Godzilla. One of the longest running film franchises in history. Dozens of movies with people in rubber suits bashing each other, while the audience tries to believe they are giant monsters near the size of Trypticon.
Over the last 20 years Western film companies have tried to have a crack at portraying the big fella using CGI. There was the terrible 1998 movie with Matthew Broderick (he should have made Ferris Buller and then retired) which was so maligned that no one in the US dared have another go for another 16 years. The 2014 Godzilla movie was better, but out of a 2 hour movie Godzilla was on screen for less than 12 minutes, which irritated fans who wanted to see more of him and less of the other monsters.
So here we are in 2019 and a sequel to the 2014 movie has been made. Godzilla: King of the Monsters, is the third Western-Based Godzilla movie and picks up 5 years after the last film. And something has happened.
Something amazing.
Something incredible!
Something stupendous!
THE WORLD FINALLY HAS A KICK-ARSE GODZILLA MOVIE!
This movie is AWESOME! I mean it is really damn good! No rubber suited monsters bashing into each other like the old days. No drawn out plots where they either totally discard what has come before or else never show you Godzilla. This Godzilla movie is giant monster balls to the wall action from start to finish, leaving the audience happy yet drained after getting such a huge huge monster fix.
The Plot
Let’s be frank, any plot in a Godzilla film is simply there to facilitate reasons for giant monsters to fight each other. This film is no different. Godzilla has been lurking under the ocean for the last 5 years, monitored by Monarch. Monarch is a worldwide organization that monitors Titans (giant monsters). All are asleep bar Godzilla, and Mothra who is just beginning to hatch and go into her larval stage. Without going into painful detail about all the things that happen in a two hour movie the synopsis is that one of the scientists has figured out how to communicate with Titans via a box that makes noises they respond to – The Orca. She then goes nuts with a bunch of other nutters and goes around the world trying to wake them all up so that they can ‘restore the natural order’ that humanity has stuffed up.
This plan goes (predictably) wrong. They wake up Ghidorah, who it turns out is not part of the natural order (being from space and everything) who as an Alpha wakes up all the other Titans on his own terms, via sonic noises, and orders them to start destroying the world, essentially terraforming it for his own needs. Of course Godzilla, being the other Alpha, doesn’t take kindly to this and lots of fights ensure.
Plenty of other stuff in the movie involving human families and governments and history, but honestly the above is really all you need to know.
The Visuals
F*cking superb! None of this crap where the monsters are hidden in fog or smoke or behind a building half the time. There are right out there where you can see them and they are BIG. I don’t think any Godzilla movie has portrayed such a sense of scale before! Godzilla is that big that destroyed aircraft wreckage lands on his shoulder like a speck of dirt and he doesn’t even notice. Ghidorah is f*cking MASSIVE! And looks friggin scary as! If I had been one of the humans in that movie my mantra would have been “Let’s get to the other side of the planet and hide under the biggest rock we can find right f*cking now!” The special effects are done excellently too, mainly portrayed as the different energy blasts the Titans aim at each other, but it’s certainly the CGI monsters that steal the show.
The Sound Effects
Ya gotta love that Godzilla’s roar has hardly changed over the last 70 years. Think of the roar from the T-Rex in Jurassic Park but dialled up to 11. Thankfully the noises made by the other monsters such as Ghidorah and Mothra have been updated and sound appropriate to creatures that size, rather than random keys on a synthesizer. Big, loud, deafening, that’s what one should expect from a movie like this and that is what you get.
The Lore
Now I am one of those geeks that actually knows a great deal of the Godzilla lore. And this movie has really done its best to keep faithful to what has come before. Yes it’s ridiculous lore but it’s about giant monsters so if you don’t like it – what did you expect? Everything from a Mothra being reborn/hatched when the previous one dies, Godzilla feeding on nuclear power and Ghidorah being able to regenerate heads and coming from space – it’s all faithful to what has come before. The only new thing for a classic character added is Rodan being born of fire – he comes out of a volcano with smoking wings and even appears to have some kind of heated plasma for blood. But given in the past all he was was a flying lizard, it’s quite a nice addition for him. There are also some new Titans on the scene in very minor roles, which adds to the ever expanding creature cast list for the franchise.
So worth a watch?
Hells yes it is! I’d say this is the best Godzilla movie ever made by far! But it still isn’t perfect by any stretch. The pacing is great with the exception of a prolonged sequence where Monarch try to revive Godzilla later in the movie – this could have easily been cut to save 20 unnecessary minutes. There was a bit too much human interest in the final fight scenes – it detracts from the action by constantly cutting to them trying to save a main characters daughter, when at this point you really just wanna watch the monsters fight. The Orca plot device is relied upon too heavily as well, too much of what happens in the movie is based around a machine that looks like it should be sat on the back seat of a Delorian.
But these are minor quibbles. This is what a Godzilla movie is meant to be! Brilliant action sequences of giant monsters squaring off and that is what you get. No waiting for an hour for them to put in an appearance, it gets going pretty quick and from that point on pretty often. Mothra and Rodan are both done very well; it speaks to the size of this movie that Rodan, who not only takes out dozens of fighter jets by performing an aerial spin, but completely decimates a city simply by flying over it, is definitely a supporting player. It now remains to be seen if the third movie which is slated to come out next year, where Godzilla versus Kong, has a hope of comparing to the catastrophic creature carnage that this flick gives you in spades.
Go get your Zilla on baby! And watch out for Ghidorah – he’s one bad Mothra F*cka!
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