Movie Review: ‘Godzilla: King of the Monsters’ Blu-ray Is Spectacle, But Not Spectacular

by | Aug 22, 2019 | Movie Reviews, Movies | 0 comments

I had heard quite a bit from the crowd of monster movie nerds online (of which I fit in nicely) that ‘Godzilla: King of the Monsters’ was the Kaiju fighting movie that finally got it right. Well, to an extent this is true, but the movie is still marred by a number of issues. One of which, is simply that the massive battles just don’t last long enough. Sure, there is plenty of fighting going on, but most of it is in the background and the shots of actual fighting lasts just a few seconds. Now, those are some cool seconds, but they don’t matter much if you don’t care about the human characters in the foreground. And that’s where the movie falters.

A plethora of fantastic actors are thrown at us to make us care about what’s going on in this film. And every single one of them do a fine job of selling the weak script. Ken Watanabe and Sally Hawkins get to make talking head speeches to scientists. Kyle Chandler gets to be really emotional. Vera Farmiga plays around a bit with making the illogical as logical as possible. And Millie Bobby Brown gets to be the one person who actually seems to do what makes sense. Yet, making sense is only part of the problem.

The plot here picks up after the previous ‘Godzilla’ movie and revolves around a family of scientists that lost their son in the San Francisco battle that ended that film. It turns out that the parents are both scientists and they both are associated with the Monarch group that has developed into the ultimate monster hunters. The mother, Emma (Farmiga), is creating a sound wave that can help control the monsters. The father, Mark (Chandler), is globe trotting and trying to convince Monarch to destroy all the monsters. Their storylines converge when a group of mercenaries help release a monster and then Godzilla comes to save the day.

I can’t really reveal the twist in this movie, but I can tell you that it involves these characters and it’s just kind of ridiculous. However, I could have gone along with it if the movies characters had been more interesting. Honestly, there is so much time in this movie just spent with scientists explaining things that the characters get lost in the shuffle. The only one that truly resonates is the daughter of Emma and Mark. Madison (Brown) seems to fill the role of the normal human being and this is much needed considering half the damn world gets destroyed.

Then again, maybe we didn’t need that. Maybe we just needed to see Godzilla kick ass and keep the human characters in the background. Possibly, they could have just stuck to the stunning imagery that made the trailer my favorite of last year! Personally, I would have just rather had more time with relationships and more time watching the monsters actually fight. There is plenty of spectacle here, but not much feels very spectacular.

Nathan Ligon