Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019)
Directed by Michael Dougherty
Follows the heroic efforts of the crypto-zoological agency Monarch as its members face off against a battery of god-sized monsters, including the mighty Godzilla, who collides with Mothra, Rodan, and his ultimate nemesis, the three-headed King Ghidorah. When these ancient super-species, thought to be mere myths, rise again, they all vie for supremacy, leaving humanity's very existence hanging in the balance.
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66 films that influenced Godzilla: King of the Monsters
What critics say influenced Godzilla: King of the Monsters
Diehards will recognize elements of the quaint 1968 Toho studios import “Destroy All Monsters” underneath the digitized flash.
In fact, the best thing that can be said about it is that director Michael Dougherty (“Krampus”), working from a script he wrote with Zach Shields (though the Japanese writers of “Destroy All Monsters” deserve at least a head nod), doesn’t skimp on the monsters.
Ever since my youth, when I first caught him in the 1968 all-star creature romp Destroy All Monsters , the three-headed Ghidorah always struck me as the most dynamic of all Toho grotesqueries.
The plot is mostly faithful to the original Toho movies and there are nice little nods to the likes of Destroy All Monsters , Mothra and other films for die-hard fans, including reprises of the Godzilla and Mothra themes in the music cues.
Fans have been clamouring for a modernized all-out brawl featuring their favourite Godzilla creatures in the vein of Destroy All Monsters for years, and with King of the Monsters that is certainly what they’ve been promising.
Had he been able to make his Destroy All Monsters with a studio budget behind it, I imagine I would have enjoyed this a ton more, as he clearly wants to go there!
This re-think was introduced in the follow up Kong: Skull Island, which setup not only one of cinema’s most beloved monsters, but also a mythology that hinted at Legendary , who produced these films, would be bringing Toho’s entire rogues gallery of monsters to this new cinematic universe.
Directed by Michael Dougherty and distributed by Warner Bros, Godzilla: King of the Monsters is the direct sequel to 2014’s Godzilla and the followup to 2017’s Kong: Skull Island .
Because, yes, this is supposed to be part of a bigger MonsterVerse, all leading up to a showdown between Godzilla and King Kong, the latter of whom was featured in 2017's Kong: Skull Island .
In terms of how the action is filmed on a technical level, I’m still a bigger fan of Edwards’ Godzilla and Jordan Vogt-Roberts’ Kong: Skull Island.
Directed by Michael Dougherty (Krampus), Godzilla: King of the Monsters is the third film in Warner Bros and Legendary Entertainment's ongoing MonsterVerse series, following 2014's Godzilla and 2017's Kong: Skull Island.
As silly and cartoony as this disaster movie gets -- it's a war allegory without the gory -- Dougherty's movie can't match the dumbfounding idiocy of Roland Emmerick's 1998 "Godzilla."
While I may not be the most well-versed Godzilla fan out there (I saw a ton of the Godzilla films as a kid, but the version of O.G. Godzilla I knew the best was the 1956 Americanized iteration with Raymond Burr that seemed to play once a month on a Saturday afternoon on Channel 66 in Chicago), there is always an excitement I feel whenever Big G comes stomping his way onto the big screen—so much so that I even saw Godzilla (1998) on the big screen three times despite my deep-seated loathing of Matthew Broderick.
The big, final scaly skirmish takes place in Boston, but unlike Roland Emmerich (from Broderick’s “Godzilla”), director Michael Dougherty doesn’t have a flair for clobbering landmarks.
Todo comienza con los ecos de la estelar aparición de Godzilla en San Francisco, y los consabidos temores al reino sumergido de Titanes que hiberna desde los orígenes de la Tierra.
Or there are attempts to make the human element compelling through drama — GODZILLA VS BIOLLANTE‘s ghost daughter plot, for example, or all of that terrible schtick from 1998’s GODZILLA — but they rarely work.
The best of these films follow a simple formula: humanity does something ecologically stupid, a huge problem/creature occurs, and Godzilla has to kick some butt (not you, Godzilla 1998) — cute twin Japanese girls optional but preferred.
Taking place in the same world as 2014’s Godzilla film, the crypto-zoological agency Monarch has risen to locate, catalog, and handle all the chain reaction of awaking kaiju set off by Godzilla in the the first film.
Godzilla: King of the Monsters is the third entry into Legendary Pictures’ MonsterVerse brand – following 2014's Godzilla and 2017's Kong: Skull Island – and while lifelong fans of ‘Zilla will be rightfully impressed by the epic kaiju smackdowns on CGI display here, much of the film’s fun is overrun by a combination of overlong exposition, ham-fisted dialogue, and some genuinely confusing editing.
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In interviews, he has likened this film to James Cameron's action-oriented "Aliens" and Gareth Edwards' " Godzilla " to Ridley Scott's scarier, more deliberate "Alien."
Dougherty has compared his film’s relation to Edwards’ like that of Aliens to Alien, a corollary that correctly steers one’s expectations for the sequel but shouldn’t be taken as anything more than that.
In addition to a dead child, this film’s favorite trick is lifted from the original “Alien” — the face-to-face stare down between the film’s teen heroine and a monster.
The worldwide appearance of monsters (or "Titans," as they are called here) echoes Destroy All Monsters and Godzilla: Final Wars.
That said, it’s probably the most kaiju-esque “Godzilla” movie since “Godzilla: Final Wars” sent the lovable lizard into hibernation in 2004.
What amounts to a loose remake of 1964’s Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster, pulling pieces from Ishiro Honda’s original 1954 Godzilla (David Strathairn, one of the few characters from Gareth Edwards’ 2014 reboot, shows up briefly to say the words “oxygen destroyer” as dead-seriously as possible), Michael Dougherty’s Godzilla 2 swells with too many boring human characters, competently sets up some sequels, thrives solely on its (sometimes awe-inspiring) monster fights and makes no fucking sense.
And because this film is intent on matching the exact kaiju lineup from 1964’s Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster, we also get the flying bird-lizard Rodan.
In its best moments, director Gareth Edwards' predecessor approached the haunting, exhilarating heights of awe and suspense found in 1993's "Jurassic Park."
The ludicrous ’tween escape artists of “Jurassic Park” and “Jurassic World” have never been half this resourceful.
The tussle for power between giant monsters and humans is a timeless theme, tackled by the likes of Transformers , Jurassic Park and Pacific Rim franchises with varying degrees of success.
Chandler exudes the same kind of dad/intellectual/everyman quality that Sam Neill brought in Jurassic Park (1993) but is let down by a far lesser narrative.
Speaking of which: anyone having read Jurassic Park knows huge chunks of the novel were devoted to the specifics of hacking a computer system to reboot the park; guess what was reduced to a mere footnote in the film to make room for more rampaging dinosaurs?
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Past filmmakers like Anno, Edwards, and even Guillermo del Toro for his Pacific Rim master the way we gaze at monsters.
Aside from Godzilla and fellow MonsterVerse entry Kong: Skull Island , the CGI blockbuster era has spat out the Cloverfield movies, the Pacific Rim movies, Rampage , and more (including earlier stabs at both Godzilla and Kong).
The tussle for power between giant monsters and humans is a timeless theme, tackled by the likes of Transformers , Jurassic Park and Pacific Rim franchises with varying degrees of success.
When watching Kaiju movies like Pacific Rim , Cloverfield , and subsequently Godzilla , I yearn to experience microscopic insignificance.
El aspecto humano de estas cintas es algo que entendió muy bien Guillermo del Toro en Pacific Rim y el recién laureado en Cannes Bong Joon-Ho en The Host : de nada sirve crear historias de monstruos fantásticos si no empatizamos con los humanos que se enfrentan a ellos.
There are multiple incredible action sequences featuring these phenomenally-realised creatures threatening humanity and battling it out with each other, and most of the time it is an awesome spectacle that indulges in the sugar-addled childlike joy these movies should inspire; no movie has done it quite this well since Pacific Rim .
The tussle for power between giant monsters and humans is a timeless theme, tackled by the likes of Transformers , Jurassic Park and Pacific Rim franchises with varying degrees of success.
Less of a Godzilla movie and more of a Transformers styled mashing together of blurry action sequences and an overabundance of uninteresting, painfully boring story and characters, Godzilla: King of the Monsters might not the the worst on screen appearance for the big guy, but I can’t think of one of his films that left me feeling more deflated and depressed the longer it droned on.
And while another Michael, Michael Doughtery, the one that directed 2015’s “Krampus,” is at the helm of “King of the Monsters,” he can’t shake the Bay style, the same style that gave us the diminishing returns and bonkers nonsense of the “Transformers” franchise.
The movie, as loud as anything I have ever seen (and yes, I have watched all the Michael Bay Transformers films), literally has nowhere to go thematically very quickly.
But in the years since, filmmakers realized action and effects films have so much more to accomplish that sacrifices have to be made, and that is usually the narrative quality, most exemplified in films like Independence Day , Transformers and Avatar .
Emerging from the loud, overlong spectacle that is Godzilla: King of the Monsters, I was struck by the disheartening realization that what I had just seen owed more to Transformers than kaiju.