Godzilla: King of the Monsters (Warner Bros., Legendary Pictures, Toho Company, Huahua Media, Wanda Qingdao Studios, 2019)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film my husband Charles and I watched last night was Godzilla: King of the Monsters, a 2019 production from Warner Bros. and Legendary Pictures (as I can imagine Charles joking, “They’re not real pictures – they’re just legendary”) based on the monster characters rather churlishly credited to “Toho Studios, Inc.” Godzilla and his monster brethren (and, in one case at least, sistren; the giant moth Mothra is specifically identified in the closing credits as female) were actually the creations of an individual, Ishirô Honda (sometimes his first name is transliterated “Inoshiro”), who wrote and directed many of the early Godzilla films and also did the effects work. Godzilla: King of the Monsters was the third in the Warner Bros./Legendary cycle they’ve started calling the “Monsterverse,” dealing with the efforts of a super-secret society within the federal government (of the U.S., though their operations are worldwide) called MONARCH (we’re never told whether that’s an acronym or what, if anything, the letters stand for, though their logo is a sideways hourglass shape apparently supposed to suggest the outspread wings of a monarch butterfly) that, depending on which MONARCH official is speaking for the group that day, was designed either to contain the so-called “Titans” – the multitudinous monsters Honda and his colleagues at Toho created for all those Japanese movies in the 1950’s and 1960’s that began with the near-masterpiece Gojira (1954), a much better movie than the chopped, channeled and Raymond Burr-ized version American-International gave U.S. audiences two years later, but eventually became a sort of worldwide joke – or to release them.

The first film in the “Monsterverse” cycle was Gareth Edwards’ 2014 reboot of Godzilla, which I remember as a reasonably entertaining movie but one that could have been a good deal better (it was aiming for some of the social-comment aspects of the original Gojira but part of me would have rather watched a modern-day CGI version of a Godzilla movie – and Godzilla himself appeared in only about 10 minutes of that two-hour film!) – and of which Godzilla, King of the Monsters turned out to be a direct sequel. It begins in a burned-out San Francisco following Godzilla’s attack on the city at the end of the Edwards film, and it continues from there with the human conflict between divorced couple Mark (Kyle Chandler) and Emma (Vera Farmiga) Russell. Both of them have “Dr.” in front of their names, indicating that they’re scientists, but they end up not only physically separated but on opposite sides of a great debate over whether MONARCH should continue to keep the monsters contained or use Emma’s super-invention, a sound generator called “Orca” that will summon the monsters, to turn them loose. Emma is nominally the captive of Alan Jonah (Charles Dance) – note the symbolism of his last name – a renegade deep ecologist who’s become convinced that in order for the world to survive, the human race must either become extinct or at least be severely reduced in population size and influence so the rest of the natural world can recover from the years of wars, faminss, pestilences and deaths we have inflicted on it. Jonah has seized on the “Titans” as his way of bringing about the near-extinction of the human race and the recovery of the world under their dominance, and at first Emma – like Dr. Zarkov in the Flash Gordon serials and his counterparts in the competing entries from Republic – seems to be going along reluctantly because Jonah is holding Emma’s and Mark’s daughter Madison (a quite remarkable young-teen actress named Millie Bobby Brown who actually turns in the best performance among the human characters!) hostage. But eventually Emma becomes a true believer in Jonah’s cause.

The film cuts back and forth between the mobile lab installation Jonah is working from and the other one in which the MONARCH establishment is attempting to control the monsters and get them back in their world-spanning containment centers – environments that look so similar we don’t really know which is which until we see which set of people is inhabiting which. This isn’t that much of a plot, but at least it is a plot and we don’t have the sense we sometimes got from Kong: Skull Island that the movie was simply an excuse to copy war-movie clichés and stick bits of monster action in between them. Surprisingly for a film that was intended as a big summer blockbuster, Godzilla: King of the Monsters is actually an auteur film, the auteur being Michael Daugherty, who not only directed (and got a possessory credit – “A Film by Michael Daugherty”) but also co-wrote both the story and the script (Max Borenstein gets co-credit for the story and Zach Shields co-credits for both the story and the actual screenplay). It also includes some nicely done references to the first Godzilla film, Gojira, which featured a Japanese scientist character named Dr. Ishiro Seriwaza (played here by familiar Japanese actor Ken Watanabe). In the original Gojira Dr. Seriwaza invented a super-bomb called the “oxygen destroyer” that would eliminate all life within a two-mile radius and flew a kamikaze mission into Gojira to explode the bomb inside him and thus destroy him. In this one Dr. Serizawa has also invented the “oxygen destroyer” and the good guys at MONARCH try to use it to destroy Mothra, Rodan and the three-headed flying monster Ghidorah (also introduced in a 1964 Toho production that was released in the U.S. as Monster Zero, with faded U.S. star Nick Adams spliced in the way Raymond Burr was in the U.S. release of the original Godzilla) after having already mortally wounded Godzilla and sent him to the depths of the “inner Earth” from which the monsters originally came.

Only Ghidorah (in a nice touch from Daugherty and his co-writers, Dr. Serizawa calls the monsters by their original Japanese names, “Gojira” and “Ghidorah,” while the Americans in MONARCH call them “Godzilla” and “Monster Zero”) turns out to be unaffected by the oxygen destroyer because he’s not a terrestrial monster; he’s something from another planet who’s come to Earth to mobilize the native monsters and destroy it. (I was sort-of expecting an explanation that he wasn’t affected by the oxygen destroyer because, like a terrestrial plant, he breathes carbon dioxide – which might make him useful to have around as a tool to combat climate change caused by greenhouse gases.) The MONARCH scientists realize that the only creature that can possibly fight and kill Ghidorah is Godzilla, and in this one Dr. Serizawa does his kamikaze mission underwater not to kill Godzilla but to revive him with a bomb that will give him a charge of atomic energy and bring him back to life – only he does this too well and we learn that Godzilla will go super-critical and blow up like a nuclear bomb in two hours. Meanwhile, Madison Russell has grabbed her mom’s ORCA device and is broadcasting it through the P.A. system in Boston’s baseball stadium, Fenway Park, so the monsters worldwide will hear a signal to stand down. There’s a final climactic sequence in which Madison is reunited with her dad, but her mom refuses to get into the evacuation craft because there’s something or other she thinks she still has to do with the monsters, though eventually the family is reunited and presumably the adult Russells reconcile.

This isn’t a great movie – even by the meager standards of the giant-monster genre, which to my mind has produced only two genuine artistic triumphs (the 1933 King Kong and the 1954 Gojira) – but it’s a legitimately entertaining one, and here as with Darren Aronofsky’s Noah (which essentially recast the Biblical Noah as the first deep ecologist, hoping that the Flood will bring about the extinction of humanity and the restoration of the rest of the biosphere) I found myself wondering why Arne Naess’s arguably nihilistic “deep ecology” philosophy – essentially that the world needs to rid itself of the infestation of human beings in order to safeguard the rest of life and the continued existence of Earth itself – has appealed to these filmmakers. (At the same time I suspect that if humans continue to screw up the climate so totally they render themselves extinct, cockroaches and other insects will be our replacements as the dominant species; just as we replaced the dinosaurs, we’ll be replaced by something even smaller.) Though I have at least one bone to pick with Daugherty’s direction and Lawrence Sher’s cinematography – we only get to see the monsters through smoky, foggy twilight-style shots, never in full light as in the old Toho films – for the most part Godzilla: King of the Monsters is good entertainment, reasonably fun to watch and with just enough seriousness to serve as seasoning for an otherwise unambitious spectacle with a lot of monsters beating each other up and only incidentally rendering human beings and their property as collateral damage. (The issue of how things are going to get rebuilt after these catastrophes – and who’s going to pay for it – usually get dodged in movies like this.)