JoltBlog

Gareth Edwards' franchise-starting "Godzilla" was a huge international hit, but divided viewers because of its flat, action figure-like characterizations, its meticulous, almost "Jaws"-like unveiling of Godzilla and the two Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Objects (MUTOs) that he ended up fighting, and its relative dearth of actual Godzilla footage (about seven minutes). The movie also placed the big fella within the larger ecosystem of wolves and snakes and birds and such. It contained more nature footage than you expected to see in a city-stomping kaiju epic, to the point where you half-expected Terrence Malick shots of honey-tinted fields and perhaps a narration by Godzilla ("Fire ... water ... why do you wrestle inside me?"). There were fears (among those who loved the original) and hopes (among people who hated it) that future movies would offer less philosophizing and atmospheric indulgences and more footage of giant monsters beating the tar out of each other, and the Vietnam-era period piece "Kong: Skull Island" delivered plenty, pitting the now super-sized ape against a series of Lovecraftian giants that seemed to be half-insect, half-demon, and making sure that the story didn't go five minutes without a burst of violent spectacle. 

"King of the Monsters" tries to blend the two approaches, not always successfully, and it suffers from its inability to trust the audience to understand both the substance and implications of the action that it presents so boldly onscreen. While the core trio of Chandler, Farmiga and Brown acquit themselves well, and often inject genuine notes of affection and anguish into their scenes, the sheer number of supporting characters, some intriguing but many more forgettable, prevents the movie from focusing on a fantastical domestic drama that theoretically could've been the equal of the central stories of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" or "The Babadook." Too many characters seem intended to explain (allegedly) complex plot points in plain language or crack wise during tense moments, serving as cliched "audience surrogates," in the degraded spirit of the ones that used to infest American horror and science fiction films in the nineties and early aughts. (Bradley Whitford's character, a doctor working for the Monarch folks, is the most annoying of the lot; the character seems to think he's starring in his own solo spinoff of "Mystery Science Theater 3000.") 

The monster cast is overpopulated as well. Like the too-hurried rollout of the future Justice League members in "Batman vs. Superman," we don't really have time to appreciate the personalities of the supporting monsters the way we do Godzilla, Ghidorah, Rodan and Mothra—though the latter is at the center of many of the movie's most breathtaking images, such as a mural-like shot of the transformed creature unfolding its glowing wings behind the translucent curtain of a waterfall. 

All that being said, purely at the level of craft, this is a frequently astounding movie—a succession of miracles and cursed disasters, unfurled onscreen with dazzling showmanship and over-scaled grace notes, from the way Rodan bites off a fighter jet’s nose cone like a hawk beheading a sparrow, to the shot of Godzilla shimmy-swimming towards the display window of an undersea research lab while flashing his spine-light to intimidate would-be challengers, to the way Ghidorah's heads screech and growl at each other, and at times even abuse each other, like the Three Stooges treating slaps as the continuation of conversation. (The middle head is Moe, the other two are Larry and Curly.) 

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