Godzilla: King of the Monsters - Movie Review

Starring Kyle Chandler, Vera Farmiga, Millie Bobby Brown, Ken Watanabe, Ziyi Zhang, Sally Hawkins, Bradley Whitford, Thomas Middleditch, David Strathairn, Charles Dance, Aisha Hinds and O’Shea Jackson Jr.

Written by Michael Dougherty & Zach Shields.

Directed by Michael Dougherty.

★★

The Godzilla movies can’t ever seem to get the human characters right. The last movie didn’t do much for me because I didn’t think Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s central soldier character was very compelling, and it was almost halfway through the movie before Godzilla showed up. This time around, we get monsters galore right away, but we keep having to cut to pesky humans with their bad dialogue and overwrought reactions. (This director really loves starting with the actor’s back to us so they can turn around dramatically.)

After the last movie, Godzilla has disappeared, and the company that monitored him - Monarch - is looking for him and other potential titans. Truth is, Monarch knows where several titans are; it’s just that most of them are laying dormant. Ah, but one terrorist gets a hold of Monarch’s technology that will awaken them. More baddies for Godzilla to fight.

If you swapped this cast out with the cast from The Meg, it wouldn’t be much different.

I will give a movie the logic it establishes within its own universe. I will give it the titans. I will give them the origins of all the creatures. Now, the plot has to make sense after that, and it rarely does. From the opening scene that rips off Batman v. Superman to the convoluted motivations of most of the characters to the murky, smoke-filled battles where it's hard to invest in what's transpiring, you have to go dumpster-diving to find the pleasures.

How are the titans? Pretty cool. Godzilla, Mothra, Rodan, and King Ghidorah are all here, plus others. I wish the movie had lived up to their potential.

P.S. The three stars from Straight Outta Compton were O'Shea Jackson Jr., Corey Hawkins and Jason Mitchell. Jackson was in this. Hawkins and Mitchell were in Kong Skull Island. All three of their characters are still alive, and Godzilla v. Kong is due in 2021. Don't squander this reunion, Warner Bros!

Secret Life of Pets #1 at Box Office; Dark Phoenix Fizzles

For the weekend of June 7-9, 2019, The Secret Life of Pets 2 managed to win the weekend. The sequel opened far below the $104 million the original opened to, so maybe this is not going to be the next Ice Age level franchise, but it’ll still ultimately be profitable.

Dark Phoenix, meanwhile, is the lowest opening ever for an X-Men movie, including the different Wolverine spin-offs. It’s also the worst reviewed of them all. Maybe they shouldn’t have taken the plot from X-Men: The Last Stand and made Sophie Turner the star while making James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, etc., take backseat roles. Perhaps it’s a good thing this will be the final outing for this cast. Expect the X-Men to lie dormant for a few years, then circa 2023, they’ll be introduced into the MCU.

Late Night opted to open on only 4 screens before going wide next week, and with a $62,000 per-screen average, it’s poised to do well in expansion, albeit against a couple other comedic offerings in Men in Black International and Shaft.

Of the holdovers, Godzilla’s dropping like a stone. Godzilla v. Kong is still the plan for 2021, but WB has to be wondering if they’ll be able to break even on the project. Rocketman hasn’t really caught fire the way Bohemian Rhapsody did. Perhaps the R-rating can be blamed, although A Star Is Born seemed to manage with one.

Many films seem to be underperforming what studios had expected, but the real overperformer has been Aladdin. And Disney still has Toy Story 4, Spider-Man: Far from Home, and The Lion King on the way.

Opens June 14

MEN IN BLACK INTL. with Chris Hemsworth, Tessa Thompson and Liam Neeson.

SHAFT with Samuel L. Jackson, Jesse T. Usher, Regina Hall and Richard Roundtree.

Godzilla - Movie Review

Starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ken Watanabe, Elisabeth Olsen, Bryan Cranston, Sally Hawkins, Juliette Binoche, David Straithairn, Richard T. Jones and Victor Rasuk.
Directed by Gareth Edwards.

★★½

Tone is an important element in a movie that introduces fantastical elements. This film wisely eschews the campy dumb fun the 1998 movie tried to have and plays it straight and serious. I liked that, and if anything it would have helped this movie to have a moment or two of levity.

Normally I wouldn't mind that it takes a while for Godzilla to show up. It gives us a chance to get to know the human characters and raise the stakes when people start dying and cities start getting destroyed. Unfortunately I didn't care about most of the characters.

The marketing campaign makes it look like Bryan Cranston is going to be one of the central characters, so I don't think I'm giving away too much by saying the movies should have focussed more on him and less on his soldier son played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson (Anna Karenina, Kick-Ass).  Johnson's a blank slate, and it just felt like another big-budget action movie putting Generic Young Guy as the hero. Was Taylor Kitsch too busy?

I know. You don't go to a Godzilla movie for good acting. But you do hope it'll be there.

You also go to a Godzilla movie for thrilling visuals, and on that front, the movie delivers. I felt that little-kid surge of excitement when halfway through the movie, we see that first sign of a giant monster on the loose. ("Mayhem's about to start!")  Godzilla isn't in the movie as much as you'd think, but I liked his design, I liked the effects, I just liked the character. If a sequel is greenlit, I'll be excited for him to return, even if (or especially if) a whole different cast is assembled to watch stuff get smashed.

Don't get me wrong. All of these actors have been excellent in something else, but Watanabe spends the whole movie slack-jawed, Straithairn carries the air of authority while the script makes him a woefully inept leader, and Olsen is there to be the wife that Taylor-Johnson calls from time to time.

It's much better than the 1998 film. The ride of the second half is quite fun.

Random Movie Stuff - 4/5/13

- Zoe Saldana (Star Trek) is up for the role of Gamora (on the right) in the big-screen version of Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy. It's scheduled to open August 1, 2014.  James Gunn (Slither, Super) will direct.  Chris Pratt (Zero Dark Thirty) will play Star-Lord (guy in the middle) and Dave Bautista (The Man with the Iron Fist) will play Drax the Destroyer (the bald guy on the left).  That leaves Groot and Rocket Raccoon yet to be cast.

- Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje (Lost) has joined the cast of Pompeii. It's directed by Paul WS Anderson (Alien v Predator) and focusses on an enslaved gladiator (Game of Thrones' Kit Harington) fighting back against a tyrant (Kiefer Sutherland) in the final days before the eruption of Mt.Vesuvius.

- We're getting another Godzilla movie coming May 16, 2014. It'll star Aaron Johnson (Kick-Ass), Elizabeth Olsen (Silent House), Juliette Binoche (Chocolat), Ken Watanabe (The Last Samurai), Bryan Cranston (Argo), Sally Hawkins (Happy Go Lucky) and David Strathairn (Lincoln).

- Bradley Cooper will play the villain in the western Jane Got a Gun, starring Natalie Portman as a woman who turns to her ex-lover (Joel Edgerton) for help when a gang shoots her husband and they're coming to her farm to finish the job while he heals.  Cooper is replacing the recently departed Jude Law.

- Melissa McCarthy and Susan Sarandon will play granddaughter/grandmother on a road trip in Tammy.  Dan Aykroyd, Allison Janney and Mark Duplass co-star.

- Ed Helms will play Rusty Griswold in a Vacation sequel that follows grown-up Rusty having his own rough vacation misadventures. Christina Applegate will play his wife, and Chevy Chase and Beverly D'Angelo are in talks to cameo as Clark & Ellen, grandparents. (Personally I'd like to see past Rusty actors cameo too, including Anthony Michael Hall, Johnny Galecki, and Ethan Embry.)