Godzilla: King Of Monsters - Review

To be honest, I wasn't expecting much, but I'll admit I was expecting a bit more than this. Yes, I got a ton of action, special effects and all the giant monster carnage you could want. However, every movie needs a story, and Godzilla: King of Monsters simply didn't have one. At least one that makes sense, or has characters in it you care about. In a movie where Godzilla is fighting a three headed dragon monster with destruction all around, boredom is not the feeling I want to have in that moment, but that is the perfect word to define this movie, "boring".

The main reason why I wanted this movie to end while watching it were the characters. I have started to notice a trend in big blockbuster movies recently and that is that movies often like to skip the character development stages in their scripts. They give us one scene and suddenly expect us to instantly know all about the character and care about their struggle. The movie starts off in the wreckage of San Francisco after the climax of the first movie and we see Kyle Chandler and Vera Farmiga walking around the wreckage and screaming for someone named Andrew. We then cut to 5 years later and we see a girl look at a photo with Kyle Chandler and Vera Farmiga and a boy we haven't seen before. So naturally, we assume that this boy is Andrew and that he was killed in the finale of the last movie. That is all the character development we get. So later on when other characters would refer to this family, we have no idea what they are talking about because we never got to know them! Someone will say, "Can't be! She would never do that!" and I would go, "Why not? How do I know that? I know nothing about these people! She could do something like that? Why do I care again?" Now I can enjoy movies with underwritten characters if they have charisma, charm and likability, but you won't find that here. This movie needed a Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum duo or something along those lines. The group of characters we have here do nothing to hold up the story or hold our interest throughout the runtime of this stinker.

So with boring characters, we also have motivations that flip flop like crazy, character decisions that make no sense, extremely cheesy dialogue and exposition and one of the worst ex machina moments I have ever seen in a movie. There were many times I threw up my arms in confusion and put my face in my hands in utter disgust.

However, I know that this movie's selling point is not the characters and the story, it's seeing giant monsters fight each other with tons of destruction and mayhem. Luckily, there is definitely a ton of that here and it is fun to see. However, part of me just knows that given an entertaining story with characters we like and care about, these scenes would have been sensational. One scene in particular where the human are in some super high tech aircraft trying to outrun a fire demon monster through a hurricane like storm. The music is loud and brudding, the action is intense and the threat is real. If I geniunely cared about the people on the ship, it would have been amazing. For now, we can simply say that the effects and action all look great, but don't feel great.

So overall, yes, there is some extremely intense action in this movie which I did enjoy seeing. However, I enjoyed nothing else an even with all the action, It's just not worth it.