Review: Godzilla: King of the Monsters

Godzilla: King of the Monsters, directed by Michael Dougherty, tells the tale of a super secret organization called Monarch led by Dr. Serizawa (Ken Watanabe) as they research and contain these giant monsters known as “titans”, with their alpha being the mighty Godzilla. But when an EVIL eco-terrorist group, with the help of a woman (Vera Farmiga) who figured out how to communicate with these titans, unleashes a rival alpha by the name of King Ghidorah upon the world, it’s up to Godzilla and his rag-tag group of human allies to restore balance to the world and save humanity from extinction.

This is the sequel to 2014’s Godzilla and the latest installment to the “MonsterVerse” Cinematic Universe from Warner Bros and Legendary Pictures. Despite not being very well received in general I actually enjoyed the previous Godzilla film. It had boring characters and an uninteresting plot, sure, but at the very least I appreciated a lot of the technical aspect of the film like cinematography, score, and CG.

This film attempts to fix one of the main criticisms of the first film being that there weren’t enough monster fights with Godzilla and they do deliver alright, but at the expense of everything that made the first film work. King of the Monsters sacrifices intrigue and scale in favor of more monster fights that gets old very quick, in addition to introducing even more boring and dumb human characters.

There isn’t much else to say about this film other than the fact that it’s now just another typical monster movie. Ghidorah is a cool monster no doubt, and the first fight between him and Godzilla was awesome, but the problem is they fight again two more times after that first fight, and the latter two fights were very repetitive. Rodan and Mothra were also in the film and they do things, and I guess it was neat. Those two monsters didn’t really have a point in the film other than to further the plot.

Once again, the human characters were pretty bad. Performance wise they were serviceable (Millie Bobby Brown from Stranger Things gives the best performance of the bunch) but as characters in the film they were all just so uninteresting that I really couldn’t care less what happened to them. The writing was also noticeably bad; there was a lot of forced humor and corny one liners that all together were painfully unfunny. The plot was also kinda stupid in terms of how events unfolded and the decisions some characters make. Basically all the problems from the first film were prevalent here, only this time it’s made even worse.

Overall there’s not much else to say about this movie other than it’s just another monster movie. It was dull, repetitive, the characters sucked, the writing sucked, it’s about as generic of a summer blockbuster as you can get. If you’re really into Godzilla films and you’re one of those people that don’t care what critics say then I guess you can check this film out, otherwise I wouldn’t really bother. Let’s just hope that the next film can deliver the REAL goods. #GodzillaKongFightNight2020

Final Verdict: 4/10