Godzilla: King of the Monsters Review

Godzilla: King of the Monsters was directed by Michael Dougherty and stars Kyle Chandler, Vera Farmiga, Bradley Whitford, Charles Dance, David Strathairn, Ken Watanabe and Millie Bobby Brown along with a few others as well.

The plot sees Godzilla face off against a group of monsters while military personnel and scientists fight to ensure their own survival.

This film unfortunately features no standout performances. There are a few moments through the film where people such as Farmiga, Brown, and Watanabe have to get very dramatic in their roles and they were definitely convincing when such moments came, which was only thing about the performances that stuck out to me. The rest of the time everyone else just seems to play their characters at a standard that can only be called barely credible.

The film was written by Michael Dougherty and Zach Shields. The script has a lot of things that it wants to do, from continuing the story from the first Godzilla film to giving us a story with new characters, family drama and debates on right and wrong. And not forgetting very intense battle scenes with monsters. The one thing that impressed me about the script was how perfectly-paced the battle scenes with Godzilla and the monsters are. They were kept at such a perfect pace that none of them dragged at all.

The film was shot by Lawrence Sher, who did an average job; the standout shots are the ones of Godzilla's underwater home, as they are so different visually from anything else in the film. I will also say that a shot of one of the monsters making its first appearance is also somewhat impressive, but it does feel it a bit manipulative when you see something like that and your first response is a feeling of awe that feels forced.

The music was composed by Bear McCreary and to be honest this film is so full of bombastic explosions and high-octane action that's its almost impossible to even to appreciate the score. Luckily it does have a standout moment when a character is walking toward certain death. The choice of music was perfect, it establishes the weight of what is happening on screen and it's all executed almost perfectly.

I would also like to mention the visual effects. I thought some were impressive, but after a while the film gets a bit overindulgent with them.

The one thing that severely damaged my experience with the movie was this. Much like the first film, the characters are not that interesting. I find this surprising since the main criticism of the first film was listened to - Godzilla's presence is improved here but the characters are just as badly underdeveloped as they were in the first film. It just seems to be all centred around Godzilla once he shows up, and very little time is made to develop the characters, both old and new.

The conclusions I draw from this are, Godzilla: King of the Monsters has no standout performances, but moments of promise from its cast; a script with a lot to do but that accomplishes very little of its ideas successfully; cinematography that's impressive if a bit manipulative; and a score that's hard to notice due to everything else going on around it, but that compensates with one perfect moment. And one flaw - the lack of interesting characters that has been carried on from the last Godzilla; I'm not sure why you would fix one flaw but not the other (and it's a rather easy one to fix) it's all a bit confusing.

Having taken all my pros and cons into account, I'm going to give Godzilla: King of the monsters...

C-

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