Review of Godzilla, King of the Monsters! (1956) by Colginator — 02 Jun 2019

Following on from Gareth Edwards Godzilla, King of the Monsters sees the emergence of a range of Titans across the globe due to the actions of a new eco-terrorist organisation. This leads to a battle royale scenario where in order to survive, mankind must work with Godzilla to defeat this threat and bring back a natural order to the world.

This time around, they seemed to take on board some of the criticism from the previous movie about not using more of the classic monsters Godzilla used to fight in the Toho franchise, so this time they unleash far more titans on to the world. On one side we have Godzilla's partner the great benevolent Mothra showing off her gorgeous wing span and giving us a lot of moments to just be in awe of her beauty. Then on the other we have the destructive King Ghidorah, with his monstrous scale towering over cities raining down destruction from the skies. And when these monster clash it does have some of those epic destructive moments that fans have been asking for and that raise the bar for when Godzilla v Kong comes out in 2020.

But unfortunately it retains the rest of the problems from the previous two films in Legendary's Monsterverse, with these remaining problems being magnified this time around. The new cast is led by married couple Mark and Emma Russell, played by Kyle Chandler and Vera Farmiga, along with their daughter Madison played by Millie Bobby Brown. Normally in a film like this you'd see parents at least try to take their child away from danger, but here Madison's mother has no qualms with letting her child run around with her on battlefield. At the beginning of the film she even brings her to a secret facility containing one of the Kaiju for seemingly no reason.

The rest of the overcrowded supporting cast is rounded up by Zhang Ziyi playing a researcher of ancient myths relating to the creatures, some more supporting scientists for comedic relief and a bunch of forgettable soldiers. There's also the leader of the villainous eco-terrorists Charles Dance, who's so badly defined we don't really get a justification for how he got to his position other than he used to be a soldier and therefore hates humanity now.

In previous films we had enough human characters like Bryan Cranston, John C Reilly and Samuel L Jackson so the human portions of the movie had at least something to support them. But the only good human character in this film is Ken Watanabe, who has a few good lines scattered throughout the film, but is not given enough prominence in the film to make the human drama work. And when a majority of the film is focused on these human characters, this is a big problem. Especially when there are monsters having an epic battle in the background and instead we're forced to spend our time with these bland personalities we don't actually care about.

There's also a lot of logical oversights throughout the film, with the film ignoring anything it needs to in order for our characters to get where they need to get to in the story. Every character seems to inherit the fast travel ability from the last two seasons of Game of Thrones, with characters having the ability to travel across the globe in a matter of minutes to show up wherever they need to, even if the monsters should have been travelling faster than they do. Characters will also change their motivation to suit the needs of the film, going from wanting every Kaiju dead to deciding to work with Godzilla over the course of a scene.

But if you're a fan of the old Toho monster movies and want to see what kind of chaos these titans can cause on a 200 million dollar budget, this film definitely has a lot of great moments showing us that. But at the same time this film doesn't offer anything on par with the moment we first see Godzilla use his atomic breath in the previous movie and takes us on a bland ride with these human characters to get to these moments.