Cinemavenger

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Godzilla: King of the Monsters

If I wanted to watch a hideous lizard with a tiny brain and even tinier hands destroy the world, I'd follow Donald "Ducking" Trump on Twitter.

And yet, Godzilla: King of the Monsters.  The things I do for you fucking people.  Actually, ol' Cinemavenger has been grooving on Godzilla movies, mostly on Saturday afternoon Creature Feature TV, since he was a Minimavenger.  Watching some dude in a rubber, irradiated lizard suit stomp-stomp-smash! balsa wood models of Tokyo and get in slap fights with other dudes in different rubber monster suits was the shit when I was seven, and it's still the shit today.

Which just goes to show that newer and bigger ain't always better (trouser snake transplants notwithstanding).  In 2014's Godzilla and its sequel, Godzilla: King of the Monsters, the sweaty Japanese guys in crappy, rubber kaiju tuxes have been replaced by millions of dollars of CGI.  Does that make Godzilla, Mothra, Rodan, and Ghidorah look cooler?  Ok, sure.  But does it make their uncaged death matches any more fun to watch?  Not by a fucking long shot.

Special, or in Ghidorah's case, short bus special effects aside, the giant monster-sized fuck up in Godzilla: King of the Monsters is the studio's attempt to politicize giant fucking monsters.  There's no doubt that Godzilla as a metaphor for Japan's nuclear terror less than a decade after getting the wasabi bombed out of it at Hiroshima and Nagasaki is what propelled the original Godzilla (aka Gojira) almost instantly into the Pop Culture Hall of Fame.

Godzilla: King of the Monsters tries to bite on that same blood sausage, but vague doomsday references just don't pack the same kind of cunt punch as the fear of a nuclear fucking holocaust.  The only slightly less giant monster-sized fuck up is the 30 minutes wasted on a heart-cooling "family drama" that's as dramatic as white rice.  That 30 minutes puts Godzilla: King of the Monsters over the two-hour and ten-minute mark, and it turns what could've been a perfectly enjoyable monster mash into the Bataan Death March.

The longest running franchise in film history deserves better.

June 7, 2019