REVIEW: Godzilla: King of the Monsters

Courtesy of Warner Bros.

As the summer movie season continues to bombard audiences with a mind-numbing amount spectacle and explosions, I’m beginning to realize how much Avengers: Endgame spoiled me. Not just how those filmmakers understand what makes blockbusters so enjoyable, but also because they realize that big action sequences don’t matter unless viewers care about the characters involved in them.

That’s a lesson Godzilla: King of the Monsters desperately should’ve learned during the script phase. Instead, the finished product has plenty of interesting creature designs, a few cool battle sequences and a host of terrific actors who stand around without much to do. It’s like the pre-viz team put together the monster fights first and then the screenwriters attempted to cobble a half-baked story around them.

For those who like their monster movies to feel like an eight-year-old kid smashing his expensive toys together, that might not be a bad thing. However, it left me feeling bored and frustrated at the wasted possibilities.

Serving as a continuation of the franchise Warner Bros. is trying to cobble together Marvel-style, King of the Monsters picks up five years after 2014’s Godzilla (the super dour reboot that killed off its most interesting character halfway through) and a few decades after 2017’s Vietnam war-era Kong: Skull Island. If you haven’t seen those installments, it doesn’t really matter – this one’s barely connected to them.

The plot (if you want to call it that) centers on an estranged scientist couple (Kyle Chandler and Vera Farmiga) and their young daughter (Millie Bobby Brown, the breakout star of Netflix’s Stranger Things) who find themselves at the center of a worldwide monster attack. Giant creatures – including Mothra, Rodan and Ghidorah – are destroying cities and killing people all over the globe and it’s soon apparent that someone or something is controlling them.

Now these scientists and their colleagues (including Ken Watanabe, Ziyi Zhang, Bradley Whitford, Sally Hawkins, Thomas Middleditch, O’Shea Jackson Jr. and Anthony Ramos) must figure out how to stop them before they destroy humanity. Hint: it involves the giant lizard in the movie’s title.

The most maddening aspect of King of the Monsters – and there are far too many to get into here – is that director Michael Dougherty and his co-screenwriter Zach Shields completely squander a phenomenal, willing cast. Actors like Chandler, Farmiga and Whitford (who deserves a medal for injecting much-needed humor into this 135-minute slog) do what they can to make their characters behave like real people, but the script kneecaps them at every turn. Even more infuriating is how they waste Brown, one of the most promising young actresses around, in a damsel-in-distress role that basically has her screaming and/or sitting in a series of rooms.

Motivations change on a whim: someone who’s a villain in one scene is a hero in another, or a vital mission suddenly becomes unimportant when it’s time for another cool monster to show up. Or a recognizable character actor like Joe Morton pops up halfway through the movie for a seemingly vital scene (I mean, why else hire the guy from Terminator 2 and Scandal, right?) but then he disappears, never to be seen again.

What’s more, the rules of ogic, physics and geography play no part in the story. I know, I know… “You critics think everything has to be art. Just turn off your brain and enjoy the awesome monsters!” Trust me, I tried. I love a fun, dumb movie as much as the next guy. But it’s really hard to focus when Jackson (so great in Straight Outta Compton and the recent Long Shot, but relegated to snarky reactions here) plays a solider who apparently has the ability to teleport.

In the span of a few minutes, the character appears in Bermuda, Antarctica and Mexico, with no indication that a significant amount of time has passed. To say it’s distracting is a massive understatement. In other scenes, characters survive explosions that should’ve disintegrated them or have them dying from radiation poisoning. Again, I get that it’s a mindless action flick; but if that’s the case, don’t have one of your characters explicitly state the dangers of radiation exposure and then ignore it a few seconds later.

Here’s hoping that the next installment, Godzilla vs. Kong, currently scheduled to hit theaters next March, aims for the bonkers tone of Kong: Skull Island than whatever confusing mishmash “King of the Monsters turned out to be. I also desperately hope they give returning actors Chandler and Brown far more compelling things to do than stand around and frown.

Godzilla: King of the Monsters is rated PG-13 for sequences of monster action violence and destruction, and for some language.

Grade: D+