{"id":7421,"date":"2019-05-29T17:37:05","date_gmt":"2019-05-29T21:37:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/?p=7421"},"modified":"2019-06-01T22:56:49","modified_gmt":"2019-06-02T02:56:49","slug":"review-godzilla-king-of-the-monsters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/?p=7421","title":{"rendered":"Review: GODZILLA: KING OF THE MONSTERS"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Godzilla\u2019s monstrous presence looms large, making little room for a coherent and engaging story.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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If Michael Bay had directed a \u201cGodzilla\u201d movie, it would be \u201cGodzilla: King of the Monsters.\u201d And while another Michael, Michael Doughtery, the one that directed 2015\u2019s \u201cKrampus,\u201d is at the helm of \u201cKing of the Monsters,\u201d he can\u2019t shake the Bay style, the same style that gave us the diminishing returns and bonkers nonsense of the \u201cTransformers\u201d franchise. And toeing the Bay line, in Doughtery\u2019s monster movie, skyscrapers topple, nameless and faceless innocents are crushed to paste, and entire communities are extinguished in bursts of atomic dragon fire. Oh, and there are jokes.

To be fair, \u201cKing of the Monsters\u201d is meant to be ridiculous. The inventive kaiju films were launched back in 1954 and then \u201cAmericanized\u201d in 1956, adding Canadian actor Raymond Burr to essentially narrate the story for US audiences. That 1956 movie was similarly titled \u201cGodzilla, King of the Monsters!.\u201d Although I\u2019ve not seen the original Japanese 1954 cut, I\u2019ve read that it took a much more anti-nuclear position. Of course, given the events in Japan that resulted in their exit from WWII, such a position was understandable. Preserved in this 2019 update is the idea that Godzilla, and other monsters, were awakened by nuclear testing.

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Vera Farmiga and “Stranger Things” star Millie Bobby Brown play a mother and daughter caught in a struggle with the monsters.<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

And in this new, big-budgeted Godzilla film, the third in what\u2019s being referred to as a \u201cMonsterVerse,\u201d universal environmental themes are expanded. The story picks up in the years after the events of 2014\u2019s \u201cGodzilla.\u201d In that movie, Godzilla battled creatures that fed on nuclear energy. The result was destruction of San Francisco.

The drama in 2014\u2019s \u201cGodzilla\u201d focused on military officer Ford Brody (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), whose father, Joe (Bryan Cranston), believed that the nuclear plant disaster that took his wife was caused by a kaiju (monster). That film’s opening, in which a nuclear plant is attacked, is an impressive sequence, filled with effective sentimentality, largely achieved by Cranston\u2019s devoted performance and a brief and emotional appearance by Juliette Binoche.

Unlike the lump in your throat that may have swelled when Cranston\u2019s Joe is forced to make an impossible and heart-wrenching decision, there\u2019s nothing with any serious dramatic weight or impact in \u201cKing of the Monsters.\u201d The latest story focuses on the Russell family, Mark (Kyle Chandler), Emma (Vera Farmiga) and their daughter Madison (\u201cStranger Things\u201d star Millie Bobby Brown). Tragically, we learn that the family\u2019s eldest child was killed in the monster rampage of 2014. Due to the grief and regret, Mark and Emma have become estranged. Madison lives with mom, who works for the extra-governmental crypto-zoological agency Monarch.

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If only the lyrical beauty teased in the trailers translated to the actual feature.<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Emma is a scientist specializing in the study of bioacoustics. Like Mark, she uses sound to understand the behavior of animals. But Emma\u2019s work offers a chance to control the kaiju, and she\u2019s built a device to isolate their bioacoustic signatures. That device, called the ORCA, resembles a portable DJ mixing system complete with XLR outputs. And, as there always are in the movies, there\u2019s only one of them.

When an evil eco-terrorist group, led by mercenary Jonah Alan (the always villainous Charles Dance), gets control of the OCRA, the Monarch team has to stop them. Meanwhile, some 17 kaijus are released including the three-headed King Ghidorah. And as the various monsters emerge from centuries of peaceful slumber, they come under the Ghidorah spell. It\u2019s hell on earth in no time.

As it should be, the best thing about \u201cKing of the Monsters\u201d is the monsters. The human story is weak and distracting. As the Russells and the eclectic Monarch crew race to recapture the ORCA, any logic is thrown to the winds. Monarch is like a low-rent version of Marvel\u2019s S.H.I.E.L.D., that has, it seems, unlimited resources to draw upon. Monarch employees (played by returning Ken Watanabe and Sally Hawkins, along with newcomers Ziyi Zhang, Thomas Middleditch and Bradley Whitford) zip around the world in a massive flying wing. And, when needed, they explore the ocean depths in a military submarine. This happens, I think, without as much as a wardrobe change. Characters pop up, in and out, all over the globe, traveling thousands of miles in what seems like minutes. It\u2019s almost too much to take.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Don\u2019t get me wrong; I know this is a monster movie, and we aren\u2019t supposed to think too hard about anything. But this film barely gets by on spectacle, making it the least intelligent and least entertaining entry to date. It\u2019s sporadically fun, sure, to see the beasts clash, but we\u2019ve seen this kind of thing so many times before, that by the third confrontation, you get a little exhausted. After the umpteenth building crumbles, you might even get a little bored. And since the human characters aren\u2019t engaging, you might even start looking at your watch.

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Globe trotting in the fantastic Argo flying wing is interrupted by Ghidorah.<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cGodzilla: King of the Monsters\u201d is good enough to whet fan appetite for the inevitable blending of this story with that of King Kong. It\u2019s a franchise episode that\u2019s surprisingly not as good as 2017\u2019s \u201cKong: Skull Island,\u201d which featured better looking creatures and a campy Vietnam war tinged mystique. When the next MonsterVerse film hits theaters, let\u2019s hope that as much effort is put into crafting the human story as they do in creating the monster one. Maybe the problem is that Godzilla is such a big presence that there\u2019s no room for anyone or anything else. Maybe it will take Kong to make us care again.

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Godzilla’s gloriously back, but the story’s weaker than ever.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[1522,149,1528,1523,1527,1524,1526,1525,1038],"class_list":["post-7421","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-godzilla","tag-kaiju","tag-king-kong","tag-king-of-the-monsters","tag-kyle-chandler","tag-michael-doughtery","tag-millie-bobby-brown","tag-monsterverse","tag-vera-farmiga","no-thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7421","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7421"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7421\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7450,"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7421\/revisions\/7450"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7421"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7421"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7421"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}