G Watch: Godzilla - King of the Monsters (2019)

that's a spicy meatball!

Watched:  12/22/2023

Format:  Bluray

Viewing:  Second

Director:  Michael Dougherty

I'm slowly making my way through Apple+'s Monarch series - more on that in a future post - and was curious how it was matching up to the 2014 Godzilla movie, the foundation of Legendary's Monsterverse franchise.  And then I saw the BluRay for the follow up was on sale for cheap when I was looking for Godzilla vs. Kong on disc.  And, so it was, that I watched 2019's Godzilla: King of the Monsters.  

Here's my theory about this very long and subpar movie:

They started with the title and reverse engineered everything from there.  

I have no real evidence to back this up, but it does seem that with the success of 2014's Godzilla, Legendary decided that they would move forward with a "Monsterverse" which would include Kong: Skull Island and then a slate of other films, arriving periodically and nowhere near as aggressively as Marvel.  I can imagine the braintrust at Legendary saying "so, the American title for the original Gojira was Godzilla: King of the Monsters.  Can we re-use that?  And, if so, what does that mean?"  Americans love to eliminate ambiguity and poetry in favor of being very on-the-nose.

So, you'd have to have a movie in which Godzilla subjugates the other monsters, and is shown to be their "king".  I guess.  But Godzilla movies always had this one monster that I think we can agree was the biggest asshole of all the Godzilla monsters, King Ghidorah/ Monster Zero.  So now you have two "kings" and you have your fight all set up.  

Write in some scenes that will look rad in a trailer, come up with human characters that will crack wise and add the element of human drama, and there you go.

Look, the human stories in Godzilla movies from Toho haven't always been great.  Having a great story about people on the ground has been what's set Godzilla Minus One apart as discussed here and here.  And, man, after a dud of a decision to focus on entirely the wrong character in Godzilla in 2014 I get why they decided to make it a family drama.  But I hate this family and I don't care what happens to them.  And that's amazing because the cast is Kyle Chandler, Vera Farmiga and Millie Bobby Brown.  You have to work to make the audience ambivalent about these people, and, boy, do they.

But, boy howdy, do they not just have those characters.  And boy howdy do they want us to believe that there's a thing called Monarch that has trillions in government funding, legally-not-helicarriers and quinjets, The movie starts off telling us Monarch and the military do not get along, but then proceeds to forget that is part of the plot, and it's basically one big thing for the rest of the movie's runtime.

With this combo of "Monarch + Military" we get a returning David Straithairn, Ken Watanabe and Sally Hawkins, and the addition of Ziyi Zhang, Bradley Whitford, Thomas Middleditch, O'Shea Jackson, Anthony Ramos, Aisha Hinds, and.. my god...  I had no idea who we were supposed to care about or focus on.  Because, really, all these people do is look at screens and bellow Animal Planet facts their five-year-olds interpreted for them at each other.  It literally doesn't matter what anyone says or does in the endless, dark and blue scenes with these characters looking at and standing in front of screens...  (Monarch seems to exist primarily to keep the monitor business thriving), because the entire human "story" sucks.  This movie goes on for over two hours, and I knew no one's name or what their deal was.  They have no arcs, they have no separate identities except for the dysfunctional family.

None of these are characters, they're not even archetypes.  They're placeholders of humans to deliver technical mumbo jump to make this feel like a movie for grown-ups and drop the kind of dialog that keeps inserting the obvious joke your brain cooks up when you're 13 but don't say out loud by 16.  "King Ghidorah"  "Did she say gonnorreah?".   HA HA HA.  That is a joke!  And someone told it!

I accept that these people all want a paycheck.  I really do.  I want Sally Hawkins to live in luxury.  But this is a movie that takes someone of her caliber and then has her mostly just stand there.  I think she has like five lines in the movie.  But if it means she could buy that beach house, good for her.

The movie also is victim to inventing something that would absolutely change the entire world and basically mean no more sequels.  From what they say, it could also possibly impact all life on Earth forever.  They've created a magic computer box that allows people to talk to animals or "Titans" and tell them things which they then fight or do.  The implications are fucking staggering.  But because this is a movie, (a) Kyle Chandler who invented it doesn't think it should be used for absolutely no reason and at complete odds with him being a victim of the 2014 attack.  And (b) there is only one box and no plans on a Google Drive somewhere to build a second.  Nor is the science that led to the box reproducible.  And, btw, the box saves the day multiple times in the movie.  

The main human story is compelling on paper.  SPOILERS.  Kyle Chandler wandered off as a dad after his son was killed in 2014, leaving Vera Farmiga to raise Millie Bobby Brown - and Farmiga has gone rogue, teaming up with Eco-terrorist Charles Dance (who has three lines in the movie and no motivation) and they've decided that what Earth needs is a good razing at the hands of the monsters.  Which, I mean, it takes all stripes.  And once MBB realizes fully what her mom is up to, is sort of surly until she steals the Magic Box and walks out of a secret facility (apparently no one at the door making sure they aren't invaded) and walks all the fucking way to Fenway Park (home of the Green Monster, natch).  

But we don't ever get to know anyone.  I have no idea who Farmiga is, or really how this is the decision came to after watching SF flattened and her child die.  I don't get why she thinks she'll control ancient, titanic beasts with her tiny machine.  Or how she knows how to speak monster.  

But you came for the monster fights?

Well, fuck you.  Because we're going to hide all of that in clouds, smoke, fire and off-screen while we watch people have funny debates in front of screens.  You want to see Godzilla fight King Ghidorah in a $200 million movie?  How about we watch that happen sort of vaguely in the background while we look for MBB in the rain instead?  

Like I say, I think they came up with lots of shots for the trailer, so we have very "iconic" shots in the movie, and that's what they want rather than monster action.  Ghidorah spreading his wings, Godzilla coming up on the shore in Boston with the might of the military at his back... it's all very *cool*.  And the kind of thing that works better than what action movies were doing endlessly for about twenty years there, which is just show shit happening like a camera was taped to a truck and then that truck was thrown down the street near an action sequence (see: Michael Bay films).  I will choose not to make fun of the shot of Ghidorah behind a cross on a steeple shoved into frame, but not every idea in the movie works.

The movie also suffers from having to subtly set up wherever the producers were planning to go with all this.  We've learned of Monarch in Kong: Skull Island (when it seems like the total Monarch budget was about $200K), and we've learned now that there was an ancient culture that once lived in harmony with the Titans - which is now Atlantis-ized, I suppose.  And that Godzilla basically eats nukes.

I won't get into stuff said that contradicts what they're doing with the TV show, but okay.  

They also want to play with their Toho toys - licensing Godzilla, Rodan, Mothra and King G for this one, but then deciding some things work - three headed lightning dragons and very large moths - while other things are silly (the entire Infant Island culture that birthed Mothra in the Toho films) and should be avoided.  Their line for what will break American audiences is weird and arbitrary.

There are beats in this movie that absolutely work, but they also last seconds at a time in comparison to the overall runtime of the film.  But in a movie with approximately 30 characters, it would be nice to like even the kid in the movie, and I'm not sure we ever really feel more than ambivalent toward MBB, scientifically proven to be a likable actor.

I think the FX are great when they don't hide them behind smoke or fog.  King G is properly a dick and they move his heads from time to time like they're marionette heads.  Godzilla may be a chonk, but when he charges up, it's still thrilling, and I buy his ancient beef with King G.  The set design of Atlantis is bananas and fun as is feeding G with a bomb.  That Atomic Blast thing at the end they give G to do is rad.

I guess it's okay to see the other monsters bowing before Godzilla at the end, if a little weird.  I don't know that I love them literally showing it.  Or the space-time breaking methodology of the Big Mastodon to somehow get across the ocean to Boston.  But whatever, this is a movie about huge monsters.

Look, if I'm particularly hard on this movie, it's for two reasons:  (1) Clearly an ungodly amount of money was thrown at this film to assemble everything needed, from sets to cast to hiring the army of CGI specialists.  (2)  This was a sequel.  They could have applied lessons from the first movie, and they chose to just apply some boring Hollywood rules to try to patch over the problems rather than coming back and doing something to make anyone care other than people who just get excited seeing FX on the screen in front of them.  

If the first movie is a sci-fi films, this one is a disaster film, and it bares all the hallmarks of why the genre is not hugely popular.  It's remarkable that on Kong vs. Godzilla, they basically finally figured it out.

BTW - MBB is directly responsible in this movie for destroying all of Boston.  Just saying.