Godzilla: King of the Monsters

I don't know why, but we still don't have that great big budget Godzilla movie.

Godzilla 1998 had the fresh off of Independence Day Roland Emmerich, yet was a total dud.

Godzilla 2014 was quite a bit better, but still was kind of dull and didn't feature very much of Godzilla.

This new Godzilla looked absolutely great from the trailers. Good cast, a lot more monsters, and coming after the very good Kong: Skull Island in the same cinematic universe.

But damn is it disappointing, and in a lot of the same ways the other films were letdowns.

In this one the world has discovered that not only is there Godzilla, but there are 17 other dormant "titans" around the globe, all more or less buried in a sort of hibernation. But then, through a very convoluted and stupid plot, they start to wake up, and tear the world to pieces, and only Godzilla (and possibly Mothra?) can save us.

I don't know why Godzilla would bother tbh. Some of these human characters are just beyond stupid. One of them in this movie is basically Thanos. And for all the good work casting this thing, almost nobody gets anything good to do. At least Godzilla 2014 had Bryan Cranston making an impression. The best we get here is a fairly likable Millie Bobby Brown, some more good knowing lines from Ken Watanabe, and hey, it's sure nice to see Ziyi Zhang in an english language movie for the first time in years. But good actors like Vera Farmiga and Kyle Chandler languish, with dopey character arcs and often staggeringly dumb dialogue. I mean, look, no the humans are not the draw for these movies, but you gotta give us SOMETHING to structure a movie around.

But even the monster fights underwhelm. No doubt there are some very cool moments in this film. Mothra is just awesome. But once again almost all the big set pieces are filmed in dark, murky shots that are really difficult to make out at times. I get that when you have these scenes at night you can sort of get away with less precise fx, but it almost always looks bad anyway. At least Skull Island had most of its big scenes in daylight. Even the Pacific Rim sequel did.

And it's again largely a very serious, humorless movie, with its few brief stabs at levity mostly falling flat.

I just don't get why the people who make these big budget Godzillas keep making the same mistakes over and over.