Movie Review - Godzilla: King of the Monsters

I went and saw this today. Here's what I thought about it.

First of all, was there cursing in the movie? Yes, a fair amount, including from the pre-teen daughter character. Parents be warned. [Because 'curse' is in my blog title, I get hits from parents wondering how much swearing is in the movie.]

I wasn't so impressed with Godzilla (2014). Kong: Skull Island (2017) was pretty fun, though. I was hoping this movie would be more in the vein of Kong, but instead it was more like Godzilla.

The plot revolving around the human characters was stupid, pointless, and terrible. Of course, you don't go to these kinds of movies for the human drama. But they wasted a lot of time on it for no payoff at the end. The main family's drama was cliche and the resolution was forced. Dr. Serizawa's plot was minimal. And they didn't give him an eye patch, again. What's up with that, Watanabe Ken? If Samuel L. Jackson can rock the eye patch in the MCU, you could do it too! Zhang Ziyi's character(s) are hinted at having a plot arc, maybe in the next movie. [And I didn't even recognize that it was her...I had such a crush on her 20 years ago circa Crouching Tiger/House of Flying Daggers.]

The monster plot? It's actually better. Dead simple, but better than what they came up with for the humans. But we don't get to see enough of it. And that's what we come to these movies for! Pacific Rim gave us lots of giant robots punching giant monsters. And monsters punching back. Here? We get lots of quick cuts to fights and long cuts away to the humans. I'd definitely have edited this thing differently. Or was the CGI too expensive? There's something to be said about guys in big rubber suits...

Anyway, the fact that it did have a big monster tag-team battle at the end made it better than Godzilla (2014), but a lot worse than Kong: Skull Island.

I'd advise you to wait for streaming/rental service to watch it. The critics are right, it's not quite a dud, but I left the movie theater not really feeling excited or satisfied by it.