In a sentenceThe three-headed dragon has a clearer motive than any of the scientists explaining it
Five years after Godzilla flattened San Francisco, the monster-hunting agency Monarch has found sixteen more: creatures it calls Titans, sleeping in outposts around the world. Dr. Emma Russell (Vera Farmiga) works at one of them, in China, with her daughter Madison (Millie Bobby Brown) and a device called the Orca that can speak to the creatures. A giant larva hatches; Emma calms it; and Alan Jonah (Charles Dance), a former soldier with a private militia, storms the base and takes Emma, Madison and the Orca. Dr. Ishiro Serizawa (Ken Watanabe) and Dr. Vivienne Graham (Sally Hawkins) go to Colorado to fetch Mark Russell (Kyle Chandler), Emma’s estranged husband, who wants nothing more to do with monsters. The trail leads to Antarctica, and to something frozen under the ice.
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Michael Dougherty gives the monsters their entrances, and Mothra’s is worth the ticket. Everything in between is people in bunkers reading the plot to each other, and there is a great deal of in between.
Michael Dougherty’s film is a sequel to Gareth Edwards’s Godzilla of 2014, and it sets out to correct that film’s one famous complaint: that you hardly saw the monster. Here you see him inside the first half hour, and Mothra, Rodan and the three-headed Ghidorah besides, most of them at night and in weather. The correction is real and the film is in trouble anyway, because the people it puts between the monsters are the dullest set of experts a blockbuster has assembled in some time. At 132 minutes, that is a lot of experts.
The moments that work belong to the creatures. Mothra breaks out of her cocoon under a waterfall and unfolds wings that glow blue and white through the spray, and Lawrence Sher lights her from inside so she reads as a stained-glass window with a pulse. We sat up. Rodan comes out of a volcano and takes a squadron of jets out of the sky with a single roll, and for a minute the film is the boyish thing it wants to be. Bear McCreary brings back the old Toho march for Godzilla and the Mothra hymn for Mothra, and both land, partly because he plays them straight and does not apologise for them.
The trouble is that Dougherty wants to hide the monsters and show them at the same time. Sher shoots nearly every battle at night, in rain or snow or volcanic ash, lit in orange and blue, and while a single frame is often handsome, a fight in this weather is a series of silhouettes. Bob Ducsay, Richard Pearson and Roger Barton cut away from the creatures to a room of people watching screens so often that we started to feel we were also watching screens, which we were. By the time Godzilla and Ghidorah meet properly, we could tell who was winning only because a scientist said so.
The scientists are the problem. Kyle Chandler’s Mark Russell walks into Monarch’s bunker and is angry at everyone for the next two hours, which is the whole of the character. Vera Farmiga is handed a speech about the planet’s fever that Dougherty and Zach Shields’s script plainly believes is a position and is in fact a plot summary. Bradley Whitford and Thomas Middleditch are there to say the thing an audience member might say, a job that should have been given to nobody. Charles Dance arrives with a beard and a plan and the film forgets him for long stretches. Sally Hawkins and Ken Watanabe, who were quiet and good in 2014, are quiet again; Watanabe is given one scene later on with some weight to it, and we will not describe it.
Millie Bobby Brown does the most with the least. Madison is written as a child who understands the monsters better than the adults, which is old, but Brown plays her listening rather than talking, and the best human shot in the film is her face, streaming wet, as something enormous walks towards her and she decides not to be frightened. We were bored through the middle hour, the one spent in Alan Hook and Scott Chambliss’s flying command centre, a grey aircraft with a bridge window and a war table, and then cross about being bored, because a film with a moth the size of a cathedral in it has no business being boring.
Against the genre’s own standard this is middling. Ishirō Honda’s Godzilla of 1954 was about a country that had been bombed and it showed you the burned city the morning after. Dougherty gestures at that, with talk of the Titans healing the earth, but he does not show anyone living in the rubble, only people in bunkers talking about it. Edwards kept the creature away from us and was accused of coldness; Dougherty throws it at us and is warm about nothing. Most critics landed in the middle and so have we.
See it if the shot of Mothra in the rain did something to you in the trailer; there are five or six more like it, and a cinema screen is where they belong. The 12A is honest: buildings fall and nobody inside them is shown. At home you will be tempted to skip the briefings, and you should give in.
Most critics arrive at the same place: the monsters are the point, and the people are in the way. The reviews lean mixed to negative, but even the harsher ones set aside a line for the creature work. Mothra’s glowing, translucent rebirth and Rodan’s destructive flight are singled out repeatedly, and the sheer scale of Godzilla and Ghidorah’s clashes is credited with delivering the shock the title promises. Almost nobody has a kind word for the human story, which is described as thin, overlong and clumsily written.
Where they part is on whether the fights themselves can be followed. The Wrap finds the battles clearly staged and excitingly edited; Vulture and The Guardian say the night-time action is so murky it is often impossible to tell who is winning. The spread is wide, from a near-rave at The Wrap to Empire calling it catastrophically dull, and the British press is noticeably colder than the American trade titles.
DeFore finds the film a satisfying step up for the MonsterVerse, despite thin character work and dialogue. He praises the beautifully designed CGI monster action and the film’s effective balance with its family story.
Read the full review →The accessible page labels this a review but hides the critic’s assessment behind a registration wall. Its standfirst says the Monsterverse returns forcefully, but provides no specific praise or complaint.
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Read the full review →Cole finds the film frustrating because its bleak ideas give way to conventional human perseverance. He praises the overwhelming, nightmarish spectacle of Godzilla and Ghidorah’s battles.
Read the full review →O’Sullivan finds the film patchy, with its human story and soundtrack falling short while the spectacle delivers. She particularly praises the monsters’ scale, vivid visuals, and thrilling clashes.
Read the full review →Bitel finds the film entertaining but ultimately overblown, with its spectacle risking an abstract clash of titans. He praises the city-destroying monster battles for delivering shock and awe.
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GodzillaThe original, black and white, and about a real country that had been burned.
Shin GodzillaCommittee meetings as horror; the bureaucrats are the point and the monster keeps changing.
Pacific RimDel Toro’s robots and sea beasts, shot so you can see who is hitting whom.
The Host · not on Fi1m yetBong Joon-ho’s river monster with a family who are funny and worth saving.
Colossal · not on Fi1m yetA hungover Anne Hathaway discovers she is a kaiju; small, odd and sharp.
