Dudzilla

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This article was published 31/05/2019 (2375 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

OK, a movie that involves a colossal moth and a humongous three-headed hydra trashing Fenway Park could be considered silly. I’m fine with silly.

Unfortunately, the problem with this hapless monster movie is that it’s dull.

Really dull. So dull even a colossal moth and a humongous three-headed hydra trashing Fenway Park can’t rev it up.

Despite some respectful nods to the Japanese kaiju tradition, Godzilla: King of the Monsters is mostly concerned with establishing a new extended MonsterVerse. A sequel to the 2014 Godzilla reboot, this outing makes several pointed references to Kong and Skull Island, prepping audiences for 2020’s Godzilla Vs. Kong.

The digital special effects are well executed — quite a step up from the original man in a rubber suit — but nobody knows what to do with them. Technical wizardry is wasted in loud, dim, incomprehensible monster battle scenes.

Likewise, the A-list human cast, which includes Ken Watanabe, Sally Hawkins, David Strathairn and Ziyi Zhang, is squandered on a clumsy, confused and inept script (co-written by director Michael Dougherty, the man behind Krampus, with Zach Shields and Max Borenstein).

The story starts with the common Hollywood trope that there’s nothing like a vast global disaster to bring a fractured family together. The Russells haven’t recovered from the Godzilla-related destruction of 2014, which killed son Andrew and left his sister Madison (Millie Bobby Brown of Stranger Things) caught between her grieving parents, both scientists.

Mark Russell (Friday Night Lights’ Kyle Chandler) started drinking and disappeared into field work. Emma Russell (Vera Farmiga of The Conjuring series) has gone on to ally herself with the mysterious crypto-zoological agency Monarch.

Now Godzilla — or Gojira, as Watanabe’s Dr. Serizawa more accurately calls him — is on the move again, and other so-called Titans are busting out of their containment facilities worldwide. Their motives — to save or destroy humankind — remain unclear.

It’s one thing to have enigmatic monsters. The humans are equally opaque. Presenting us with military officers, politicians, scientists and a renegade eco-terrorist (Charles Dance, who’s basically doing Tywin Lannister in modern dress), the script waffles around trying to find a viable viewpoint.

The scripters never quite get to grips with their big questions, instead giving us a lot of vague talk about “balance” as the mega creatures annihilate major cities.

Are the Titan supporters envisioning a radical new environmentalism that could save Earth, or is this just typical human hubris in thinking these massive creatures can be controlled? The scripters never quite get to grips with their big questions, instead giving us a lot of vague talk about “balance” as the mega creatures annihilate major cities.

The massive monster action draws on the trappings of the sci-fi sublime — including vaguely religious choral music — but Rodan, Mothra and the three-headed King Ghidorah don’t really register as anything other than really, really big.

Only Godzilla himself has some personality: he may be covered in scales, but he somehow has the face of a sad dog.

There is almost no sense of popcorn fun here. But the filmmakers don’t get much from heading in the other direction.

The movie’s scale is vast, so vast that the monsters’ roaring, radioactive rampages feel remote and weirdly inconsequential. (Oh, there goes Washington. There goes London. There goes an entire Mexican island.)

We are supposedly watching the unfolding of “the greatest disaster in human history,” as one cable news host solemnly intones, but the filmmakers are unable to convey any sense of loss or even fear.

Even with our little circle of named characters, it’s hard to muster up emotion. The writing is so flat and nonsensical that when one of the best actors gets killed early on, you might not feel sad. In fact, you might think she’s well out of it.

Now, she can go back to doing movies that actually make sense.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca