IR Film Review: GODZILLA - KING OF THE MONSTERS [Warner Brothers]
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The texture of a monster movie relies on its sheer size but the diametrics of destruction have a certain threshold of believability and therefore, art in a way. Sometimes with certain dialogue it is better to say nothing at all, than risk an essence of impact. “Godzilla: King Of The Monsters” suffers from this ailment in numerous and many ways. Even though the texture of some of the large monster scenes is indeed impressive, the core family story that is supposed to fuel it with Kyle Chandler, Vera Farmiga and Millie Bobby Brown just falls flat mainly because of confused motivations and simply bad dialogue. “The MEG” functioned in this same way but with more of a tongue-in-cheek sense of humor but that cannot save a bad script. Now popcorn movies can be just that but they can be done with that sense of weight. The first "Godzilla" made by Gareth Edwards took a different approach with Godzilla in terms of the mystery and especially with the Bryan Cranston family angle, it definitely gave it a sense of stakes. Here it switches it around but Farmiga's character who is motivated by loss is one sided. Vera is an exceptional actress but one cannot save bad motivation. Kyle Chandler, so great in “Wolf Of Wall Street”, seems exceptional cardboard and flat here. Millie Bobbie Brown is the only that seems to understand or at least try to impact what she is doing but she seems like she is doing almost a different movie or script than what is being filmed. Her part works. In essence, this is likely the fault of the director.Michael Dougherty wanted to take the film to a different tone than the first one with this sense of scale. But oddly enough Godzilla had much more a sense of scale in the Gareth Edwards' version. Another actor that understands what film should be created is Ken Watanabe, He has a sense of weight and genuinely a sense of loss for what Godzilla could be. His solo scene where he confronts Godzilla is perhaps the high point in the movie. The overall dexterity of the film though lacks cohesion as if the director was more interested in the sequences than the actual story. That is fine in certain cases but it really creates a separation of definition when the motivations come off as a laughable. There is somewhat of a happy medium somewhere between what Gareth Edwards' Godzilla was and this. One is a disaster movie and one is a perception on survival. The aspect here that should inspire comes out as schlock.D-
By Tim Wassberg