo Ghost-type argument in favor of irradiating the world’s cities, because it ends up–in a round about way–supercharging plant growth in those regions. That’s not actually how radiation works, right? Like, Chernobyl made vegetables grow like crazy, but they weren’t edible, were they?

2. On the point about all the noble suicide runs: there sure is a lot more love in the office for Dr Serizawa (Ken Watanabe’s character) than there is for Sally Hawkins (Shape of Water). They both die, but literally no one but Ken references Sally after her death. Multiple people say the words “This is what Dr Serizawa would want,” or “Let’s do this for Serizawa,” which feels really rough. On a related note, it feels weird that Farmiga gets the easy out by dying while luring Ghidora away from the helicopter that’s got her family on it. A lot more interesting a plot would have been seeing her pay for her crimes and try to patch things up with her family after their unification and her change of heart in Boston. Instead, the story takes the Bradley Cooper route from A Star is Born.

3. Last, a point about the Mothra/Fire Demon fight, which may or may not matter at all in the scheme of things, says The Ringer: once we see the way that Godzilla’s hydrogen bomb explosion snuffs out Ghidora, I felt so relieved that Mothra had already died in (another) noble suicide, but all of a sudden we see that flaming **** bow for Godzilla at the end and I’m left wondering, How the eff does Rodan survive that blast with a “six mile radius” but Ghidora doesn’t? Does it have to do with Ghidora being an alien species? Would Mothra have been cool too or would she have been killed by the blast?

King of the Monsters obviously doesn’t deserve the time we’ve devoted to it...