Sometimes when you go to the cinema to see a big summer blockbuster you find yourself watching something so silly that you end up beaten into submission and pinned to your chair by a combination of CGI onslaught and noise. I felt like this during Godzilla : King Of The Monsters earlier. I felt like this during the 2014 Godzilla film too. I enjoyed the earlier film in the moment but this one was just deadening. It might look pretty as a picture in places but it's bombast and stupidity just left me numb. And I'm not taking about the monster stuff.
The world is still rattled by the massive monster (Kaiju) attacks of 2014. San Francisco got it especially bad when a colossal lizard by the name of Godzilla (a bastardisation of the Japanese word Gojira) fought another monster to protect humanity. A human casualty of that disaster was the son of Emma (Vera Farmiga) & Mark Russell (Kyle Chandler). They were once a pair of scientists working for an organisation called Monarch who dedicated themselves to tracking down and securing the Kaiju. When Emma and her daughter Madison (Millie Bobby Brown) are kidnapped by a gang of eco-terrorists intent on freeing the other Kaiju led by the fearsome 3 headed Ghodirah, Mark finds himself thrust back into a world he had left behind. The only weapons the good guys have are the mighty Godzilla and a colossal flying beast called Mothra. But will they be able to take on what the terrorists have unleashed on the earth?
This is the 35th Godzilla film to be made so far. 32 of them are Japanese and 3 have emerged from Hollywood. This one is definitely the most lavish of the lot but despite all the money it lobs at the screen and all the star power involved it's lacking the one vital ingredient the low budget Japanese films had in spades, namely fun. In a film where a massive fire breathing lizard and a gigantic moth take on a humongous 3 headed dragon in the middle of Boston you'd expect some bit of a thrill wouldn't you? It's not an unreasonable ask is it? One of the joys of the Japanese takes was their low budget charm. Watching men in rubber monster suits duking it out in the middle of a collapsing cardboard city could never fail to be endearing. Godzilla 2019 has the same thing but it's all CGI and no substance. There's no heft or oomph. And there's way too much focus on the humans running around the place. Way too much. Amazingly the silliest parts of a movie about giant scrapping monsters come from the human side of things.
You get the feeling the screenwriters created the big moments first and then decided to fill the gaps as an afterthought. Huge gaps in logic are frequent, decisions and actions make no sense, important plot points appear from nowhere. A fine cast gamely (Vera Farmiga, Kyle Chandler and Ken Watanabe are the standouts while talent like Sally Hawkins, Zhang Ziyi and David Strathairn are totally wasted) tries with poor material but we just aren't here to see them, we're here to see the titular character in all his glory and every time we cut away from him to bumbling politicians or troubled teens feels like an annoyance.
One thing the film does do well though is explaining why the Kaiju do what they do (lil poem there). The creature in the original 1954 Gojira film was a metaphor for the destructive power of nuclear weapons, being released only 9 years after the twin bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima while the other kaiju stood in for numerous other societal concerns. Godzilla has always been a force of nature who fought for the good of the planet and in 2019 he feels especially topical as climate change takes it's toll on our world. It's just a pity he can't save the planet in a way that feels......you know.....a bit more fun. That's why we go to blockbusters. Fun. As Andrew WK once said "We want fun and you better believe it! We want fun 'cause we desperately need it!"
If you think you'll hate this then you most definitely will. If you think you might enjoy this then you probably won't. The thrill of huge beasts scrapping it out might be tempting but once again the filmmakers have decided to let all the battles take place at night or in the midst of howling storms meaning you can barely see what's going on anyway. Why obscure what we all came to see?
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