Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire Review: More Monsters, and Bearable Humans.

I quite enjoyed Godzilla vs Kong.
Although it did have its problems, the film made me feel like a kid again watching the original King Kong vs Godzilla for the first time.
Going into the sequel, Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire, I was hoping the film could recapture that feeling for me.
Directed once more by Adam Wingard, the film follows Kong in Hollow Earth, where he discovers he is not the last of his species, exposing the world to another threat which he cannot face alone.

Kong and Godzilla must team up to defeat the latest monster.

The New Empire is primarily a King Kong film, with Godzilla’s role feeling a little tacked on at times.
He is absent for most of the movie until the final fight where he is needed to team up with Kong.
Thankfully, Kong more than makes up for Godzilla’s lack of screentime, with The New Empire feeling like it focuses more on the monsters than any previous film in the Monsterverse, which is what I wanted.

I’m glad to see the monsters taking a much more central role than the humans this time around.

Another thing I wanted was more screentime for Jia (Kaylee Hottle).
In my review for Godzilla vs Kong, I stated that I wished she had more screentime because she was pretty much the only interesting human character in the entire thing.
Well, I got my wish in The New Empire, with the human storyline focusing on her.
This resulted in the humans being much more bearable than in previous Monsterverse films, with the cast of Rebecca Hall, Brian Tyree Henry, and Dan Stevens standing out more.

Jia’s storyline is the most interesting human one in the Monsterverse, although that is not saying much.

The monster and human storylines both converge by the third act in a massive CGI battle between monsters which, while visually fun, had me a little uneasy.
This final fight was supposed to be a big, crowd-pleasing moment, yet I found myself kind of wincing because of the sheer amount of human casualties which are never acknowledged.
It felt kind of weird that the movie was trying to entertain me with the spectacle of a big monster battle, when said battle was clearly resulting in hundreds of thousands of fatalities at the very least.
The fact that the movie does not acknowledge such losses felt a little off to me.

The final battle had a bit of a strange tone because of this.

Another issue was that, well, this film came after Godzilla: Minus One.
Granted this issue is through no fault of the movie, but it did feel like a step down going from one of the greatest Godzilla movies ever made to a big dumb action movie.
Still, this only dulled my experience with the film slightly.
Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is a solid entry in the Monsterverse.
The Kong storyline is great, the humans are much more bearable, and, though the final fight does feel a bit off-putting by the unacknowledged casualties, it is still fun.
I look forward to seeing what the Monsterverse does next.

Godzilla Minus One Review: One of the Greatest Godzilla Movies Ever Made.

I have been a Godzilla fan since I was a kid.
So once I heard all the positive buzz surrounding the latest film, Godzilla Minus One, I knew I had to see it.
I expected Minus One to be a good film, perhaps even a great one.
What I was not expecting was it to be one of the greatest Godzilla movies ever made.
It is so good that it may even surpass the 1954 original.

*Godzilla Minus One is truly excellent.*

Written and directed by Takashi Yamazaki, the film is set in post World War Two Japan, and follows former kamikaze pilot Koichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki).
Having lost everything during the war and stricken with survivors guilt, Shikishima eventually meets a young woman named Noriko (Minami Hamabe), who has adopted a young orphan named Akiko.
The three form a makeshift family and, as the years pass, it seems like the horrors of their pasts may fade, until a monster from Shikishima’s past rises from the depths to plunge Japan into horror once more.

Having read the synopsis I gave of the film’s plot, you are probably assuming that Minus One centers more around the human characters than Godzilla, and you would be right.
This is, in fact, usually the case for a Godzilla films
However, what separates Minus One from the rest of these movies is that the human characters are all fantastic.
In most Godzilla films, we really do not care about the people.
At best, there is sometimes one character we can latch onto but, most of the time, we are just waiting for Godzilla to show up and wreck stuff.
This is not the case for Minus One, as I found myself caring for each and every one of the characters, which made the action sequences more intense, since I was scared for each of their lives.

This scene was made all the better because of the fact that I cared about the characters.

The last time I had this much investment in a character from a Godzilla movie, it was probably Brian Kranston’s one from the 2014 Godzilla movie, but every other character in that film was pretty bland.
Again, this is far from the case with Minus One.
I cared about the characters so much that the ending to the film actually had me tearing up, something I have never done in a Godzilla movie before.
What adds to the weight these characters have are the excellent themes of PTSD and survivors guilt, along with the scars war leaves on a nation.
Shikishima is the perfect encapsulation of these themes, making him my favourite Godzilla protaganist, with the exception of the big G himself.

Shikishima embodies the movie’s themes more than any other character.

Speaking of him, Godzilla is a terrifying presence whenever he is on screen.
He is no misunderstood hero like in the recent Legendary films.
No, the Godzilla here is more in the vein of the original 1954 version and the Shin Godzilla version.
He is a horrifying force of nature who crushes everything and everyone in his destructive wake.
His atomic breath is also on par with Shin Godzilla’s in terms of the fear it creates, as it is akin to a nuclear blast.

The atomic breath scene is one of the best in the series.

What helps increase the fear Godzilla generates in this movie is just how fantastic the CGI is for him.
Minus One was apparently made with a budget of $15 million dollars and that is absolutely incredible, given that many blockbuster movies have ten times that budget and look considerably worse.
The way Godzilla is shot is also great, along with the score throughout the film, which adds to the intensity.

This shot of Godzilla creates both awe and terror.

Considering every aspect of the film, I cannot think of a single flaw with it.
Godzilla is terrifying, the human characters are the best they have ever been, the CGI is excellent for the budget, and the themes, score and cinematography are all top notch.
I cannot recommend this film enough, especially if you are a Godzilla fan like me.
Godzilla Minus One is not only one of the best films of the year, but potentially the greatest Godzilla movie ever made.

Godzilla Vs. Kong Review: Pleasing My Inner Child.

Growing up, I always loved giant monster movies.
Peter Jackson’s King Kong remake was the film that got me interested in movies in the first place.
However, my favourite giant monster as a kid was not Kong but Godzilla.
I watched many of his films and even now still own a lot of them.
I’ve always been a fan of Kaiju movies, which has honestly made me disappointed in the whole monster cinematic universe so far.
I loved the first of these films, Godzilla, when it came out in 2014.
However, this was mainly because I was excited to finally see an accurate blockbuster representation of the big G on the big screen.
As time went on, I realized the film’s flaws more, like that it gets rid of the only interesting human character way too early and leaves us with only bland and generic ones, not focusing enough on Godzilla himself.

Killing off Bryan Cranston’s character and focusing on the rest of the bland human characters, instead of Godzilla, were the 2014 film’s biggest mistakes.

Then there’s it sequel and spinoff, King of the Monsters and Kong: Skull Island, which were even more disappointing to me.
King of the Monsters just could not live up to its trailers, delivering an even worse cast of characters than the first, and Kong: Skull Island also focused on a mostly uninteresting cast, while I felt that one characters’ backstory should have been the entire plot of the movie.
So, taking all of this into account, I came into Godzilla vs. Kong excited to see these epic monsters have their first cinematic showdown since 1962, yet I was slightly skeptical.
You know what, though?
I came out of the theater actually very pleased with Godzilla vs. Kong.
It’s a fun, cheer inducing film that pleased the inner child in me, who so loved Kaiju movies growing up.
Directed by Adam Wingard, the movie justifies its big fight between the two monsters by having a group of mostly uninteresting scientists using Kong to search for a power source inside the earth, with Kong’s presence drawing Godzilla out to fight.
Given how I just described the human characters, you can obviously see that I once again find them to be the biggest problem with the movie.
With a talented cast among the likes of Alexander Skarsgård, Millie Bobby Brown, Brian Tyree Henry, and Julian Dennison, I’d hoped they would at least be more interesting than the ones in the previous movies.
Alas, it was note to be, with many of them being incredibly one dimensional.
Not only this but I found that the storyline centering around Brown, Henry and Dennison’s characters could have been removed entirely from the film.
However, there is one interesting human character in the movie, Jia, a deaf girl played by Kaylee Hottle who has a connection with Kong, leading to a moment that gave me chills in the theater.

The bond between Jia and Kong is fantastic. This is how the relationship between humans and monsters should be portrayed in these movies.

I just wish that instead of the pointless conspiracy theory plotline we got more time with Jia and the characters surrounding her because this could have also made them way more interesting.
I think in the next monster movie they make whoever’s writing it should cut down on the number of characters, so they actually have time to develop some of them to the point that we can actually care about what happens to them and their arcs.
These flawed characters had me concerned for the first quarter of the movie, since it mainly focused on them.
I was worried this was going to be another movie where everything focused on the humans instead of the monsters fights, which were what we all actually wanted to see.
I am so glad that I was wrong and the film actually focused on the monsters.
After this first quarter, the movie picks up, delivering epic fight scene after epic fight scene, as Godzilla and Kong duke it out numerous times.
The way that these fights were shot, edited and given a sense of scale really amazed me.
It was something I’d been wanting from this monster cinematic universe since the very first one.
And that final fight.
That. Final. Fight.
What an incredible climax it was, gifting us with epic scenes that made me grin so hard I was sure my mouth was going to fall off.

The final battle between Godzilla and Kong gave me an experience that I have been waiting to see in theaters for a while.

These fight scenes saved the film for me, making up for the many uniteresting characters, unfunny jokes and pointless conspiracy subplot.
I came to see the two most famous monsters of all time engage in a battle and that’s what I got, in sometimes spectacular fashion.
This makes the film worth the price of admission for me.
I am sure that it pleased every single Kaiju fan’s inner child.

Godzilla: King of the Monsters Review – Cool Monsters, Boring People.

I have been a fan of the Godzilla series for a while so I was very excited to see the adaptations.
I found the first of them, Godzilla from 2014, to be good overall but with a lot of problems.
Sadly, Godzilla: King of the Monsters, directed by Michael Doughtery, also has many problems but less good things with the film largely focusing on boring, exposition spewing characters.
I was concerned about this right from the trailers, which were genuinely fantastic but also showed there were a lot of characters in the film, maybe too much even.
My fears were unfortunately realised yesterday when I went to see the film.
Picking up five years after the original, King of the Monsters follows the experiences of the Russel family, including Gary sue Mark (Kyle Chandler), his ex-wife with confusing motivations Emma (Vera Farminga) and their daughter Madison (Millie Bobby Brown), who I honestly forgot was in the film at times.

Russell family.jpg — Sadly, the Russell family does not hold that much emotional value. They did have potential but it is bogged down by the exposition.

Speaking of forgettable characters, Charles Dance plays the villain Alan Jonah whose character feels unneeded and, much like Emma, has very confusing motivation.
There are some returning characters like Ishiro Serizawa (Ken Watanabe) and Vivienne Graham (Sally Hawkins), who are just as forgettable as in the first Godzilla.
Say what you want about that film but at least it had one interesting character in Bryan Cranston’s Joe Brody.
Godzilla: King of the Monsters does not have one interesting character, and almost every scene has them sprouting exposition in ways that are not at all interesting.
I already got sick of them saying Godzilla was a beacon of hope in the first film, I did not need to hear it multiple times in this one.
Thankfully, the film does get entertaining when the monsters do show up and fight.
These battles between Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah, and Rodan have some very spectacular moments.

Whenever the monsters are on screen the movie gets exciting, with King Ghidorah looking especially threatening.

There are even some points when an updated version of Godzilla’s original themes plays and this is my favourite part of the film, as it left me grinning from ear to ear.
Sure, the shots of the monsters are not as good as they were in Gareth Edward’s original film but they are competent enough here.
It is just annoying that they kept cutting to these boring characters, the worst offender being Emma because of the lack of connection between motivation and goal.

I'm Sorry..jpg — Emma’s goal makes absolutely no sense based on her motivation. Not only this, but it is never explained why the human villains have their goals either.

Whenever the monsters appeared on screen I was entertained, which is good because they have more of a screen presence than in the first film, but whenever it cut to the human characters I was bored out of my mind.
What makes it worse is that these boring humans took up most of the screen time.
Overall, Godzilla: King of the Monsters is a disappointing film.
There are some good moments of monster action, but you have to sit through scenes of boring, unrealistic characters who spew useless exposition to get to it.