MONSTER MASH

MOVIE
Godzilla: King of Monsters
Kyle Chandler, Vera Farmiga 
Director Michael Dougherty
Review Ray Chan

Michael Dougherty’s name may be unfamiliar, but he did help write the big-budget blockbusters Superman Returns and X-Men Apocalypse, so he appears well-suited for Godzilla: King of the Monsters, a creature feature on a massive scale, peppered with sprinklings of black humour.
    This is the third instalment in Legendary’s MonsterVerse, following Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla and Jordan Vogt-Roberts’ prequel Kong: Skull Island; a mega-franchise which models itself on the Marvel and DC ones, featuring super-beings and villains slugging it out in a world where humans are for the most part expendable, collateral damage.
    Dougherty’s movie opens with a flashback to the 2014 Godzilla film’s climactic mayhem, and then unfolds in the aftermath of this hidden monster’s first public appearance.
    Ever since, the cryptozoological research group Monarch has been tracking Godzilla and monitoring many other ‘Titans’ found dormant beneath the Earth’s surface.
    The theory, already proffered in the first two chapters, is that these behemoths have long existed to bring global balance, a premise more fully explored here as their epic battles are made to allegorise and embody the cataclysmic upheavals of nature that man-made climate change is bringing to Mother Earth.
    At the centre of Godzilla’s revival from its slumber is an acoustic device named Orca, which echoes the sounds of the monsters to summon, repel, anger or calm them.
    Godzilla’s big fight against two Mutos in 2014 tore apart not just San Francisco, but also researchers Mark (Kyle Chandler) and Emma Russell (Vera Farmiga), the husband-and-wife team who had developed Orca together, but whose young son was killed in the devastating onslaught.
    Now divorced, they are driven by divergent ideologies: Mark wishes to destroy all monsters, while Emma sees them as a necessary evil if mankind is to have a future.
    This same division can be seen between Monarch and the military, ever disputing whether to pulverise the Titans or preserve them.
    Ex-military eco-terrorist Alan Jonah (Charles Dance) steals the Orca device – along with Emma and her daughter Madison (Millie Bobby Brown) – and plans to introduce widespread chaos to restore world order.
    He succeeds in awakening all of the hibernating Titans scattered around the globe, including the lepidopteran Mothra, the three-headed King Ghidorah and the winged pteranodon Rodan – regulars of the Godzilla franchise who all, according to the closing credits, appear as themselves here.
    The chaos that ensues, with confrontations which seem to last interminably, will either bore the casual viewer or thrill those brought up on a fare of 60s Japanese action programs on TV, when rubber-suited creatures delighted in destroying papier mache skyscrapers.
    In the parallel rush by Jonah and the bloodthirsty Ghidorah to topple incumbent hierarchies, to kill the king and to set an unruly replacement on the throne, the fate of Godzilla proves intimately intertwined with that of the entire human race. There’s metaphor and symbolism aplenty if you can spot it through the devastation and carnage.
    Godzilla: King of the Monsters rattles and races along to an explosive finish, while leaving the gate open for a perpetual Pandora’s pandemonium of sequels.
    And of course, we can’t forget the titular character. 
    In championing him, Dougherty respects both the B-movie beats of Godzilla’s film history as well as the environmental subtext that he has always represented, maintaining the lizard's persona as equal part ‘rampant destroyer of cities’ and ‘snarling action hero’, but mostly ‘noble ally of the righteous’ .
    Ultimately, the climax is predictable, but don't let that mar your enjoyment of the movie. All that’s required is a mandatory suspension of critical judgment.


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