Godzilla: King Of The Monsters (2019) - Spoiler Review

I am just going to dive into this review. No trivia or anything. There will be spoilers if you haven't guessed by the title already. So if you don't want to be spoiled then now is the time to close this article and come back after you have seen the movie.

Godzilla: King Of The Monsters is one of the best Godzilla movies I have ever watched. It takes the 2014 movie and turns the knob up to a hundred. It goes balls to the walls crazy. You got the cheesy plot, cheesy human characters, and monsters fighting each other for a good part of the movie. Despite having everything a fan could ask for, is it properly executed? You could say that it could have been better.

When it comes to the story, the first act of the movie drags until the second act and this is where the movie does not hold anything back. My only criticism is that there are too many characters the movie is trying to juggle. Part of the movie follows the Russell family, another part is about the terrorists, another about Dr. Serizawa, and then the monsters and it feels sort of cluttered. The story about the Russell family is focused on Mark and Emma on how it has affected them after losing their son, Andrew, in the events of the 2014 movie and how their daughter, Maddison, is caught in the middle of it. The eco-terrorists capture Emma and Maddison so they can use Emma's bio-acoustic device called the Orca to wake up Ghidorah and Rodan. Dr. Serizawa is ridiculed for believing that Godzilla and other monsters can coexist with humans after what happened in 2014 and he believes that Godzilla is the proof that coexistence is possible. So there are all of these different stories being juggled and takes up a lot of time. However, despite what critics say the movie really focuses on the human characters more than the monsters and it isn't that bad at all. I liked the characters from Kong: Skull Island better, but the characters in Godzilla: King Of The Monsters are more enjoyable than the characters in Godzilla (2014). There are just some scenes that could have been cut out and made more room for more monster action.

There are a lot of moments that I liked. I loved Dr. Serizawa's sacrifice scene. This scene is very ironic because in the original 1954 movie, Dr. Serizawa was the one that kills Godzilla with the oxygen destroyer. In this movie, he does the exact opposite by saving Godzilla with a nuclear warhead and before the nuke goes off he walks up to Godzilla's face and gives him a very sad goodbye. This scene could have been one of the most emotional scenes in the movie if the scene showed the rest of the characters having a moment of silence. Instead, Mothra's sacrifice was way more emotional than it should have been. It shouldn't have because Mothra dying in a Godzilla movie isn't that uncommon, but something about Mothra sacrificing her life to save Godzilla just had my heart strings tugged more than Dr. Serizawa's sacrifice.

The movie is jam packed with monsters. There are the main four (Godzilla, Ghidorah, Rodan, and Mothra) and there were five other monsters in the movie that only had a couple minutes of screen time. Dr. Serizawa said that there were 17 monsters and counting meaning there were more monsters that were not shown. Kong is among one of those monsters that was mentioned and didn't show. The monsters that were shown actually had interesting designs. There was one that looked like a mammoth, a giant spider, a MUTO made an appearance, and there is the mountain monster that was seen only briefly. All of them had interesting designs, but I would have liked to have seen them do something rather than being told. At least show one of them struggling to put up a fight against Ghidorah or Rodan or Godzilla or maybe have one of them attack Monarch's base and have Mothra swoop in. That would be interesting to see since the movie is telling the audience they are attacking the cities across the globe.