Monster flop

Legendary Entertainment found a way to totally muck up the greatest Godzilla premise ever and produce a film that is both great and terrible at the same time. How is so much suckage possible in a movie that features Godzilla, Rodan, Mothra and multiheaded Monster Zero? My summer is ruined, and it isn’t even summer yet.

Godzilla: King of the Monsters does have some terrific monster battles in it, and the special effects are mind-bogglingly good. Godzilla squares off against legendary foes that first appeared in the early 1950/60s films of the franchise, while getting some much needed assistance from the great Mothra, and all of the monsters are wonders to behold on screen.

But still, I cannot endorse this movie. The human stuff in between and during the monster scenes is dreadful. The script and staging for the homo sapiens is so bad that the film derails every time things cut to military types in a war room.

The story, such as it is, picks up where the previous film, Godzilla (2014), left off, with a world in a state of disarray after monster attacks on San Francisco and Las Vegas. And how do the humans dust themselves off and find a way to coexist with the likes of giant sea reptiles and moths after the decimation of the Bay Area?

Apparently, according to writer-director Michael Dougherty, we deliver inane dialogue really slowly, and inexplicably play with a sonar gadget that calls out to the monsters in a manner that either chills them out or fires them up and, of course, winds up sparking the monster mayhem. That gadget was created by Dr. Emma Russell (Vera Farmiga), who lost a child in the San Francisco attack and is attempting to communicate to the monster animals alongside her daughter (Millie Bobby Brown).

The monsters get the only well-staged scenes, featuring beautiful closeups and battered landscapes. Meanwhile, the poor actors are left to sit around in a situation room looking lost as they observe and comment on the action taking place elsewhere.

Bradley Whitford as a doctor gets the Lowery Cruthers-in-Jurassic World role (as played by Jake Johnson). That is, he’s the nerdy guy cracking wise from afar while monsters eat people and military folks scratch their heads—only Whitford’s character’s lines aren’t funny.

Brown is decent here, but again, with material so bad, there’s not much for the Stranger Things actress to work with. And she’s already completed her shots for the next installment, Godzilla vs. Kong, due out in 2020, so she’s not escaping this franchise quite yet.

Before making this film, Dougherty directed some OK horror entries (Krampus, Trick’r Treat). He’s also on board as a screenwriter for Godzilla vs. Kong, with Adam Wingard—also a horror specialist (You’re Next, and the awful Blair Witch reboot)—as director. I’m not optimistic. Perhaps Legendary should stop putting large blockbusters such as these into the hands of relatively new and mediocre horror directors.