Movie Review: "Godzilla 2: King of the Monsters" Makes a Mess

All the character actors in the world can’t save Godzilla 2: King of the Monsters from calamity.

Oh, the humanity.

The death toll in Godzilla 2: King of the Monsters must be upwards of one hundred million casualties. That said, I’m actually more concerned for the viewing audience.

After sitting through 132 minutes of Michael Dougherty’s sense-deadening sequel, attendees should be ushered into Red Cross tents outside the cinema. At the very least, they’ll need an eye exam, to ensure their corneas weren’t melted by the constant radioactive flashes from the screen, or that their retinas haven’t detached as a result of all the straining to see what the hell was even going on.

The maniacs, they blew it up. In 2014, Gareth Edwards delivered a moody, English language reboot of the Japanese classic Godzilla, and the results were awe-inspiring. This sequel, however, wanders off the path laid out by its predecessor, and becomes indistinguishable from a Transformers flick, and about half as clever too. Dull and dulling, King of the Monsters is just plain bad.

It at least follows on from Edwards’ Godzilla in one way: by hiring all the good actors. Vera Farmiga, Kyle Chandler and Millie Bobby Brown star as Emma, Mark and Madison Russell, respectively; a family who apparently survived Godzilla’s carnage in the first feature (though Emma and Mark’s son perished). The parents are now divorced, and Mark is working… as a professional wolf photographer? So, I’m guessing he’s not making those weekly child support payments. Nonetheless, he's soon summoned by the mysterious organisation Monarch when Emma and Madison are kidnapped by mercenaries, who are using Emma’s technology to release sleeping Titans, like Godzilla, contained across the globe. Turns out scientists played by Ken Watanabe, Sally Hawkins, Bradley Whitford, Zhang Ziyi and Thomas Middleditch need Mark's help to get Godzilla to fight for humanity again, and take out these other beasts. Don’t they realise Mark has a personal feud with Godzilla? Godzilla killed his son!

The script—credited to Dougherty, Zach Shields and Max Borenstein—is nonsense, and can never decide when or why any of the leads think keeping the monsters alive is a smart idea. It pretends to center on the supposedly grounded family drama of the Russells, yet what the writers believe to be small-scale and relatable issues are actively bonkers/homicidal. And though there are injections of winking humour every so often, the screenplay doesn’t realise when it’s unintentionally hilarious, such as when one character, having betrayed the others, says flatly, "I couldn’t be more sane," as if it had come from the pen of Chandler Bing himself.

Composer Bear McCreary’s bombastic B-movie score is a rare highlight, and I was otherwise glad to see so many actors I enjoy collecting a paycheck for gawking at the CGI unfolding before them. Similarly, the creative technicians who manufactured these convincing sights can’t be blamed for the picture’s terrible pacing, constantly-collapsing narrative architecture, or the fact that Zhang Ziyi, for exactly one second, appears briefly as her own twin for no godly reason except to wear a different wig.

Those buying a ticket to simply see monster-on-monster action will, of course, get it, but while the last Godzilla teased it out and built to a crescendo, Godzilla 2 starts chaotically and stays there. Several hours of Titan-fighting provides diminishing returns, inspiring yawns rather than awe. I was briefly roused when Chandler’s constantly surly Mark Russell noted that monsters only respond to another’s calls when they’re looking for "food, a fight or a f- … something more intimate". Alright, I thought to myself, now we’re really gonna see some cinema. Alas, there is zero Titan-doinking, despite the creature designers adding a busty Mothra to flirt with their thicc Godzilla. I hope my disappointment with the lack of kink here highlights the overwhelming tedium of Godzilla 2. I was after… something more intimate.

2/5

Rated M for science fiction themes, violence and coarse language.