(DATELINE: SPOILER ALERT) A lot of people are mad at the new Godzilla movie Godzilla: King of The Monsters, including me. First-ly and foremost-ly, this thing seems like somebody egested a first draft of a movie and the Movie People were like “OK, let’s make a movie! Go! Movie!” The dialogue is lame and there’s too much of it.
Dr. Rick Stanton [about Godzilla]: Good thing he’s on our side.
I don’t even know who Dr. Rick Stanton is, I guess it’s Kyle Chandler, who I think was in the previous Godzilla movie that I did not see, and I’m glad, because otherwise I would have heard that much more of Kyle Chandler as the Scientist, talking about Godzilla. No shit, it would be bad for Godzilla to be on the Other Side? You are a Scientist of what?
There are scenes where people are going blah-blah-blah while the giant monsters are fighting behind them! Be quiet and get the hell outta the way so we can see the monsters fight!
There are Scientists in this thing, and Soldiers, who are comical, one of them is played by Ice Cube’s kid in real life, O’Shea Jackson Jr., and he has a great mug, he just keeps showing up all over the world almost getting killed. I would settle for that, having the one pissed-off soldier complaining about kaiju, that would be enough, a pure monologue of complaining.
Everyone has been slicing up so many parts of this stupid movie and mounting them on slides to be scrutinized under critical microscopes, and rightly so. This movie deserves to be vivisected for study. All I am doing here is adding a slide. It’s not like this is some mean or gratuitous pigpile; this movie is bad, and there is an entire Internet doing Parallel Thinking right now about it. It’s the kind of Bad Movie that needs its badness to be analyzed.
The SOUND of this movie is terrible. It is a total SPOILER ALERT part of the story, the sound, even though the fucking TITLE of this thing is also a SPOILER ALERT, c’mon. The actual SOUND of this film betrays it and deprives the audience of a better Giant-Monster Movie experience, and I am saying this in spite of having accidentally bought “D-Box” seats at the theater, seats that fucking VIBRATE YOUR BOTTOM PARTS as you sit there and slurp a Coke and watch monsters destroy stuff. The vibrating was bullshit, I didn’t come anywhere close to getting off, and while I was getting vibrated, I was thinking that the sound on this movie was totally unremarkable, the SOUND is what should have been cutting through me, not some goofy subwoofer junk.
This story is a lazy regurgitation of Destroy All Monsters (1968), and Destroy All Monsters is a better movie! It’s old and corny and it has space aliens and a creepy baby-Godzilla who can blow smoke rings! Yes, it’s people in rubber suits, but this new film doesn’t really convince me that I’m not looking at the same level of technology trying to convince me there’s a giant lizard walking around on two legs, except there’s lots of computer-steez all over the frame! Still looks like rubber suits!
I will fight you on Monster fucking Island about how good this flick could have been, and instead it’s just a placeholder to get us to a Godzilla vs. King Kong-type movie, and of course King Kong will win because he has a larger brain and Godzilla will swim away, the end. Or is it, question-mark fills screen, roll credits, fart sound, D-Box. Who the fuck gets the “Large Coke and Large Popcorn” deal and then goes back for a refill?
Speaking of credits! If the criminals who made this movie had put the end credits at the beginning of this thing, they could have eliminated all the boring talking by humans that totally gets in the way of letting us watch the goddamn monsters fight! The end credits to this movie sketch out the whole thing! Giant monsters! “Titans!” They are rising up because we are destroying the planet! Then we could just cut to all the monsters busting out of L-Seven and fucking shit up.
Also, Millie Bobbie Brown, you gotta hand it to her for sucking every last dollar out of her Entertainment Brand, she’s great, she sells every dopey loving look at green-screen Godzilla, but all they do is plug her into moments where she says something before the sound drops out and some special effects happen, and she’s not alone, but she’s the big star of this movie, no offense to Kyle Chandler and Vera Farmiga and Bradley Whitford from fucking The West Wing, har! He’s doing his The West WIng thing, explaining shit, except it’s not a walk-and-talk, it’s a sit-and-talk, in front of a computer screen and some buttons to click. A click-and-talk? Mostly though, it’s a talk-and-talk! Stop talking!
Anyway, the sound, that’s my big beef with this flick. SPOILER ALERT Mothra the giant moth is in it, and the whole gimmick with Mothra has always been that she is controlled by a pair of miniature singing twins, they soothe her and communicate with her, and in this new iteration, they totally steal this power away from the Twins (also they steal Mothra away from Japan and assign it to China) and give it to Vera Farmiga, and I don’t know what her character’s name is either, but it doesn’t matter because there pretty much shouldn’t be any people in this new Godzilla movie, there should only be Godzilla and other monsters, and they should just fucking fight and DESTROY for 90 minutes, no dialogue, unless there’s subtitles for what the monsters are saying. Have we discussed the sound?
The sound! Vera Farmiga has this gizmo that generates sounds that you can use to control the monsters, and Charles Dance, who was on Game of Thrones as the guy who got assassinated by his son Tyrion (Peter Dinklage) for sleeping with his girlfriend while he was taking a shit—wait, he was sleeping with Tyrion’s girlfriend, and then later on Tyrion crept up on him with a crossbow and waylaid him in the privvy. Anyway, you keep interrupting me but I am trying to tell you about the SOUND, Charles Dance wants the sound gizmo because he is an Eco-Terrorist, which is cool, Earth First and whatever, but it’s never really clear what he wants to do beyond murder people to gain access to the monsters, via the sound machine.
The SOUND! So the idea is they have the ability to do what the mini-twins could do with Mothra, except there’s this tech that zeroes in on each monster’s acoustical biorhythms or whatever, and when they press the button and do an example of each monster’s sound, THAT should have been a GIANT MOVIE MOMENT, each monster’s THEME SOUND, I mean holy crap, MOTHRA’S THEME, and then RODIN’S THEME, and then MONSTER ZERO’S THEME, and then, and then: GOJIRA!!! That coulda have been mapped onto the ENTIRE MUSICAL SCORE FOR THE FILM, and could have done so much of the storytelling! They totally failed doing that, because most of the movie music has to take a back seat to a bunch of actors yapping about OBVIOUS THINGS. Even if you DNGAF about monster movies, if you hear the theme music for Godzilla, it RESONATES, it’s like Jungian or something. They failed, they went cheap and didn’t rope in a decent music person to make it happen.
