Review: Godzilla: King of the Monsters Swings Erratically for the Fences

The film is frustrating in the end for reaffirming the traditional blockbuster’s allegiance to human perseverance.

Godzilla: King of the Monsters
Photo: Warner Bros.

Despite its impersonal character work, Gareth Edwards’s Godzilla shrewdly used its humans to help ground the film in a recognizable reality. Its images of creatures towering over and smashing through skyscrapers emphasized their godlike nature. That film’s haunting majesty is evident in spots throughout Godzilla: King of the Monsters, but Michael Dougherty’s sequel is closer in spirit to the films in the Godzilla series that immediately followed Ishiro Honda’s original. Here, the atmosphere of existential terror that pervaded Edwards’s film is largely replaced by a more crowd-pleasing emphasis on action as a smorgasbord of monsters collide with the giant lizard in a series of epic battles.

For a time, King of the Monsters is in lockstep with many of its predecessors for wearing its allegorical heart on its sleeve, understanding these monsters to bring a reckoning for so much devastation caused by humans. Monarch, the clandestine organization devoted to studying and preserving the “titans” discovered in increasing numbers around the world, sees a creature like Godzilla as a natural component of the Earth’s immune system, capable of restoring balance to the planet’s ecosystems. It’s an idea that Monarch scientist Emma Russell (Vera Farmiga) takes to extreme lengths when, armed with a titan-summoning sonar device, she sets about waking the dormant monsters in order to bring about a great cleansing. The film, then, is part of a growing trend of blockbusters to embrace absolution for the human race, and the primitive, bestial carnage of the titans makes them well suited to embody the unpremeditated, unfeeling nature with which the planet might rid itself of us.

Unfortunately, it isn’t long before the film gets fatally bogged down in thin character drama, emphasizing the conflict between Emma and her ex-husband, Mark (Kyle Chandler), over their shared grief over losing a child in Godzilla and of Emma kidnapping their surviving daughter, Maddie (Millie Bobby Brown). Scenes of Mark talking about finding Maddie are redundant to the point of parody, and Emma doesn’t exactly make for an effective villain, as she blanches at her own plan almost immediately after setting it into motion. The film also leans into the idea propagated by many of the older Godzilla sequels: that the monster is inherently benevolent. That was an impression that was compellingly muddied by Edwards’s film, which suggested that any salvation Godzilla brought to humans was the incidental result of the beast’s biological imperative to enforce its alpha status over its rivals.

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When King of the Monsters arrives at its moments of pure spectacle, however, it’s as though the visuals are directly countering the deficiencies and questionable thematic turns of Dougherty and Zach Shields’s screenplay. When Monarch scientists aren’t debating Godzilla’s benevolence, we see the monster simply asserting itself against the titans that Emma frees, particularly King Ghidorah, a three-headed alien dragon freed from a glacier in Antarctica. The film takes pains to suggest that Godzilla is a force of good, only to then casually dispel that notion as the monster moves through human terrain, bringing down skyscrapers with spectacular ease and blasting apart entire blocks with his atomic fire breath.

The clashes between Godzilla and Ghidorah are hellish conflagrations of lightning and fire. Elsewhere, such details as the gales of superheated wind and volcanic ash emitted by the flying monster Rodan as it soars over cities and swats fighter jets speak to the futility of human intervention against such gigantic creatures. The action sequences are never incomprehensible, but the sight of beasts fighting each other as cities collapse around them is certainly overwhelming. There’s a nightmarish beauty to these battles that epitomizes a nihilism buried under the more sentimental heroics with which Godzilla has been saddled.

Dougherty lacks Edwards’s painterly skill but retains that filmmaker’s sense of scale. Even the film’s perfunctory incorporation of a self-contained mythology—about ancient death cults devoted to city-leveling eldritch creatures—brings a pulpy Lovecraftian edge to the story. At its best, the film is a rare American blockbuster that paints a wide-ranging picture of humans robbed of agency, reminding us that we’re scarcely masters of our own fate. Which makes it all the more frustrating when King of the Monsters sets about undermining the bleakness of that message by reaffirming the traditional blockbuster’s allegiance to human perseverance. The film’s inability to decide whether Godzilla is a guardian angel or an uncaring, almost deist supreme being zaps the franchise of its captivating, humbling depiction of humans being insignificant compared to the powerful might of Earth’s self-persevering whims.

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Score: 
 Cast: Kyle Chandler, Vera Farmiga, Millie Bobby Brown, Bradley Whitford, Sally Hawkins, Charles Dance, Thomas Middleditch, O’Shea Jackson Jr., David Strathairn, Ken Watanabe  Director: Michael Dougherty  Screenwriter: Michael Dougherty, Zach Shields  Distributor: Warner Bros.  Running Time: 132 min  Rating: PG-13  Year: 2019  Buy: Video, Soundtrack

Jake Cole

Jake Cole is an Atlanta-based film critic whose work has appeared in MTV News and Little White Lies. He is a member of the Atlanta Film Critics Circle and the Online Film Critics Society.

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