Finding Humanity in ‘Godzilla: King of the Monsters’
Heart, mind, and soul come together to create the imperfect tokusatsu storm in Godzilla’s most striking American film yet
Legendary Entertainment’s 2014 Godzilla film faced two (perceived) obstacles upon its debut. In the first, there were the inevitable comparisons made to Guillermo del Toro’s 2013 Mecha-Kaiju film, Pacific Rim. And second, overcoming the then-sixteen-year-old stigma of the 1998 Roland Emmerich Godzilla film.
Godzilla 2014 cleared the low bar of the 1998 film, and most comparisons to Pacific Rim were favorable. Yet, despite the otherwise decent cast leading the film and the amazing grizzly bear-like redesign of Godzilla, the movie suffered from poor pacing, a poorer script, and passionless direction.
Gareth Edwards’s love affair with Monster Delay left the movie without its emotional core, it’s heart: Godzilla. That heart was instead given to two original monsters: The M.U.T.Os. With the lion’s share of screentime, their journey back to each other was the more compelling tale in a two-hour-long film with very little to offer in the end despite some solid set pieces.
Godzilla 2014’s issues split folk down the middle. You got lovers and haters. For me, it failed to even reach the basic highs and lows of del Toro’s Pacific Rim. A film whose (heavily) altered screenplay saw Toho-styled man, monster, and machine work together in a visually cohesive narrative about overcoming trauma through the fanciful idea of global corporation. I can’t begin to summarize Godzilla 2014’s themes or goals. That’s how little it engaged me. It’s a film all about set up, but one not driven by a moral or character arc to bring it all home.
Emerging from the theater almost five years ago, I cannot describe the disappointment that sat heavy in my gut. It was something I hadn’t felt since I made the mistake of expecting quality from a film like UltraViolet (I was seventeen). At the time, my opinion was that Godzilla 2014 wasn’t a bad movie, yet I had no positive expectations for Legendary’s MonsterVerse franchise. And as time went on, I was content with believing the second attempt to Americanize Godzilla was something simply not meant to be. The five years following allowed those feelings of disappointment to fester into reinforced hate.
Learning the sequel would not see Gareth Edwards return as director did little to restore faith. Stranger Things’ Millie Bobby Brown becoming the new face of Legendary’s franchise was a good career move but not necessarily a taste of good things to come. Still, Godzilla’s sequel prospects looked way better than the one del Toro’s Pacific Rim got.
The financial success of Legendary’s MonsterVerse (Godzilla 2014 and 2017’s Kong: Skull Island) guaranteed the survival of ‘Godzilla 2’ and the Godzilla vs. Kong crossover waiting in the wings. America’s Godzilla was slowly working its way back on top in the States and into the hearts of general audiences.
May 31, 2019, King of the Monsters released in theaters. The lukewarm reception of the film following its debut didn’t make it sound any better than its predecessor. King of the Monsters kept in the tradition of being “as bad” as the previous American Godzilla films. The rushed product that was Pacific Rim Uprising only weakened the perception that Legendary knew what they were doing in the giant monster department.
Mid-June, by complete accident, I happened across an old article announcing Bear McCreary would be the composer for King of the Monsters. That was when I decided I was interested in the sequel. Listening to the score non-stop without seeing the film first painted a fairly compelling story in my head as I saw more glimpses of Legendary’s advertisement gambit on TV. I thought if McCreary could do for King of the Monsters what Ramin Djawadi did for Pacific Rim, then something good had to come out Legendary’s second offering.
The mood for King of the Monsters was completely unlike the dark, grim, and distant tone of its predecessor. Its promotional presentation was awash with thematic colors, questionable trailer music, self-satisfaction, and an even bulkier Godzilla. True to Legendary’s typical promotion method, I was being promised major monster battles, but none of the trailers were explicitly saying what the film was about beyond that.
And so, fueled by curiosity, the story soundtrack painted in my head, and the insistence that this film wasn’t being given a fair shake, I decided to see it in theaters instead of waiting for video release.
If it’s not obvious, Pacific Rim and Cloverfield (to an extent) are what I consider the gold standard for American [giant] monster movies. If a Godzilla film can’t meet either level, then I’ll probably be disappointed. I was completely prepared for another episode of Buyer’s Remorse with the Toho property of my childhood.
Down to the wire in available show times in my area, I saw it twice and both times I was floored.
THE STORY
Five years following the emergence of Godzilla and the Battle of San Francisco, the world is still dealing with the fallout of the sea dweller’s awakening. Monsters (dubbed “Titans”) have appeared across the globe, creating a cascade of collateral damage that sees most of the world’s populace living in fear of what might appear from the depths next.
The now mostly declassified organization, Monarch, admits to protecting, isolating and studying the dormant Titans. All to determine which of the creatures will protect humanity, and which will be hostile towards them. To appease public and government concerns, the organization is threatened with the possibility of falling under military control. Its humanitarian cause may be brought to an untimely end.
Aware of the organization’s potential failure, Emma Russell (Vera Farmiga), a Monarch scientist devastated by the death of her son in the 2014 monster attack, allies herself with a group of genocidal eco-fascism to set loose the Titans under Monarch’s surveillance. She convinces her daughter, Madison (Millie Bobby Brown), of the righteousness of her plan, promising that freeing the Titans will save the world.
When the eco-fascists ‘abduct’ Emma and Madison, they steal a device that can control the Titans using bioacoustics. However, the one Titan they choose to wake is an ecosystem killing monster whose name was erased from history to prevent its rediscovery.
Monarch finds its faith in the Titans inadvertently validated by Emma’s actions. The world does need Titans like Godzilla to protect it and maintain the balance of nature itself. To prevent the Titans from being used as weapons, Monarch needs to find the stolen technology that can control them. But the only person who knows how to do that is Emma’s ex-husband, Mark (Kyle Chandler), who’d sooner see the Titans dead before choosing to help them willingly.
1.1 THE EXECUTION
The 1998 and 2014 American Godzilla were films fairly determined to ground their Godzilla emergence narratives in some level of realism, reluctant to embrace the absurdity of the monster narrative itself for very different reasons.
Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin were forward about their confusion regarding the appeal of the Godzilla character and premise. Their want for realism was a quest to make something they saw as silly the opposite, and their Godzilla was perhaps truer to ‘life’ if you were to think about the character not as a quasi-supernatural metaphor for nature, unsympathetic and unstoppable, but as an animal. Vulnerable and sympathetic, something tangibly harmed by Emmerich and Devlin’s love for American Exceptionalism.
If you’ve seen Gareth Edwards’ 2010 budget film, Monsters, all the issues with Godzilla 2014 become clear. For Edwards, the title character is not as important as how he affects everything or everyone around him.
His film retains all the supernatural might of Godzilla’s character but muddles the waters of his antagonism in a narrative third wheel position. One that sees him as a anti-hero, undermining the dread of a singular primordial beast that reacts to or is the result of an environment harmed by the ignorance of man.
King of the Monsters is an American Godzilla movie with as much heart and energy as the best of Toho’s kitschy post-1954 films, married to the vibrancy and stylization of Pacific Rim and Kong: Skull Island.
Writer-Director Michael Dougherty (X2: X-Men United, Krampus) and co-writer Zack Shields re-envisions the world of Legendary’s Godzilla closer to Toho’s fantastic universe that takes the emergence of Godzilla and other monsters like a bad storm season.
It doesn’t pretend its audience hasn’t been inundated by the pop culture osmosis of Godzilla’s history as a rampaging monster. Yet, references to Godzilla of yore are oblique enough that you miss nothing if you don’t spot them or aren’t a die-hard fan (which I am not).
The world feels lived in, breathing and alive. It discards the notion of soft-realism and embraces the fantasy of a tokusatsu world, but leaves out Godzilla’s flying dropkicks and breath propelled flight. No longer are the monsters referred to by unwieldy acronyms, they’re just called Titans. Ancient animals once revered as gods by ye olden civilizations.
Cinematography and color grading present within the film creates distinct visual markers for each location where a major monster is present. The Antarctic, Washington D.C., and Boston become violent, painter-esque depictions of a maelstrom, invoking the introduction of Malus in Team Ico’s Shadow of the Colossus, and the trail of disaster depicted in Francisco de Goya’s The Colossus.
Isla de Mara of Mexico is awash with warm browns, reds, and oranges that become amplified by the aggression of Rodan flying over doomed cities like a tidal wave of fire from the heavens. The blue and green bio-luminescence of Godzilla and Mothra establishes their moral alignment to nature itself, opposing the exclusivity of protecting mankind from their contemporaries.
The pacing of the film ensures that the first act establishes the conflict, stakes, and goals of its story. It leaves the second and third acts free to do what they want with the material act one provides.
The world-building is largely exposition-heavy, with broadcasts and Monarch experts hitting you with rapid-fire visual aids (such as perfectly timed video montages in a live feed). It helps that the dialog between the characters can sometimes (but not always) feel like a natural conversation and not dry bullet points. The lore that expands the world is digestible and engaging.
King of the Monsters can do a lot with what it gets away with because Kong: Skull Island wasn’t afraid to wear its love for the silliness of monster movies on its sleeve. Its approach to hyper-stylization reenergized the concept of a shared universe full of monsters that can level cities unmasked by shadows. Skull Island’s mindset was that more focus on the monster was necessary. King of the Monsters pays strict adherence to this, never letting us forget just how much it owes to Skull Island.
However it pays dividends to its Toho roots, King of the Monsters makes clear its love for its monsters. It wants to show off the world they live in. Everything from the environment and set design exists in service to that adoration. Even when good ole’ American Exceptionalism sees a roaring Godzilla flanked by the United States Air Force and Navy, King of the Monsters never loses sight of its heart.
1.2. THE STORY OF SOUND
Bear McCreary was an artist I was content to write off as a ‘generic television composer’ from the early 2000s. But, his turnabout in 2018’s God of War changed my opinion of his ability as a storyteller. In the confines of a game, he seemed to bring forth a kind of energy otherwise absent in his television works. Coming off of God of War, King of the Monsters is McCreary at the top of his game, bringing to Godzilla that same dynamic energy.
While Akira Ifukube and Yuji Koseki’s “Godzilla” and “Mothra” themes are somewhat reimagined, McCreary isn’t afraid to introduce newer themes that match the multifaceted presentation of the Titans. The “Rodan” theme does for King of the Monsters what Hans Zimmer’s “Supermarine” did for Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk. A standout on the score, it is relentless in the rallying call of Rodan’s rage and power.
On the opposite end, the recreation of “Mothra’s Song” is comforting and builds to a heroic grandeur that embodies the melody of the original song’s lyrics in a harmonizing choir. The “Ghidorah” and “Godzilla March” themes are interwoven throughout the score, a striking and apocalyptic narrative that illustrates the war between a planet destroyer and the planet’s defender. Theater performers chanting names of Mothra, Rodan, Godzilla, and Ghidorah in traditional kakegoe create an electric, chest-beating oomph that gets you invested in the action taking place before your very eyes.
McCreary and System of Down’s Serj Tankian cover Blue Oyster Cult’s “Godzilla”, aligning it to the franchise it pays homage to. It takes the same energetic silliness of something like Alien Ant Farm’s cover of “Smooth Criminal” and runs with it in a manner befitting of an opening theme for an anime series.
I don’t remember a thing about the Alexandre Desplat Godzilla score, but I’m still vibing to McCreary’s King of the Monsters score the same way I ended up listening to Djawadi’s score for Pacific Rim straight into the following year. It is without a doubt one of the best soundtracks of 2019.
1.3. THE BURDEN IN THE MESSAGE
Godzilla’s environmental or sociopolitical messages have never really gone beyond the shallow end following the 1954 film, and the most recent film, 2016’s Shin Godzilla. Both films are reflective pieces on nuclear devastation and the loss of life during some of the most inhuman and unfortunately negligent events ten and five years after the fact.
However, as the series became more about campy heroism and villainy, the most the franchise has ever said about the erosion of the environment by the hand of capitalism was surface commentary that doesn’t impede the monster mayhem, kid-friendly aspects, and comedic hijinks. It wasn’t so vague that you could ignore it, but nor was it like 90s-era American Public Service Announcements burdening the ones the least power to do anything with the responsibility of mending everything.
As a monster movie, there’s only so much Godzilla as a framing device or manifestation of mankind’s shared guilt for its negligence against the world can do. Still, the messaging of each film is delivered with a grand theatricality that treats its environmental topics with all the levity of a cautionary folktale handed down from one generation to the next.
King of the Monsters’ surface commentary on climate change isn’t any different from your average Toho film. The monsters are rising from hibernation in response to the wild flux in temperatures. The scientists’ calls to actions are all but ignored by the privilege of political ignorance.
While there’s an argument to be made about how the film exacerbates ‘disaster movie fatigue’, the destruction taking place in the story is a direct consequence of its commentary on climate change as opposed to being an element thrown into the film because that’s what’s expected of a blockbuster movie.
The three representatives of humanity — Monarch, the military, and the eco-fascists — all have wildly different takes on their circumstances. Monarch wants co-existence with the Titans without harm to human or Titan life, the military wants to wipe the Titans out on the pretense of global security, and the eco-fascists are comfortably content with allowing human life to perish to ensure the Titans can ‘restore the Earth’. The human conflict maintains the momentum of the plot to support the monsters’ function as the solution or non-solution to environmental erosion.
It’s regrettable that the point of view with the lion’s share of the story is coming from a grieving mother who thinks to create a wave of destruction with giant monsters, which creates more and more grieving parents like her, will restore balance to the planet and solve the capitalist myth of overpopulation by indirectly culling it so that nature can, uh, ‘find a way’.
While the character is taken to task for her actions by most of the characters, who warn her she’s meddling with things she doesn’t understand, the movie ultimately absolves her of wrongdoing in a mid-credits sequence that declares the nuclear devastation caused by the Titans’ global rampage was a good thing for the environment and mankind. Hmmm.
2.1. FINDING HUMANITY
King of the Monsters’ cast dynamic features rising and veteran film and television actors. Except maybe Ken Watanabe, Zhang Ziyi, and Millie Bobby Brown, most of the cast can blend in with the story easier than, say, the modelesque Aaron Taylor-Johnson, pre-Marvel Elizabeth Olsen, and Bryan Cranston hot off the end of Breaking Bad. Sure, most of them are “that actor from that show!”, but it’s nothing too distracting. Michael Dougherty’s ability to balance the unlikeliest ensemble casts works in favor of the rag-tag hero vibe of Monarch’s new team.
Major and supporting characters in the film all have an explicit part to play in the plot’s momentum surrounding the war of the Titans. They work either in service or to the detriment of Godzilla, which makes the story more functional and focused.
We’re running with the Monarch employees, the people with a personal stake in the Titans, so the civilian and military grunt perspective is more or less set aside outside a few moments cross-cutting between action sequences. That’s honestly how it should have been from the start considering there are zero excuses needed to have these characters where we need them at any point in the story
The film doesn’t dedicate a lot of time to the development of the characters. Except for the Russells, most of them are static and that’s not a bad thing. What they lack in development they make up for in personality or performance. Zhang Ziyi’s role as the twin scientists, Ilene, and Ling Chen, takes the place of Dr. Serizawa as the supportive master-of-monster lore for the team.
I haven’t seen Ziyi in anything since Memoirs of a Geisha, so this easygoing bookworm character was a nice breather from her more dramatic roles. It’s also a cute callback to Mothra’s relationship with the inhabitants of Infant Island. The creative choice to include the Shobijin as generations of identical twins is perhaps easier to swallow than ’12 inch priestesses who worship a magical moth taken at face value in the Toho films.
The reveal was clumsy though. It took until after Mothra’s hatching to realize that the Dr. Chen watching Mothra unfurl her wings behind the waterfall was not the Dr. Chen still on the USS Argo airship. There’s a quick clarification with a picture, but that’s after the fact.
The two nerdy white guys, Rick Stanton (Bradley Whitford) and Sam Coleman (Thomas Middleditch), do little except provide mild comic relief that lands or doesn’t, but none of it is as egregious as most criticisms make it out to be (Charlie Day isn’t in this movie after all).
Whitford is doing the most as the eccentric Rick, but his blatant corniness was fun. Middleditch’s Sam just seemed present for Mark to focus his hostility on. He’s just the jittery wet-blanket that kind’ve brought nothing to the table.
The family drama established in the opening works as a secondary driving force in the story instead of being the sole core of the human element or film itself. The rattled dynamic between the Russell family was fairly solid across the board. It engaged me enough that I questioned which parent would be the Captain Ahab of the story as Alan Jonah (Charles Dance) seemed to set up to be an extension of that expectation.
Both Emma and Mark are frayed characters with a particularly damaged relationship with the Titans, but the film avoids the trenches of melodrama once found in Joseph Brody. We know they’re devastated by their son’s death, but we don’t wallow.
The film presents Emma Russell as the paragon, sympathetic to the Titans like Dr. Graham and Serizawa. She’s the obvious character the audience should connect with, root for. Her ex-husband Mark, however, is the solitary ex-Monarch scientist with a fairly understandable ire toward Godzilla that presents as unhealthy the angrier he becomes about his family’s kidnapping and the number of Titans found since his retirement.
Add the fact their daughter Madison was cautioned to be wary of her father by her mother because of his brief stint into alcoholism, all the arrows seem to point to Mark as the problem character. I was waiting for him to go off the deep end, to make Dr. Serizawa’s life difficult.
Imagine my surprise when it turned out Emma fancied herself judge, jury, and executioner, while Mark, despite his shortcomings, was the more self-possessed parent. His knowledge of animal behavior negates his personal feelings toward the Titans repeatedly, his respect for their nature as predators contrasting this wife’s lack of respect for them beyond their uses in her plans.
Emma’s destructive actions push Mark to help minimize the damage to the world, but his goal is to save his daughter from her mother’s less than stellar choices. Despite how his story begins, the Ahab expectation is subverted entirely. I did not go into this movie blind, but I wasn’t expecting that set-up and I appreciate it overall.
Farmiga and Chandler do well with what they’re given, their characters are uncomplicated in their motives. As far as arcs go, I thought Mark’s journey from the man unflinchingly rooted in the belief that the Titans should all die, slowly won over by Dr. Serizawa’s faith in Godzilla (which brings him a kind of catharsis regarding his son’s death), did a great job of warming me to the character. I came out of this film a fan of Mark Russell. Now I’m dreading his chances of survival in the upcoming crossover film. King Kong films always kill my favorite characters.
Emma becomes a kind of unsympathetic that makes the slightest show remorse on her end hard to buy as genuine. At least until the moment she denies herself safe haven and falls on her sword in the climax. The complaint I see leveled at her subplot is that her motivation makes no sense. The counterargument being that her wanting to cull the human population, but also urge it to save itself, was a contradiction.
It’s not when you consider her goal wasn’t to eradicate mankind. She believed the Titan’s rampage was worth the sacrifice of billions caught in their path. The restoration of nature, even if it meant many people would die, was the goal. The survivors would see the benefits in the end. But, Ghidorah’s alien nature was the wrench in her plans. If things had gone her way, remorse would be the last thing on her mind. There’d only be justifications for her actions.
I was otherwise content that her genocidal actions were repaid accordingly by the very monsters she released or agitated (Godzilla obliterating her alongside Ghidorah in a nuclear Final Flash), even if Dougherty and McCreary frame Emma distracting Ghidorah to protect her daughter and husband as absolution enough to forgive war-level crimes against the planet. Pardon my salt.
Madison is the more accessible personality of the Russell family. She’s a child character that doesn’t play into the caricature of a teenager, which is a relief considering the monster genre’s track record with unreasonably antagonistic children. I like that they allowed her to be the kid who makes choices based entirely on which parent she favors (because that’s what kids do), but eventually realizes the huge mistake she made in siding with her mother.
She doesn’t get to do a lot early on beyond passing judgment on her mother and father. The narrative holds her hostage to Emma’s grief-driven actions. Things don’t come together for her until she makes an uncontested escape from the eco-fascists and draws everyone, monsters included, to Fenway Park in Boston.
The character is proactive. She’s not just reacting to things (screaming and crying 90% of the time), and she’s not solely an emotional motivator for her parents. Her actions early in the story play into and facilitate the reason she ends up being a major player in the finale, but not so much the battle.
The trailers played her proximity to Godzilla up in such a way I was expecting a weird paternal partnership like the one that appeared in Godzilla: The Series (Godzilla Jr. protecting Nick Tatopoulos because he imprinted on him), but there’s nothing of that nature in the film. Millie Bobby Brown’s performance ended up endearing her to me in a way that never happened when I watched Stranger Things, so now I’m a fan.
Alan Jonah isn’t as terrible as most people make him out to be. He’s barely around to meet that kind of qualifier. He’s a bit character that exists to clarify that Emma’s actions were of her own volition, that her hubris in thinking she had the right to choose who lived and died with the ORCA (through ‘controlled chaos’) was something his group could exploit. As far as antagonists go, he’s not obtrusive. Dance makes what little he has work, and the film establishes his organization as potential antagonists going forward.
I think the script does just enough to make its characters functional within the plot, and some of them are far fairly engaging. How you end up reacting to them depends on the performance. I’m of the mind that everyone was pretty engaged in the material.
Yes, there’s more you can do with the characters, sure, but they are not the train wreck some hyperbolic criticisms are making them out to be. Not to me.
2.2 PERSONIFYING THE MONSTER
King of the Monsters follows relatively close in Pacific Rim’s footsteps and discards Monster Delay altogether with a full-body glimpse of Godzilla in a prologue establishing the past events of Godzilla 2014, introducing the new characters (the Russell family), and Mothra early in the film.
Seven visual effects companies worked on King of the Monsters, and they go all out in personifying the monsters with increased screentime. Their personalities shine through their actions and interactions similar to the Kaiju in Pacific Rim. There’s an almost cartoonish quality to the way the Titans engage the world (Rodan’s exaggerated look of surprise when Mothra stabs him), but it doesn’t break the tone of the story.
Rodan is just pure aggression, speed, and calculation, annihilating everything his path. The film makes the best of Rodan’s screentime and transforms him into one of the most memorable characters in the entire film. Ghidorah is malicious, controlling, and curious.
The film cleverly depicts personalities acting independently of each other, otherwise unified in their attempt to supplant Godzilla’s status as the “King of the Monsters”. In Ghidorah there is no real empathy for the audience grasp or project, it enjoys hunting creatures smaller than it. It enjoys the act of killing and harming for the sake of it.
That the film can communicate this to the audience without words, but mere body language, is striking. I know of Ghidorah but saw none of the films he starred featured in. The reveal that he was alien was surprising, impactful even, to his role within the story as the central antagonist.
Mothra, of all the Titans, is the most romanticized character of King of the Monsters. Her characterization is more in line with what I remember of the 64' and ‘92 versions of Godzilla vs. Mothra. The film plays up Mothra’s role as a god and hero more than Godzilla’s. She can banish the darkest storms, flood the skies with god rays, and overpower enemies stronger than her with wits and agility.
Mothra has been one of my favorite Toho monsters since I was a kid. I like her more than Godzilla or Gamera. I used to be in love with the idea of a monster moth who protected the world with two tiny women at her side. That King of the Monsters frames her as the “Queen” of the Titans, whose partnership with Godzilla is a necessary part of maintaining the balance of the world, was my favorite part of the story.
Where Godzilla was not much else beyond an aggressive blank slate in the Godzilla 2014, King of the Monsters provides the effects team leeway to fool around with how he emotes. Godzilla reacts to his circumstances with bafflement, respect, and even anger. Little moments like his falling through a widening crevasse, screaming in surprise on the way down, and his visible frustration with Ghidorah’s repeated evasion tactics, do wonders in selling him as a dynamic character.
He’s a creature aggressively indifferent toward mankind but recognizes them as a potential threat and ally. If he ends up protecting humans, it’s typically by happy accident.
King of the Monsters sees Godzilla challenged to defend his status as the alpha of Earth when Emma Russell wakes his centuries-old rival, Ghidorah. He’s seemingly motivated by the sacrifice of one man (Dr. Serizawa), who believes he’ll protect them from a ‘false king’. Godzilla’s narrative arc isn’t learning to trust humans so much as it is accepting he has to deal with them sometimes.
The film nails the sense of scale and mass that del Toro preached was a necessity to the success of a monster movie. Ghidorah dwarfs that of Godzilla, Godzilla reduces everything he stands next to a mere miniature. Both characters wreck their surrounding environment with ignorant ease that makes every step the human characters make a perilous journey to safety as the camera follows the massive monsters wrestling across the screen.
The film doesn’t use (a lot of) low camera shots, opting instead to substitute them for wide shots to capture the scope of the monsters, giving everything around them a miniature set quality. Wide shots of Rodan makes the Jets pursuing him look like toys, the size of Mothra’s wings during the emergence from her cocoon dwarf the giant waterfall she hides under. The helicopter shot around Godzilla and Ghidorah fighting near Fenway Park fools the audience into believing the USS Argo is about to crash into them before Godzilla’s hand smashes the invisible lens and reveals he’s holding himself up against two ruined buildings.
The action choreography, while not Pacific Rim or even King Kong 2005, sees Titans move with frightening speed, showing the futility of conventional retaliation, and how easily they become disadvantaged against each other using the environment to their specific advantages (be it flight, ranged attacks or brute strength).All of it comes together to create a series of action sequences that don’t end in one-hit kills. Every win, every defeat, it’s earned through attrition.
Like Pacific Rim before it, King of the Monsters finds itself unfairly maligned by the complaint that the action sequences were “too dark” or “too obscured” by storm conditions. The argument was hard to believe in 2013 when you consider how light and color was used in Pacific Rim. It’s even harder to buy in 2019 as King of the Monsters relies on similar lighting and color techniques wherever the monsters (specifically Ghidorah) are on-screen.
2.3. EVERYONE’S GOT PROBLEMS
A complaint I leveled at Godzilla 2014 was that it treated its characters of color like glorified background dressing for its white characters. Most of them were nameless grunts, and the only ones of note were Dr. Serizawa, Captain Russell Hampton, and Tre Morales. King of the Monsters just hops up four steps on the scale of representation and taps out from there. Most characters of color still represent the bulk of the military characters.
Jackson Barnes (O’Shea Jackson Jr.), Anthony Martinez (Anthony Ramos), and Lauren Griffin (Elizabeth Ludlow) are your atypical military grunts, who want the cliff notes version of a situation, while their commanding officer, Diane Foster (Aisha Hinds), is the no-nonsense element of their dynamic that keeps them together.
Their characters feel more present than someone like Captain Russell (Richard T. Jones), who just kinda showed up to fade away. King of the Monsters sees its minor characters of color portrayed by actors who at least have material that bolsters their minimal screen presence. They’re more participatory in the background action — saving civilians, fighting the losing battle against the Titans — and they’re not blown to smithereens so that the focus can remain the white characters.
Considering the military was the worst part of the 2014 film, that they aren’t as present is one hand, a relief, and on the other, the meanest kind of monkey’s paw consequence. C.C.H. Pounder (in the thankless role of a government official), and Joe Morton (as an older Houston Brooks from Skull Island) just show up for no other than reason than that good ‘ole cameo cred. I can’t blame them for it, it’s a Godzilla movie after all.
By and large, this is me damning with faint praise, here. King of the Monsters does better than Godzilla 2014 or even Godzilla 1998, but not by much. Especially when compared to something as equally imperfect or clumsy on the representation front like, wait for it, Pacific Rim.
The remaining cast of the 2014 film, specifically Sally Hawkins and Ken Watanabe, is dealt a bad hand in this film. Except for David Strathairn (of all people!), they’re gradually or unceremoniously phased out of the film within the greater mechanics of the plot. I expected Hawkins to be a larger part of the film, considering the commercial success of Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water. Hawkins herself hoped for a larger role in the film since her role was so minor before.
The expectation that Dr. Graham would be an integral part of getting Mark Russell to not only see the good in Monarch’s existence (again), but also Godzilla’s as a sort’ve ‘necessary evil’ that must coexist with humanity, wasn’t exactly unreasonable. That’s how they appear to set up their dynamic. Dr. Graham seemed like the only character able to level with Mark when he berated them at the very mention Godzilla and Hawkins’ performance sells it.
In the only shocking moment in the film, Dr. Graham helps Mark out of helicopter wreckage I was certain he would die in. They’re running for their lives together and King Ghidorah comes out of nowhere and kills her. My reaction (“Oh, my God!”) was loud, audible above a whisper when it happened. The other four people in the theater (during my first viewing) reacted similarly to me.
Dr. Graham is just gone, and it happens so fast. Meanwhile, Mark survives a missile explosion at near point-blank range and walks it off (his entire family is explosion-proof!). Beyond Dr. Serizawa convincing us of his devastation over a character we never got to know, she’s all but forgotten by the film afterward. Even if King of the Monsters sees a demonstrably better representation of women in its story than the previous, I was still feeling pretty rattled about the whole scene. Did that have to happen?
With Dr. Graham gone, Dr. Serizawa’s tenuous connection to the plot is slowly severed. As mentioned before, Ilene Chen takes over his role as the Monarch scientist with all the information we as audience members need to know about our monster friends, and Mark Russell begins to lead the team more than Serizawa does, with Dr. Serizawa constantly deferring to his experience in animal behavior. Most of Serizawa’s dialog is largely about championing the notion that man ‘must have faith in Gojira’ (to save them).
Dr. Serizawa has a far more pronounced presence in King of the Monsters than he did Godzilla 2014, where he was almost an afterthought of a character simply there to remind the audience that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were holocaust events that happened. Michael Dougherty’s direction for King of the Monsters humanizes Dr. Serizawa and Watanabe seems more engaged in the material.
Yet the Chen family’s historical relevance to the universe’s mythology beyond Godzilla clarifies that they are effectively his replacement. The reports of Ziyi becoming a mainstay in the MonsterVerse confirm that much. On some level, it’s hard not to think of what happened to Rinko Kikuchi’s Mako Mori. They reduced her role to nothing in favor of Jing Tian’s corporate suit character (Liwen Shao) and John Boyega’s self-insert (Jake “Pentecost”) in Pacific Rim: Uprising.
The only difference in King of the Monsters is that one relatively experienced actor is replacing another, both worked together on previous projects, and the replacement doesn’t feel all that callous. Still, I’m incredibly frustrated. Serizawa finally seemed to come into his own as a character, and then the climax of the film sees him go out in a painfully depressing fashion: Death by a nuclear explosion.
It’s a clear parallel to the way his namesake, Daisuke Serizawa, dies in the 1954 Godzilla, but the circumstances and the manner of death is different. It’s saving the life of Godzilla instead of ending it. It’s not that the sequence is terrible. It’s not, it’s one of the best moments in the film, and unlike Dr. Graham, Serizawa’s passing is the driving force behind Monarch’s second wind and victory. It just leaves me lamenting how they handled the character overall.
I always thought Dr. Serizawa should’ve been the human protagonist of Legendary’s Godzilla franchise if it wasn’t going to be Bryan Cranston (it clearly was not) and Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s reprisal was never a sure thing. Serizawa was the character with the greatest connection and understanding of Godzilla and the Titans. I’d go as far as arguing he could’ve been the human heart of these films in the same way Godzilla finally became the monster heart of King of the Monsters. Characters like Mark Russell and Ilene Chen (aka, Graham and Serizawa 2.0)? They should’ve been orbiting around Dr. Serizawa.
But no one responsible for the scripts of Legendary’s Godzilla film seems to view him as a mainstay character, which is disappointing when you consider the stake his namesake had in the original film’s story as an isolated tale. Sufficed to say, as well as Watanabe performed in this film, I was crushed to see Dr. Serizawa die.
David Strathairn was the one cast member I wish had disappeared altogether. He appears three times over the course of the film. In the first, he only seems present to glare at Watanabe and Hawkins. He provides little in terms of giving the audience context about how badly the US military wants to destroy the Titans.
His second scene, he just kinda slips into the frame in a video conference call to throw out a reference to the Oxygen Destroyer from 1954 film and disappears for a big chunk of the film. In the last, he just explains where we are since the film started, and that’s a role that could’ve easily been fulfilled by Aisha Hinds’ character. He gets to live, so I’m sure we’ll all see him again.
CONCLUSION
K ong: Skull Island probably did the most in establishing the kind’ve tone the MonsterVerse would roll forward with and as a prequel, ends up negating a lot about how Godzilla 2014 introduced the monsters. King of the Monsters follows the path Skull Island paved and does a lot to pull Godzilla out from the obscurity and shadow of its predecessor’s grim tale of Monster Delay.
Both times I saw King of the Monsters I left the theater in a state of absolute euphoria. This is the closest a film has come to matching the theater experience I had when I saw Pacific Rim. This is the closest a film has come to rousing the kind of happiness in me that makes it feel as though I’m sitting next to the spirit of the little kid that fell in love with monster movies, rediscovering why she thought they were so great. Fantastic as the standard theater experience was, I regret not seeing this on an IMAX screen instead.
This is the feeling I wanted to experience watching the 2014 film but was denied by its execution. I was excited about Pacific Rim and was vindicated by a fantastic monster movie. King of the Monsters was a film where I believed my doubts to be proven right, but the opposite happened.
My expectations were thwarted. Everyone involved in this production brought the fire, the passion, and the energy. I never thought I’d see my favorite monster (Mothra) so audaciously realized. I never thought I’d be staring at Mothra in awe as her theme swelled to an overwhelming crescendo.
I don’t think it can be overstated just how much King of the Monsters gets right as a Godzilla story and just as a solid action/adventure movie. There’s a better balance between man and monster, the plot’s pacing is much more focused. Everyone is vying for a single goal instead of feeling scattered to the four winds.
The emotional highs and lows of the film are only amplified by the dynamism of the score. From the mood to the core theme of the story, even with the unfortunate implications of its overall message, it delivered a Godzilla film right down to the core of the franchise hero himself. I can’t wait to buy this film.
