Movie Review: Godzilla II: King of The Monsters

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Godzilla II: King of The Monsters crams a franchise worth of films into just 132 minutes. Is it a non-stop white knuckle ride? or stuffed with too many sub-plots, red herrings and secondary characters to sustain its god-sized action? Oxford Lamoureaux contemplates this and other mysteries in his review of Warner Brothers latest contribution to the MonsterVerse.

At first, the premise of Godzilla II is relatively simple. Emma and Mark Russell (Vera Farmiga and Kyle Chandler) are scientists and parents to a young boy and girl. It’s heavily implied that the couple lose their son in the final battle of the preceding film, 2014’s Godzilla, and separate, after which Emma spends her time reformulating an old device prototype that allows communication with the giant monsters, known in the film universe as ‘Titans’.

The device is then stolen by paramilitary eco-terrorist Alan Jonah (Charles Dance), who holds Emma and her daughter Madison (Millie Bobbie Brown) hostage and uses the device to awaken ancient, mountainous monsters and unleash chaos upon the world.

If the film had limited its story to just that, a solid script could have provided us with a genuinely moving story about loss, forgiveness, redemption, and love – themes the film touches on, but often forces into the story for the sake of plot pacing. Unfortunately, Godzilla II struggles to provide a story, or characters, that we can either relate to or care about, forcing them into caricatured situations and keeping them alive through impenetrable plot armour.

This is almost entirely the fault of the script, which stuffs the story with so many secondary characters that – despite an ensemble of incredible actors – there simply isn’t enough time for any of them to develop beyond forgettable comic relief and scene dressing.

The result is a cast of characters that all experience emotional arcs far beyond our available, on-screen investment in such a brief space of time, and a constant state of confusion around whether the film is an eco-commentary piece tackling heavy human issues, or presenting itself as a flippant mega-monster blockbuster. Perhaps it’s the curse of competing against established cinematic universes with decade-long character development at their core, but Godzilla II often tries to include too much, and this leads to a film containing very little to care about.

Script and characters aside, the most crucial aspect of any Godzilla film is the action. The Godzilla franchise has seen a few iterations in the West already, with this most recent spending two slightly connected films (Godzilla and Kong: Skull Island) teasing our first, full-scale monster battle. For fans of Godzilla or monster films in general, Mothra, Rodan, and the terrifying King Ghidorah all meet the incredible expectations you might have for them.

Much of the time, the film’s monster battles suffer from an overuse of steady-handheld zoom, designed to pull the audience into the action but leaving these moments feeling like video-game cutscenes. Despite this, for their first major cinematic outing in recent history, these giant monsters deliver immense entertainment across the film’s runtime, bursting from volcanoes, filling the sky with crackling thunder and lightning, and hurling each other through giant skyscrapers with ease.

The intertwining story that ties these battles and our characters together would have benefited from being split across separate films, where fewer limitations on time could have delivered a story with characters that felt genuine and complete, and a gargantuan monster franchise with a narrative on humanity and survival that an audience is able to fully invest in.

Oxford Lamoureaux

Oxford Lamoureaux
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