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Godzilla: King of the Monsters-6/10
This'll be lengthy so fair warning.
My initial feeling leaving the theatre was disappointment. It is not a bad movie, but it's certainly not a good one. It does feel like a step back from the previous installment. Where the last one was a self contained story that followed a less is more approach, built to its climax and gave a definitive ending that could be built off of, this movie is the contrary, feeling very much like it's trying to set up a universe and rushing thru things because it's sequel is coming out soon.
The criticism that the story itself is dumb and the human characters are bland is valid. The cast tries their damndest, but the material is so clunky and, at times, illogical, that it makes what they're doing insufferable and boring. The motives for releasing the Titans is absurd. While you don't need Oscar worthy material here, it has to at least make sense. That's not present here. It felt like the film needed to find a reason to have all these monsters running around, so it came up with the easiest, ham fisted way it could to get it outta the way.
There's multiple scenes throughout that are strictly exposition, and it gets pretty old fairly quickly. You're getting what feels like power points during a lot of the movie. In contrast to the first one, which gave you some hints of Godzilla's origin and why he exists, this one hammers home everything it can to make sure you know there's a lot of monsters and that they used to rule the world and Godzilla used to fight some of them and etc etc.
The kaiju fights are fun. But they go a little overboard. There's no build up to anything. They just give you the main event right to start, as opposed to building and teasing. And without giving away spoilers, they blew their fucking load on Godzilla. I'm not talking about using him in action sequences, because he's really only in 3 and the final one is rightfully the longest. I'm talking about what they have him capable of doing. It's ridiculous, and after seeing it, my thought was "no way the Kong from Skull Island has any shot".
The other issue I had is there are just too many damn monsters. Most of them being useless in the context of the movie. Godzilla and co aren't as special when you know there's another 20 or so out there. And when they're not adding anything to the movie, it begs the question why they are there in the first place.
There are some cool moments. Godzilla gets most of them. Mothra has her own as well. And the sound design is spectacular.
One thing they continued from the first one that I really liked was the angles they shot the monsters from. You did get some standard shots and there's a scene during the Godzilla/Ghidora main event that is throwback to original. But a lot of the time you see the monsters fighting from the humans pov and I thought that really helps sell just how massive these animals are.
They also kept the pace at which the monsters move similar to the first. These things aren't flying around at breakneck speeds. I mean, they are in the context of the movie, but they look big, slow and lumbering. Which is something I liked from the first one and was happy to see they kept that approach.
All in all, it was just ok. I like the previous one better, and I feel like this was just too much packed into one movie. I hope the next one is better.
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