There is a point in the new Godzilla film where one of the human characters looks at another human character and whispers the words: “You’re a monster.”
The entire theater around me burst into laughter, much to my relief. Because all metaphors in this film are legitimately hilarious.
If you really like monster battles, and that’s all you came for, you might enjoy this latest Godzilla flick. There have been complaints from some quarters that there are too many monster mashes at the expense of character work, but that’s not true. If anything, having more monster fights would have distracted the audience from the larger problem in the film—all of the characters in this movie are missing their brains. They do not behave like real people whatsoever, and that’s not for lack of screen time. It’s entirely intentional on part of the film, which could have been a legitimate choice if the movie hadn’t wasted so much time pretending that it wanted us to care about said characters. (On a side note, please stop giving Ken Watanabe parts in films like these. Not to ever begrudge an actor a paycheck, but he deserves so much more, he is literally one of the best actors of our era and everyone is wasting him.)
Most of the actors in this film are playing modified versions of characters they’ve already played before in other movies, so they’re not required to do much heavy lifting. You know these people, and either already like them, or you don’t. Millie Bobby Brown is just here to prove she should be in more movies after Stranger Things, which was already a given. Bradley Whitford is here to make people laugh, and he does okay with it, but he’s not as effective as Charlie Day in Pacific Rim with the same type of character. The soundtrack by Bear McCreary is gorgeous, so that’s something to legitimately look forward to.
This Godzilla is a sequel to 2014’s Godzilla and the third installment in Legendary’s “MonsterVerse” that’s slowly been building up. This film centers itself around yet another largely hapless (and again white, suburban, middle class) family who believes they can understand the monsters and their purpose better than a multitude of professionals around them with more knowledge and experience than they’ve ever dreamed. But at the end of the day, that’s what this film is about: being aggressively ignorant in the face of certain doom. Knowledge is not important in Godzilla: King of the Monsters. In fact, knowledge is actively sidestepped in the most egregious ways possible. There’s a point where the characters find an underwater city, and one of the characters says “This looks Egyptian… or maybe Roman.” These two societies and their art and architecture are really not similar at all, but that’s his best guess. Cool.
I cannot stress enough how aggravating it is that the filmmakers chose to frame this MonsterVerse around nuclear power. The fear of nuclear devastation is only one metaphor that Godzilla is steeped in, and it’s not even the first or most interesting one. Godzilla works best when the monster stands as a metaphor for how rapidly the world is changing around us, and how little we can control. Godzilla is best when it represents the raw power of nature and its indifference to human plans and ambition. The movie clearly thinks it’s saying this by batting around the (ultimately incorrect) concept that Godzilla and the other monsters are solutions to how we’re destroying the planet with pollution and war, but this is not a cake you can have and eat too—the last film makes it clear that these monsters are powered by nuclear energy, at which point, you are literally saying that the answer to humanity’s problems is “drop a bunch of nukes on bad things”. It doesn’t matter if Godzilla is harnessing that energy and using it consciously because that concept literally makes no sense whatsoever. The only takeaway possible is that nuclear power is extremely useful for killing off all threats to humanity, which is a wildly unethical and thoughtless stance to take.
Also, at this point, the entire earth should be completely devastated from monster attacks and several nuclear events, so how do we even have a planet to protect? The idea of Godzilla working in symbiosis with humanity is great, but not when you don’t bother to consider how planetwide devastation works. This is part of the reason why the best film in Legendary’s MonsterVerse has been Kong: Skull Island—the action of the film was isolated and thought through, and the insistence on painting more complicated characters was actually well considered so that it jived with the film’s plot.
This is without calling attention to the most irritating flub of the entire film: the insistence that pack animals have an “alpha”. First off, Godzilla is not the same species as his monster pals, so calling them a pack is something that requires more explanation than what we’re given. Second, and it really needs to be emphasized, the entire concept of alpha animals was an error that has been disproved over and over. It’s bad science, and it reinforces really screwy hierarchical thinking in humans. And that’s without adding an extra, seismic error into the film’s central conceit: Godzilla cannot be the world’s alpha monster and exist in symbiosis with the rest of us. These two concepts are fundamentally averse, but the film keeps insisting that it’s truth anyhow. Sure, it’s a movie, and sure, movies don’t have to have perfect science. I love handwaving that stuff. But these concepts are so basic and widespread, there’s really no excuse for using them in a movie. This easily could have been smarter. It wouldn’t have taken that much thought at all.
On the plus side, knowing that Godzilla vs. Kong is on the way in 2020, I do have a preference for the victor after that mealy, soggy mush of a film. Team Kong, all the way.
Emmet Asher-Perrin still wants to know how everyone in that film isn’t dead of radiation poisoning. You can bug him on Twitter, and read more of her work here and elsewhere.
Stop trying to make the human characters part of the story, in a Kaiju battle flick their job is to stand on the sidelines and narrate the battle.
Also, for the love of god everybody in movies right now, just film using bright blue skies and sunny days. CGI cloudscapes and murky night-scenes are the new skybeam.
If you really like monster battles, and that’s all you came for, you might enjoy this latest Godzilla flick.
I can work with that.
Dubious science in a kaiju film? What is the world coming to?
If the science was accurate, or even plausible, there would be no movie. It’s not that kind of concept.
Where the nuclear power thing does work as a metaphor is that nuclear is perhaps the best hope we have at consistent, green energy.
My problem with the 2014 Godzilla is that once Brian Cranston’s character died, all of the film’s energy went with him. Oh, look–there’s another generic family of wooden actors! (And is it too much to hope for some Miki Saegusa? Surely Japan would have created a Kaiju Self Defence Force, or at the very least be a part of the UN Godzilla Countermeasures Center!)
Yeah, I wish they’d give up on human characters in these things. It would be an interesting experiment anyway — a blockbuster type movie with no dialogue, only roars. And hopefully… dancing.
This happens when there’s a sequel of a sequel of sequel…
@6 I don’t know why Hollywood thinks that we think that soldiers are actually interesting protagonists for literally every single movie. I swear, we’re about one Hollywood Brunch away from a reboot of Annie where Annie is an ex marine sharp shooter too. Why does every Hollywood script pitch have to start with the MC being in the military or just out of it?
“Relies on…Dubious Science”
HAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAH really?
Sorry that article title made me spray my keyboard :D
“The fear of nuclear devastation is only one metaphor that Godzilla is steeped in, and it’s not even the first or most interesting one.”
I’ll give you “not the only,” and “not the most interesting one,” but not the first? Godzilla was pretty much a direct response to the way the Japanese felt in the wake of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If that’s not the first metaphor Godzilla is steeped in, I don’t know what is.
There is an equally disappointed but more detailed enumeration of this movie’s many, many plot and visual failings (which may save you the effort of paying to view it), at Ars Technica, by Sam Mackovech: “Godzilla: King of the Monsters film review: *Fart noises*”.
(I’ve been slowly reviewing the history of American and Japanese daikaiju movies on home video, in preparation for this one. Oh, this one’s bad? Good thing my stack of Honda/Tsuburaya flix is still plenty thick.)
@9/random22: To be fair, a number of Japanese Godzilla and kaiju movies (not to mention their spiritual cousins, American B-grade monster movies from the ’50s and ’60s) have heavily featured military personnel as central or supporting characters, when they don’t center on scientists or reporters or government officials (or all of the above). I mean, if there’s a massive threat endangering the nation and destroying its cities, it wouldn’t make much sense for the military not to be involved.
I’m seeing it tomorrow and I will admit that there is basically nothing that could make me hate it but I think the inherent problem at the heart of the MonsterVerse has been their attempt to marry the original Japanese Godzilla film with the sillier (but more well known) 1960s/1970s and to a lesser extent, 1990s, version. The problem with this is that Gojira, the original Japanese film without the Burr add-ons, is a straight up horror film about nuclear warfare and the futility of trying to solve the problem of nuclear warfare with more technology. (This is where I feel Godzilla’s take on the nuclear problem is most interesting – the oxygen destroyer is always described as being as bad as the nuclear bomb and one of the latter movies does underline this by having it produce a monster that is even worse than Godzilla and much more threatening to humanity.) I actually did my dissertation on this topic and it is remarkable how much the American version of the film deliberately and even maliciously rewrote the entire message of the story to be just another monster flick with technological ‘know-how’ defeating the monster. There is also an element of tragedy to Godzilla’s destruction in the Japanese version that isn’t present in the American version. In contrast, the 1960s through to 1990s Godzilla films were varying degrees silly and made for the American market, which culminated in Godzilla vs. Megalon and kung-fu Godzilla. This isn’t to say that silly Godzilla is inherently bad – both versions of the character produced pretty good movies but I’m not sure they are compatible in the same way you probably couldn’t combine Brightburn with Christopher Reeve’s Superman films.
@14/teg: I wouldn’t call most of the Heisei Godzilla films silly, certainly not The Return of Godzilla, which is nearly as solemn a parable and critique for the nuclear brinksmanship of the ’80s as the original was for the nuclear testing of the ’50s. The only Heisei film that approached the silliness of ’60s or ’70s Showa Godzilla was the unbearable Godzilla vs. SpaceGodzilla.
I can’t let that comment on alphas pass. I haven’t studied wolves in particular, and I am unable to check the literature on that particular topic just yet, but alphas do exist in nature: many species exist in groups that are organised in hierarchies, and the one at the top is usually called the alpha. Typically, baboons and chimps do have a clear social hierarchy that defines many essential aspects of their behaviour. The alpha is not necessarily the strongest or the most aggressive (it’s not always safe to follow an aggressive leader), it can be the one that is best at making friends for instance. But saying that the concept of alphas in general is wrong, is, well, wrong.
@16 – careful now, they cited an article from io9/Gizmodo, so you know it’s rock-solid science.
@16/Athreeren: As I understand that, those assumptions about pack behavior in the wild were based on studies of behavior in captivity, and it was subsequently found that actual behavior in the wild (at least in wolves) doesn’t work the same way, that pack structures are more fluid and hierarchies more temporary, that alphas are no more than the parents/breeders of a pack rather than the myth of the most tough, aggressive males lording it over the others by intimidation or force.
https://web.archive.org/web/20050308172008/http://www.npwrc.usgs.gov/resource/2000/alstat/alpst.htm
However, it looks like the idea of alphas among primates (other than humans) are still considered valid, though recent research has suggested they’re more often determined by what they can do for the other members of the group (e.g. grooming) than by intimidation or violence, and that alphas who do dominate by force are more likely to be overthrown.
I just saw it with my wife. It was a bit too long at two and a half hours. The script appears to have been developed by the use of a random cliché generation device, rather than a human writer. If I had a dime for every time a character spouted a line I’d heard in ten other movies, I would have been able to go out to dinner afterward.
There were some nice nods back to the older Godzilla movies, which was fun. And the monster battles were spectacular. Disengage your brain and you will have a good time.
The audience/reviewer disconnect on this one is just astonishing.
@20/Almuric: “The audience/reviewer disconnect on this one is just astonishing.”
Are you basing that on reading the actual reviews, or just glancing at the Rotten Tomatoes percentages? Those numbers are just meant to be rough overviews, and they’re useless for comparison to each other because they’re calculated by different methods. Batman V Superman also supposedly had a huge disconnect between the critic scores and the audience scores, but when I actually read a sampling of both groups’ reviews, I found that they mostly said the same things — that the movie was clumsily and incoherently structured but still had a lot of entertaining aspects. So the much-hyped “chasm” between critic and audience response was basically nonexistent. The only difference was that the critics ascribed more weight to the technical side than the pure entertainment side, because that’s their job.
I am reminded of Harrison Ford’s comment to Mark Hammill when Mark complained that his hair should still be wet after the trash compactor scene, “Hey kid, it’s not that kind of movie.”
Just saw this today, and two things stuck with me: Smartass sidekick (why do they always have this guy?) makes “gonorrhea” joke of King Ghidorah’s name. Fortunately, the Japanese translation was completely different. And the WTF!? irony of Dr. Serizawa sacrificing himself with a nuclear weapon to revive Godzilla. o_0
@21. Going by what I’m seeing on Twitter and opinions of friends who have already seen it.
I saw the movie yesterday with my son. It is a family tradition. I happen to enjoy the movie very much. I have seen all the Godzilla movies since the Original Godzilla and the addition of Raymond Burr. I was age 7 at the time.
This movie gives everything it promised. To watch a “Monster Movie” you need to suspend belief in your present world and enter the world created by the movie you are viewing. I enjoyed it – the movie gave everything it promised. I enjoyed the subplots. I enjoyed the relationship between Mothra and Godzilla.
You cannot over analyze a monster movie. . Enjoy the movie for what it is. I thought it was a damn good monster movie.
let a monster movie be a monster movie, if you want a hero, let it be another monster![.](//s04.flagcounter.com/mini/Jkzv/bg_FFFFFF/txt_CCCCCC/border_DBDBDB/flags_0/" alt="Free counters!" border="0"></a>)
My problem with this “It doesn’t have to be good if it’s a monster movie” attitude is that it’s a lazy generalization. There have been some very good, smart, character-driven monster movies; the original 1954 Godzilla is probably the smartest, most dramatic, most powerful and meaningful monster movie ever made. And while none of its successors have achieved the same height, a few have managed to be smart and impressive and rich in their own ways. Similarly, while the original Showa-era Gamera films from rival studio Daiei were cheap, lazy, dumb, and formulaic, the Gamera revival trilogy in the ’90s was superbly made, dark, adult, powerful, character-driven, and thoughtful in a way that surpassed nearly all of the Godzilla canon since 1955, and 2006’s Gamera the Brave was a soulful, beautiful children’s movie that meditated touchingly on dealing with loss and grief, and that felt in many ways like a live-action equivalent of a Miyazaki film.
Sure, the cheesier monster movies can be entertaining too, but that doesn’t mean the makers of monster movies shouldn’t aspire to quality or intelligence or good characterizations. Heck, I felt Kong: Skull Island had terrific character work, so we know it’s possible for Legendary to make spectacular monster movies with engaging characters. So if G:KotM has superficial, one-note characters, that’s falling short of Legendary’s own precedent, so it’s valid to criticize that. They could have done better.
@29 I agree with you about Skull Island. That one showed that you can have interesting characters coexisting with monsters.
Take my inner child to a Kaiju movie once per year or so. We saw King of the Monsters last night and enjoyed it. Sure it was hokey, knew it’d be. I actually much preferred it to any other giant monster movie I’ve seen on the big screen in recent years: the first Legendary Godzilla, Skull Island, Pacific Rim, the Jurassic World fiascoes. I won’t argue it is better, only that for whatever reason, it gave me a far greater atavistic thrill than any of the others. It might have been the beautifully animated Mothra and Ghidorah. It might have been the weed.
I zoned in and out of the anthropocentic portions, but what I did notice seemed as poorly executed as usual in such movies. I’d have shown human dimension entirely, or nearly entirely, through the media coverage of the monster eruption as occurred: clips of constant, frantic updates (in many different languages), cataclysmic viral images of caught on smartphones, and the like. The movie did take this approach somewhat in the buildup, but didn’t handle it very well. The newscasters delivered lines like “greatest natural disaster in human history,” as blandly as if they were forecasting tomorrow’s weather. And the movie drops the media angle when the action starts anyway, to focus exclusively on the perspective of the super-scientists and soldiers tasked with containing the Kaiju chaos. The perspective of the ordinary people on the ground, terrified and struggling to survive, might have made for more arresting cinema. (The closing credits montage of headlines about the “Titans” in the aftermath of Godzilla’s coronation worked much better, I thought.)
As for the description of the Kaiju as a pack: While they’re clearly different species, or perhaps some of them unique entities of no species in particular, I presumed they’re related to each other in some non-genetic, perhaps mystical sense. But yes, the idea needed fleshing out. And if the notion of an “Alpha” has really been debunked, no-one bothered to update wikipedia.
So like every monster movie ever? Personally I am not watching for science or character, I am waiting to see Tokyo stomped flat – again.
@31 – I can’t stress this enough: the author chose to cite a science fiction blog run by the same people who used to run Gawker.
That alone should speak volumes about the “junk science” angle the author was going for.
@33/danielmclark: As I already pointed out in comment #18, the io9 piece was merely citing research that did come from a more reputable source, a paper that I linked to directly in said comment, and that the io9 article also links to directly, so it wasn’t making an unsupported assertion. Granted, though, Emily did misstate the results of the paper as invalidating the concept of alphas in all animals when it was in fact specific to wolves.
@32 Not just Tokyo gets stomped, and the city where the final battle was fought was quite a surprise to me! I can’t say more because of spoilers.
@33 danielmclark Just to be clear, wasn’t disputing (or affirming) the contention. For all I know the concept of “alphas” is invalid. Nor would it surprise me to learn that the reality of alphas is more complicated than the popular understanding of the concept might suggest. Just wanted to point out that the Wiki page 10 ethological alphas does not so much acknowledge that the concept has been challenged; there’s no “criticisms” section.
@35 Don’t try to be coy and flirting about your knowledge of the movie. That is not about spoilers, if you were worried about those you’d have said nothing at all, you wanted to say you’d seen the movie and had superior nerd info.
The city is Boston, the one in the USA where Cheers was set, not the real one in Lincolnshire. Although I wish it had been.
The Boston in Massachusetts is not real? It’s been a holographic projection all this time?!!! Gad-zooks!
@38 Yeah, it is totally a knock off.
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In Godzilla vs King Ghidorah (1991), humans from the future go back in time to 1992 and tell them that Godzilla destroys future Japan. So the future humans and modern day humans go further back in time to 1944 where a dinosaur was spotted and suspected to become Godzilla after some nuclear bomb testing. They teleport it away so that the dinosaur never turns into Godzilla. Plot twist: the future humans were lying. Future Japan was actually the largest super power in its time and was protected by Godzilla. They thought that by removing Godzilla from 1944, Japan would be vulnerable to another separate monster, King Ghidorah, that would be created by leaving behind ALIEN PETS to absorb the nuclear radiation after the testing. King Ghidorah was born and starts wiping out Tokyo in 1992. A future human feels bad, so she goes to the modern humans and tells them that the death of future Japan was a lie. They put together a plan to hit the original dinosaur with nukes so that the radiation will create a new Godzilla. New Godzilla comes in and wrecks King Ghidorah and then goes on a rampage in Tokyo. Future human and an android character come up with another idea to go back to the future, get King Ghidorah’s corpse, create Mecha-Ghidorah, and pilot it back to modern Tokyo. Mecha-Ghidorah and Godzilla fight. It ends in a tie when Mecha-Ghidorah traps Godzilla in a giant metal hook that blasted out of its chest with a bunch of electricity and flies into the ocean. Future human flies away in an escape pod and everyone waves good bye as she time travels back to her era.
Was that hard to follow? Cause that’s how hard it was following your review. Complaining about the science, the hammy actors, and the nuclear message in a Kaiju movie sounds trivial. Sorry you didn’t like it, but you’re focusing on the wrong parts.
@@@@@36. Skallagrimsen, did you not read as far as the section on Canines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_(ethology)#Canines
The original research by Schenkel and the later popularisation and subsequent reversal by Mech are both described with citations. What more would you want?
@35, Boston getting stomped works too.
@42, no, didn’t read the whole article, just noticed it didn’t have a “criticisms” subsection. Should have been more careful
Saw it, liked the monster battles, agree that the human elements and logic expressed by all non-monsters were silly and/or not plausible (except for Sally Hawkins’ character, who made sense at all times) and people were standing much closer to giant monsters than prudence would recommend …but the movie worked for me and my son anyway because MONSTER BATTLES!
Note that there is a post-credits scene that should be stayed for, as it tees up a potential curve ball for later movies in the Titan-verse. .
Atlantis. Was I the only person who thought that?
@46 — No, no you were not.
To an extent, that scene is a bit of a callback to some of the original movies where the baddie monsters would be controlled by aliens or people from Seatopia or mole people or something silly like that.
@47/hoopmanjh: The odd thing is that Legendary Godzilla is, in some ways, more like ’90s-reboot Gamera than like most prior versions of Godzilla. Gamera was explicitly from Atlantis in both the original movie and the reboot trilogy, and in the latter, he was bioengineered by the Atlanteans for the purpose of preserving the Earth’s balance by fighting more destructive creatures that threatened it.
One of the late-90s Rebirth of Mothra films also featured a giant, ancient ziggurat that mysteriously rose from the sea bottom, as I recall.
I’m hoping the underwater ruins are setting up the Seatopians and Megalon (and maybe then, Jet Jaguar!) or Titanosaurus. There is some classic Showa era stuff it could tie into.
This movie makes two in one year where the villain thinks pruning back the human race would be a good thing. First the Avengers, and now Godzilla. I sense a trend…
@51/AlanBrown: Although that kind of Malthusian thinking has been largely discredited in real life. Modern technology and farming techniques give us enough food and resources to support everyone (especially if a majority adopted vegetarianism or if we were able to perfect vat-grown meat); the reason hunger and scarcity persist is political and social, because governments or institutions hoard resources and prevent them from being shared fairly.
Thank god I’m a minority.
erased by author 6/11/19
@54/Skallagrimsen: I looked into it, and both Marvel and IDW Comics have done Godzilla comic book issues involving Godzilla attacks on Seattle. It’s also one of the locations in a trilogy of Godzilla video games from the early 2000s.
Also, the first prequel novel to the recent Godzilla anime trilogy, which depicts the backstory for the movies’ future setting, established that Godzilla destroys Seattle in 2031, a year after destroying Los Angeles and San Francisco.