Movie Review | Godzilla: King of the Monsters

Godzilla: King of the Monsters was a pretty good movie. I only watched one trailer before seeing the film and all I knew was Godzilla was going to be fighting other monsters.

What I didn’t expect was for the human element in this movie to be somewhat unrealistic. Granted, in a Godzilla film, there is always some corky scientist who thinks he can control the laws of nature. But this time, the corky scientist wanted to “restore balance” by destroying the entire earth.

Spoilers ahead

The entire story surrounded a broken family who lost their son in 2014 due to the Godzilla attacks. As a result of the attack, the United States, in particular, is in an uproar. The government wants to take control of a group called Monarch that specializes in tracking, monitoring, and finding monster species or Titans as they are referred to in the movie.

Our broken family that I mentioned earlier are scientists from the Monarch group and were heavily involved in the group when Godzilla attacked. Emma (the mother) buried herself in Titan work and Mark (the father) decided to study smaller animals after their son disappeared. Madison (the daughter) went with mom.

Fine.

We meet up with Emma and Madison on site at a Monarch facility waiting for a Titan larva to hatch. As the Titan is hatching some unknown group bursts into the facility kills everyone except Emma and Madison and the larva escapes to cocoon itself in a waterfall.

Usually, this is normal right? Once Monarch finds out that their scientist has been abducted they’ll tell Mark and then we’ll spend the rest of the movie trying to save the day.

No, apparently Mark knows his ex-wife is some sort of wacko. They created an Orca sonar technology to speak with whales and recently Emma started using that technology to speak with Titans. Mark tries to tell her co-workers that there is some sort of trap going on. But they don’t listen.

So they proceed with Operation: Save the Crazy Scientist!

Emma and rogue militant, Jonah (the man who “abducted her”) find Monster Zero (or Blue Eyes White Dragon) in Antarctica and release him from his crypto-cell where he has been frozen for who knows how long. Turns out he’s not so friendly.

Godzilla, who has been minding his business for five years can sense Monster Zero is about to be a problem. So he swims to Antarctica and starts fighting it.

Meanwhile, Madison has a clear chance to get away from her captors and run to her dad, but she steps back with her mom. As a result, everyone almost dies, but no named characters do.

We find out the Mark was right about Emma being in on the terror. And during a facetime conference, Emma admits to planning this all along after she lost her son.

Her plan is to let the Titan’s take over the world. Her theory is that their radiation will restore the balance of nature and reset itself.

Right.

However, she didn’t realize that King Ghidorah also known as Monster Zero has plans of his own. So he starts calling out to all the other Titans. Even Titans that are still frozen wake up and start destroying everything.

Emma later regrets her decision to insight destruction after Madison runs off with the Orca sonar device.

Ghidorah has already started complete destruction and Godzilla is the only hope to regain some type of order.

There is a point in the movie where Dr. Ishiro blows a nuclear bomb up in Godzilla’s face to help him heal, but not before saying some kind words of encouragement.

I guess we’re supposed to believe that having that talk with Godzilla made him allies with the humans. But, really Godzilla just wanted Ghidorh out of his spot as Apex Predator. So it worked out for everybody.

Thoughts:

I understand that the human element needed to be present in this movie. Otherwise, we’d have a bunch of monsters running around clashing with no real cause other than animal instinct.

However, it’s surpising that Emma would have taken such extreme action in her grief and never once second guess her plan.

What I will commend is all of the fighting sequences in the movie. The film makers did an amazing job making Godzilla feel like the mythical creature that he is. Godzilla’s fight with Ghidorah was really intense and fun to watch. The larva turned into a butterfly also known as Mothra and fought really well in a cool scene with Rodan (a pterodactyl type). And seeing all of the monsters reimerge from their slumber was genuinely an amazing sight.

Godzilla and the other monsters were the best part of the movie and unfortunately all the rest felt like filler.