Not counting public domain characters (like Dracula, Tarzan, Robin Hood, etc.), Godzilla is the world’s longest-running film series. This is the 35th Godzilla movie (!) and you bet your sweet ass that I’ve seen all of them. The good news is that this is easily the best American-made Godzilla movie. The bad news is that that bar hadn’t exactly been set very high by the 1998 and 2014 American movies. This is a perfectly fine, run-of-the-mill Godzilla movie. As somebody that has seen all of these damn things, the problem is that there is nothing here that I haven’t already seen literally dozens of times. It’s like putting a $200 million paint job on an old car. It looks cool, but it still has a whole lot of mileage on it since it debuted in 1954. If you aren’t also a geeky weirdo that has seen one Godzilla movie for every year that you’ve been alive, I imagine that you will find this to be more fresh and entertaining. Somebody let me know.
This is a sequel to the 2014 snoozefest, which concluded with the revelation that Godzilla isn’t the only so-called titan that has been slumbering somewhere on Earth. A group of eco-psychopaths has decided to intentionally wake these things up so that they can save the planet by wiping out a large percentage of mankind. This result in the awakening of monsters all over the world, but most importantly three of Godzilla’s chief enemies/friends: King Ghidorah, Mothra and Rodan. The rest of the movie is basically a monster battle royale with those four as the main combatants.
I will say that this movie seems like a direct response to the criticism of the 2014 movie, specifically that that movie was boring as hell and contained about 5 minutes of actual monster footage. This movie certainly isn’t boring and focuses almost entirely on monster battles. That’s a good thing as, quite frankly, human characters have been an afterthought in this series (except in the original) and I really just want to see ridiculous monster action. So, in that regard, the movie delivers.
Unfortunately, I’ve received this delivery many times before. On one hand, I’m glad that an American movie has finally introduced other classic Toho monsters into the fray. Godzilla has fought many monsters over the years, but King Ghidorah, Mothra and Rodan are easily his most frequent adversaries (or friends, depending on the movie). They are basically Godzilla’s equivalent of Joker, Penguin and Riddler. But I’ve already seen these things fight each other, in every possible configuration and scenario, many times. It just seems ho-hum. Also, this is really just Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah, with Mothra and Rodan in unnecessary extended cameos (this is probably because Warner Bros. license for the characters expires soon, so they wanted to throw in as much as possible). The movie does include brief clips of the monster’s classic music themes, but these are largely teases as they never play the full scores. I’m also disappointed that Mothra is not accompanied by those two hot fairy girls that summon Mothra by singing a song. I assume that this is because that element was considered too silly for modern audiences, but c’mon people. It’s a fucking giant bug fighting a giant, radioactive lizard. Just embrace the silliness because I want the goddamn Mothra song!
On the plus side, the monsters all look really cool and are instantly recognizable versions of their Japanese counterparts. The action scenes are all done very well, even if they are just repeats of stuff from other movies. It is cool to see a mega-budget version of these monsters, but the cosmetic awe wore off pretty quickly on me. The human characters are secondary, as they should be, but the performances are all fine and the cast has a few favorites of mine (Vera Farmiga, Charles Dance and Bradley Whitford). It’s a competently made film and comes from one of my favorite directors nowadays (Michael Dougherty, who directed Trick R’ Treat and Krampus), but it’s just not particularly special or memorable.
In case you’re curious, my favorite Godzilla movies are the 1954 original and Godzilla vs. Destoroyah from 1995. Next year at this time we will be getting Godzilla vs. King Kong, which was also been done before in 1962. However, I’m looking forward to that because 1. I loved Kong: Skull Island and 2. King Kong’s fighting style in the original film consisted entirely of throwing rocks. At the very least, the new version should allow him to do more than that. That’s something, at least.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godzilla:King_of_the_Monsters(2019_film)#/media/File:Godzilla_%E2%80%93_King_of_the_Monsters_(2019)_poster.png
