Godzilla: King of the Monsters could have been the ultimate Summer popcorn movie… a movie that would have been just out and out non-stop mindless action had it not been for the boring tiny people in it. As it is now, it’s mindless action movie with multiple stops… thanks to the people.
Darn you, people!
Honestly, I could not have cared less about the human elements in this movie. In my opinion, the dad character was boring, the mother character was irredeemable, and the kid character was dumb as a brick. I don’t want to give away why I think this way, but let’s just say it’s a case of the follower realizing they’re an idiot three hours after the deadline and five hours after everyone else figured it out.
Contrast this with the human element in the 2014 Godzilla movie. I actually cared about the dad trying to get home to his family and ultimately joining the fight against the monsters to protect them. It hurt when he lost his mom and his dad. I cared… because he wasn’t an idiot or less interesting than a potato.
Beyond the human story that completely doesn’t work, we’ve got a kooky crazy silly monster movie that quite literally throws everything it has at the theater screen and does not give the slightest care if it sticks or not. You like Mothra? You got Mothra. You like King Ghidorah and Rodan? You’ve got that too. You like other monsters? You’ve got them… Only for a few seconds, but you’ve got them. I grew up watching these guys, so I was grinning like an idiot watching the classic monsters get a modern Hollywood special effects makeover, but to someone who’s not familiar, the movie does not care to explain Jack or squat.
Wait, so is this what it’s like to watch Detective Pikachu and actually know what the monsters are and what they do? It makes so much sense now!
You go to a Godzilla movie to watch monsters fight and stomp a city to the ground… that’s it. Granted, every now and then, you get a movie that throws in some actual interesting story like Godzilla 2014, but most of the time, the expectation is simple carnage and property damage. Godzilla: King of the Monsters does its best to meet those expectations, but ruins it by insisting on a human-led story that brings the film to a grinding stop every time the drama unfolds.
I await the ultimate edit of this movie where the humans are excised from the movie and all we get are 30 glorious minutes of monster mayhem. It will be such a marked improvement.
Jason Gaston 