Godzilla King of the Monsters movie review: The film is bathed in this uniform, dull grey that makes things hard to decipher, and harder to care for.Godzilla II: King of the Monsters movie cast: Kyle Chandler, Vera Farmiga, Millie Bobby Brown, Ken Watanabe, Ziyi Zhang, Bradley Whitford, Sally Hawkins, Charles Dance
Godzilla II: King of the Monsters movie director: Michael Dougherty
Godzilla II: King of the Monsters rating: 1.5 stars
Sixty-five years and 35 films. That’s not bad for a giant that started out as a man in a rubber suit in 1954. But now that we are into the 35th, it is time to repeat, ‘Please, let the godzilla go’. Particularly as the central premise of Godzilla II is posing this question, repeatedly, that given how we have treated the planet, who deserves this Earth more: them or us?
Now that we are officially into the Anthopocene epoch, to reflect how the Earth has been shaped by human activity, Hollywood blockbusters too have been popping up this question with rising frequency. Here, the top villain is an “eco-terrorist”, Jonah (Dance), seeking to wreak mayhem “to restore the Earth’s balance”.
The idea, to cut a long story short, is to unleash the giants — who have been “contained” at sites across the world, by secretive governments — in the hope that they will kill enough people for the survivors to live happily ever after. The thought isn’t original, but in all honestly, you can’t say you have seen this movie before. It’s imagination gone wild, in kinds, numbers, types, scales of giants, who clash everywhere from Mexico to Antarctica, and from underwater (in an Atlantis-type city, but “way, way older”) to up in the air. All of it is bathed in this uniform, dull grey that makes things hard to decipher, and harder to care for.
The ensemble of well-known actors are caught in an even weirder human story, particularly the family of Mark (Chandler), Emma (Farmiga) and daughter Madison (Millie Bobby Brown of Stranger Things). The last time round, in 2014, the parents had lost a son to a godzilla attack. And here they are, in the midst of it all again, with “bisonar” control devices, “oxygen destroyers”, Earth extinction theories, and luck that should have run out long ago.
