For the longest time, had you asked me if I was a kaiju fan, I would’ve answered “Yes” without hesitation. I mean, who doesn’t love giant monsters swinging their various limbs, tentacles, tendrils or what-have-you around? Well, after forty minutes of the newest installment of Legendary‘s Monsterverse, Godzilla: King of the Monsters I must change my answer to “No.” In this piece, I will explain why this movie was such an unpleasant experience for me, and how it opened my eyes to what I really like about Godzilla. Spoilers, it ain’t the monster fights.

The Plot

I often don’t really care about talking about plot. Really, it’s just a sequence of events varying in strength of connectivity for a defined runtime. I don’t place much emphasis on it in general, and doubly so in regard to Godzilla. Godzilla doesn’t need, nor is expected to have an expansive plot. All one goes in expecting is a giant monster shows up, destroys a city and maybe fight another giant monster. So with that out of the way, why am I devoting time to talking about the plot?

Simple. This film had a fairly sweeping plot, with a lot happening, all while planting breadcrumbs for future sequels. The plot, as you’ve probably heard by now, is nonsense. The movie, I think, understands this as well, as it often only has the human characters running about and doing things during the monster fights. Some complain that this undercuts the fights, but when your plot is as convoluted and as messy as this film’s was, it’s best to cut to it when the audience is paying attention, which is generally during the monster fights.

My biggest issue with the plot was the McGuffin introduced in this film. Scientists manage to create a machine that can control the kaiju, and it’s the crux the film is built on. The only problem is that goes against all of the themes of Godzilla (2014), but I’ll get more into that later. The film also expects you to be emotionally invested in the central family, but the characters are so paper-thin, whilst also just being pawns of the plot—doing what the plot needs them to do, rather than what the character they’re shown to be would do.

The Characters

The talk of plot leads us here. The characters are all archetypes. That in and of itself isn’t damning. Take a look at 2017’s Kong: Skull Island, whose director himself admits that he wasted all the talented actors that signed on for the film:

“It’s a movie that takes some of our best and most talented working actors and gives them nothing that even resembles an arc.”

With that being said, the characters in Skull Island, as paper-thin as they were, still had relatability. Their motives, wants, desires and how they went about achieving those all made sense. None of that applies to the characters of King of the Monsters. Let’s go through them one by one:

Dr. Emma Russell, played by Vera Farmiga, is a paleobiologist who lost her son during the events of Godzilla (2014). She is also an environmentalist and one of the creators of the aforementioned McGuffin, the ORCA. All of this is okay. What’s her motive? To raise all the kaiju and have them destroy cities and set nature back on balance because global warming… I feel like somewhere along the line they might’ve lost track of this character. At one point, it’s raised to her that billions of people will die, and she accepts that as an acceptable loss. Okay, so she’s a crazy villain then. That’s fine; villains are allowed to be insane. Except she isn’t. The movie wants you to be sympathetic toward her and, quite bafflingly, even treats her like a hero. This character has a significant onscreen presence, where she goes through every Hollywood cliché about environmentalists, and she and her cartoon motives drag the film down. Dr. Mark Russell, played by Kyle Chandler, is married to Emma, is also paleobiologist and is the other co-creator of the ORCA. If you are out there arguing that Rey from the Disney-led Star Wars films is a mary sue, then you have to acknowledge that Mark is one too. He is perfect at everything and is always right. Soldiers don’t know what to do? Ask Mark. Scientists are stumped? Ask Mark. Need advice on anything? Mark’s your guy He plays into that stereotype of the disgruntled veteran who’s mad at all these nerds for not seeing the world how it is, and the film doesn’t do anything with that; it plays it completely straight that he knows what’s best for the world and everyone. I don’t know what this character is about, what he wants out of life or how he’s meant to elevate the film, but at least he’s better than… Madison Russell, played by Millie Bobby Brown, is the 14 year old daughter of Emma and Mark. She is the most unrealistic depiction of a 14 year old you’ll find in a blockbuster, but that’s fine since realism can be boring. This character, however, is also boring, flat and makes no sense. She goes along with her mother’s plan, and is perfectly fine with everything that it entails (billions dying) until she learned that more people than the original estimate would die. Uhm, okay. And that’s all there is to that character. No agency, no arc, nothing to really add to the film. Godzilla himself. I, traditionally, don’t think of Godzilla as a character, but full transparency, I watched the original Gojira (1954), Godzilla (2014) and Shin Godzilla before writing this review. Godzilla is a character in those films. For the purposes of this section, I’ll only refer to Gareth Edwards’ 2014 film. In that movie, Godzilla’s movements were clunky, slow and deliberate, when the camera focused on his face, you could see the years and the exasperation in every expression. This Godzilla was meant to be aged, ancient beyond our comprehension and tired. Come Godzilla 2019, he’s nimble, fast and just does what the plot requires him to do, even working with army. I’m not really casting judgment on whether his character would or wouldn’t do that; I list these differences only to say I preferred his depiction in the 2014 film.

Direction and Cinematography

The trailers for this film were fantastic. During the film, after I had mentally checked out, I could see all the shots that were made specifically for the two trailers. I thought to myself, “They made this film for the trailers,” as characters were throwing out one-liners and as we got comic book-esque splash pages of the monsters.

This is what I see people calling “brilliant” cinematography, and I couldn’t possibly disagree more. Yes, a lot of moments in this film can be used as beautiful desktop backgrounds. The animators and artists did brilliant work, but I do not think this qualifies as particularly great cinematography. For example, if I took a picture of The Edge of Doom, would my picture then be considered beautiful simply because someone crafted a breathtaking painting?

It also cannot be ignored that these are movies. Move is the important bit of etymology here. The film doesn’t look beautiful in motion. In motion, the imagery is foggy, the direction is so bizarre in places that it’s hard to perceive exactly what’s happening at any given time and both come together to create a thoroughly unremarkable visual experience.

The splash images of the monsters are pretty though.

I’d also like to take this time to talk about how the creatures are shot. In his film, Gareth Edwards makes a point to shoot the monsters from the humans’ perspective, so their enormity is the first thing you notice. He also made them slow, and lumbering as a way of conveying their massive scale, and all of these serve to make the action (when it finally happens) very readable and understandable. All of these lessons are thrown out with Godzilla: King of the Monsters. The chaos with which the battles are shot can be compared to the Michael Bay Transformers movies in how indecipherable they can be.

In that regard, I do not find the direction or cinematography particularly noteworthy.

Themes

Truly, everything else in this article has been preamble. The themes that this film utterly misses the mark of—that is why I decided I wanted to talk about this movie.

I love Kong: Skull Island. It succeeds at being a dumb blockbuster that you can eat your popcorn through, while maintaining fidelity to what King Kong represents. In the original 1933 film, Kong was a powerful, majestic creature from another land, taken from his home by greedy capitalists, exploited by them and then rebels—the real monster was man. This was preserved in the film, where it’s shown that Kong is a protector of nature and the natives, and only violent when he is preyed upon. The director, Jordan Vogt-Roberts kept the themes of the original while setting up a franchise film, so I don’t want to hear the excuse that they couldn’t build a franchise while staying true to what these films are supposed to embody.

“Godzilla is the son of the atomic bomb. He is a nightmare created out of the darkness of the human soul. He is the sacred beast of the apocalypse.”

This quote from Tanaka Tomoyuki, the producer of the original Gojira, gets at the heart of my problems with how this film depicts Godzilla. But before I continue, another quote is necessary.

“If nuclear testing continues… then someday, somewhere in the world… another Godzilla may appear.”

This is a quote that comes at the end of Gojira, a line spoken by the character, Professor Yamane.

Gojira was made after we dropped the atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, occupied Japan, suppressed any criticism of the US armed forces that they might have had and forced them to demilitarize, but these weren’t the impetus for the film and not the only inspiration. Gojira opened on a Japanese freighter—this is because a month before production started in earnest, the case of the Lucky Dragon 5 happened, where US nuclear testing heavily irradiated a ship and its crew of 21. This, coupled with the atomic bombings at the tail end of World War 2 gave nuclear arms a much different cultural connotation in Japan than in the West, and it was on full display in this first film. Let’s take a look at the titular monster.

The original Godzilla was meant to call to mind victims of nuclear fallout, with its blistered skin, and growths all over its body. In the plot of the film, Gojira is awakened by nuclear testing, so in a way, he too is a victim. He too suffers from the burns, welts and sores that human victims of nuclear fallout endure.

These, in addition to the opening quotes do a fine job of explaining just where the film stands when it comes to nukes, nuclear testing, military and war. Indeed, the final McGuffin that defeats Gojira is a new super-weapon called the “oxygen bomb,” created by the character, Dr. Serizawa. However, Serizawa insures that he dies with the weapon out of fear that someone would force him to create another. The movie couldn’t be any more obvious with the stances it is taking.

In the years following the runaway success of Gojira, Godzilla was reimagined as a protector of Japan, starring in film after film where he would fight off invaders. It is true that the franchise took a more child-friendly tilt, but Godzilla became a Japanese cultural icon. This is important for later.

Let’s move on to Godzilla 2014, which, in my opinion, was the only Godzilla film after the first to really be about something. A quote from the director, Gareth Edwards:

“There’s definitely a strong theme in the film, and in simplest terms it’s kind of “Man v. Nature” And when we started off in the process of defining Godzilla, what is he about, what makes a Godzilla movie, what makes a monster movie, and we were brainstorming and watching all the old movies again, the thing that comes through is that in some movies, he’s slightly evolved and represents different things, but he’s always a force of nature like the wrath of God that comes to put us back in our place when we kind of think we own the world. I would go into more detail, but I’ve been told I can only say certain things, but there’s definitely a very strong theme that harks back to the original 1954 Godzilla. It’s the “Man v. Nature” that comes through a lot. It’s a recurring theme on the set today the way that nature always wins. You can’t control nature. When we start thinking we can control nature, that’s when it all starts to go wrong. And that happens a lot in our movie. You see it quite a bit, that is our arrogance always comes back to bite us.”

The themes of his film shine through and hark back to the original Gojira. It is stated in the film that mankind digging, excavating and using up natural resources is what was waking up these titans. Instead of focusing on nukes and nuclear testing, the film instead is a very obvious conversation about climate change and the effects of capitalism on the environment—more contemporary issues. While the themes are slightly different from the original’s main themes, there’s still a strong pro-environment, anti-war message in the film. Instead of having Godzilla tear through armies, it instead just ignores them because they’re insignificant ants, and it is shown that everything the various military bodies try is ineffectual. The film even has them fail to shut off the nuke they engaged, and the best that could be done was mitigate the blast radius since it could no longer be stopped—that’s the film saying we’re our own destruction. To end, a quote from this film’s version of Dr. Serizawa:

The arrogance of man is thinking nature is in our control and not the other way around. Let them fight.

Though a cultural icon, Godzilla was on hiatus due to decreasing ticket sales. After 20 campy films of a man in a rubber suiting fighting other men in rubber suits, the market finally told Toho that it was no longer interested. After the success of Godzilla (2014), Toho set out to make a new Godzilla that it hoped would recapture the magic of the creature. To this end, they hired Hideaki Anno, the creator of the Evangelion series, to direct. Did Anno hearken back to those 20 campy films of Godzilla fighting Space Godzilla, Megalon, or Jet Jaguar? No, he hearkened back to the original Gojira with his film, Shin Godzilla.

Boy did that decision pay dividends. Shin Godzilla made record-setting numbers at the Japanese box office and was nominated for 11 Japan Academy Awards, of which it won 7 (including Best Picture and Best Director). This film tackled the anti-war, pro-environment messages of the original, but like Gareth Edwards’ film, it added its own spin to these issues. Rather than denouncing nukes, it instead urges us to find a balance, where we don’t sacrifice the environment. This was a wise decision because, let’s face it, the nuclear power is around and will likely still be around; our society wouldn’t be possible with out. The film also talks about how passive America has made Japan, and criticizes the American military (civilians don’t evacuate when Godzilla attacks, but when America sends in its forces, that’s when they run).

That brings us to the film this review is supposed to be about: Godzilla: King of the Monsters. The film fails to adhere to any of the themes of the wider Godzilla franchise, as well as the themes of its own franchise. I’ll just do it in list format:

Environmentalism. The film makes its main bad guys be crazed environmentalists. Why you would do that in a Godzilla film is beyond my understanding. In our modern age where you have climate change deniers, who hold the vast majority of the money and power, why make the villains be the minority group that is trying to effect positive change in the world? That’s like making a film with a Jewish bad guy in late-1930’s Germany. It’s not strictly wrong for you to do it, but read the room, for Christ’s sake. Man cannot control the environment. Well, that one is blown out of the water within the first ten minutes. The McGuffin of the movie literally controls these things which are meant to be avatars of nature’s volatility. Anti-war. Not present in the film at all. In fact, the climax involves Godzilla running toward Ghidorah with a bunch of military vehicles backing him up in what is supposed to be a cathartic moment. So militarization is good! The dangers of nuclear testing. A nuke literally is used to save Godzilla’s life. Nukes are good now! The Americanization of Godzilla. It was very gross to me that Godzilla was presented as a protector of America in this film, working with a bunch of Americans (with the token asian characters). Godzilla was created as a response to what America put Japan through, and then that country embraced Godzilla as its mascot. Seeing him as this film chose to depict him was… offputting, to say the least

Final Verdict

This most recent Godzilla is not worth seeing and I do not look forward to further Americanized bastardizations of a creature born in a very different culture with very different values. Godzilla: King of the Monsters is a fitting sequel to Godzilla (2014) in only one way: it is as much of a mockery to Godzilla as the original American localization of Gojira was in the similarly titled Godzilla: King of the Monsters!

So in the end, it comes back to this: what do I like about Godzilla? Well, were you paying attention?