That was an excellent opsis. I’m glad that there are still a few podcasts from last year that I haven’t gotten around to listening to yet as I haven’t seen the movie.
As for the movie, I found it okay, I suppose. I think I fall into the poor actor performances / pretty good monster fighting crowd. I didn’t see the Cranston Godzilla (I did listen to that podcast thought), and this movie hasn’t made me want to search it out to watch. I’m not excited about the next one in the queue either, although I do wonder if it will still have a November release date or if it will get shifted because other movies are getting shifted due to the theatre closures.
There’s a pocket of us who really like Godzilla (2014). I didn’t see G: KotM because the trailers looked completely incoherent, and I hated Kong: Skull Island (aside from Brie Larson’s tank top), but I’d slot G '14 in just below Cloverfield. And I really like Cloverfield. I’ll validate my opinion with a link to a review by the always fascinating Walter Chaw: https://www.filmfreakcentral.net/ffc/2014/05/godzilla-2014.html
I do want to see this King of Monsters thing now to see if Tom is right, or dumb.
A bunch of giant monsters literally kneel down to their king in the very last shot of the movie. It’s looking right into the camera. That’s this movie’s “It’s some kind of … Hot Tub Time Machine” line. You’re either in or out.
The Fenway Park fight from ground level perspective is alone worth the Kaiju price of admission for me. Charles Dance chews some scenery, there is kind of an ambiguous villian that gives redemption a shot, I mean it’s all screenwriting 101, but it’s well done and the special effects are top notch. Mothra helps Godzilla fight Monster Zero at the end, Godzilla pushes his enemies through buildings, there is some good tail smashing action… it’s Kaiju Heaven, yo.
Fwiw, I enjoyed Godzilla (2014) a good deal, but Godzilla: King of the Monsters is incoherent. It’s still enjoyable to watch, but don’t expect the writing to evoke cinematic masterpieces like Citizen Kane, Shawshank Redemption, or … even the Star Wars prequels. Just watch it for the sheer fun of the monsters being monsters, which they do admirably well.
My basic feeling was that neither movie is particularly well-written or has interesting characters, but King of the Monsters spends significantly less time with those uninteresting characters and significantly more on spectacular monster action. I mean, both movies dedicate huge swathes of time to the human characters, way more than they deserve, but there’s probably 30-40 minutes of action in King of the Monsters and like…5-8 in Godzilla 2014.
This popped up on Amazon Prime and I was in the mood for a dumb movie so I watched it. For once I agreed with more with Tom than the rest of the crew. I quite enjoyed it despite the terrible script. The effects were really impressive and the fights mostly satisfying, though there was definitely a lot of plot armour involved, and with the exception of Isla Mara it never really felt like they were destroying cities. It was vastly superior to Kong: Skull Island on that front. Haven’t seen the new one, or for that matter the Godzilla movie before this one, so can’t compare. Preferred Shin Godzilla as a Godzilla movie.
