So I finally sat down and watched this thing, and honestly, we were all putting it off as long as we could. My daughters wanted to watch it and less than a third of the way through, both of them got up and left.
That ought to tell you something. They are in the target demographic and they both got bored.
So let’s look at what went wrong and why I hope Toho never lets Legendary make a Godzilla movie again.First off, to be fair, I want to go over some of the good parts. There aren’t a lot. They actually had fights in the daylight. They didn’t hide the monsters until the end. At least they listened to fans there. The fights were generally decent, if overblown and I guess when you throw a massive CGI budget at it like they did, I hope they at least make it look decent. So they got that right.
Unfortunately, they got a ton wrong and I don’t want to necessarily blame director Adam Wingard for the failure. Sure, he had a lot of problems but I think the biggest is that American big-budget summer blockbusters really don’t know what to do with Godzilla. The biggest concern isn’t any of the directors or the script-writers, it’s that they let America take another shot at a Godzilla film.
That sounds more serious than it is, so let’s take a step back. The biggest problem that I have with every single one of these Legendary Monsterverse flicks is they fundamentally don’t understand what most old-school Godzilla fans are looking for in a film. The complains that have run through all of the films have come down to a few repeated errors.
Number one, and this is a Hollywood problem, they are spending tons and tons of money on big name actors and then, because of the massive investment, they feel like they have to put them on screen all the time. The problem there is that people going into the theater (or HBO Max, currently), they don’t give a damn about any of the human characters. They are there to watch giant monsters duke it out. The problem in just about every movie is the human characters are just bland and forgettable. It doesn’t matter if they exist and you could cut most of them out entirely and not lose anything.
This is what this movie makes me feel like.
That was a massive problem with Kong. Half the characters were just walk-ons. Three characters in Kong, the podcaster, Mille Bobby Brown and the fat practical joke, they were just comedy relief. They did nothing of substance the whole time, except make people roll their eyes at the utter incompetence of the security that they just walked through. The billionaire head of Apex sat there chewing scenery and twirling his mustache the whole time and I never cared one bit if he lived or died. Madison, and I had to go look that up because she was so unremarkable, her father appears in a grand total of two shots in the film. Why bother? Why are you paying for these actors? Oh right, it’s the Hollywood way!
At least in Japan, they both make their characters well-rounded and they don’t pay them a tons so they don’t feel the need to put them onscreen very much. Mostly, Toho knows what the audience is looking for, although there are plenty of cases where they get it wrong too. I don’t think for a second that any of the Legendary films had the slightest clue. They kept trying to make the humans matter. They simply do not.
This is more like Tron than Godzilla.
Number two, there was no point to anything that happened. It was all plot-convenience theater. Everyone was in the right place at the right time to make the discoveries that they made and the whole thing was utterly absurd. They didn’t need to use Kong at all, but it was all shoehorned into the whole stupid hollow earth nonsense. And how the hell did that work, exactly? Why was there light in the middle of the planet? And of the whole thing was impossible to get to without getting killed, they had that as a sub-plot for a couple of seconds, then how the hell did Godzilla burn a hole the thousands of miles they said it took to reach it? Oh right, they just forgot all about that when it became inconvenient to the story, right? Because this whole thing is just dumb.
Number three, the whole film was made by a chickenshit, be it the director or the studio. I think they knew early on that if they let Godzilla win or if they let Kong win, they’d have riots in the theaters. Therefore, they wimped out and threw in Mechagodzilla so they could team up in the end. That could have been done well but here, it simply wasn’t. Therefore, they avoided taking a side and added in a third monster to take the pounding that the heroes simply wouldn’t be allowed to. That’s just terrible writing there. It isn’t Godzilla vs. Kong vs. Mechagodzilla. At least be honest!
Next, the effects really weren’t that effective. The whole movie looked like they jammed everything, including the kitchen sink into the script, just to see what would stick to the wall. There was nothing cohesive to the plot and that made the whole thing a waste of time to watch. It wasn’t just the effects though. The whole Kong battle in Hong Kong looked like a video game cut scene bathed in technicolor vomit. Of course, they have to pander to China, which is a large part of their market, but maybe if they didn’t flush that much money down the toilet on useless actors and asinine story ideas, maybe they could afford to tell China to go take a flying leap.
How can both of these franchises suck so badly?
Finally, and I could go on and on and on at all of the problems this thing had, but it’s clear that no one even paid attention to the previous films. They pulled ideas out of the blue because the director had a vision and that simply wasn’t impressive. This is like the DCEU in a way. They knew they were out of time and they had to get one more movie made before the deal with Toho expired, so they just threw it together and hoped it would stick. I knew, long before anything happened, what was going on. I saw the tech mogul turning evil nearly from the first second he was on screen. The “humans will be the apex predators” line spelled it out absurdly well. Oh look, that’s the villain! There was no subtlety whatsoever in this movie. The same went for Mechagodzilla. The same went for the death of the bad guy, while he stood there ranting about his own superiority, everyone else is watching Mechagodzilla close in. Zero surprises were to be had because the movie was made for stupid people.
I am ever so sick of movies made for stupid people. Isn’t it about time that we fired Hollywood because they only make crap these days. Overpriced, zero intelligence garbage that caters to the lowest conceivable denominator. It’s really hard to think of the last movie I really loved. This is the level of incompetence that we see today.
It’s just pathetic.
