Oh, No, There Goes Tokyo

Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) is both terrific and ridiculous. It’s basic plot made no sense and we loved every minute.

It starts right in the middle of everything, with a family searching for a lost child in a San Francisco destroyed by Godzilla. The father (Kyle Chandler, who I thought was Timothy Hutton), mother (Vera Farmiga) and their daughter (Millie Bobby Brown, from Stranger Things) never find the son. Fast forward several years. Farmiga and Brown are living together in what looks like a suburban home, and Brown keeps up with Hutton on by email. But it turns out that the house is a monitoring station for the Chinese step pyramid (?) that houses a monster egg. And it’s hatching.

Mother and daughter head for the egg, and Brown has a moment of empathy and awe when she touches the egg. Just as Mothra hatches, a gang of eco-tourists - or terrorists, not sure - led by Charles Dance bust in. And not in a nice way - in a shoot everyone who moves, then shoot the ones keeping still way. Farmiga and Brown are taken as hostages, but it looks like Farmiga is cooperating. And Mothra flys away.

So Sally Hawkins and Ken Watanabe of the secret Monarch monster squad get Chandler back on the team to get them back. It’s the usual rag-tag bunch of quirky scientists, mostly mad. They head to Antarctica, where Monarch has been monitoring the frozen “Monster Zero”, Ghidora. When Dance’s gang arrives to awaken Ghidora, it becomes clear that Farmiga isn’t a hostage, but another eco-tourist. Like Dance, she thinks that humanity has become a plague on the earth, and that the monsters used to keep balance. If they are revived, the earth will bloom again.

Now, I’m not saying we won’t get our hair mussed. Two, three billion killed, tops.

And that’s the big ask of the movie: that we believe that a woman, who has seen a monster destroy a city, and kill her son, would think it’s a good idea to release more monsters and kill more people for an abstract ideal. And expects her daughter to go along with it. Millie Bobby Brown is way to smart for that.

Oh, and it’s not just Godzilla, Ghidora and Mothra - there are monsters hibernating all over. Yes, every country has a monster.

But while we’re laughing at this, Ghidora is killing soldiers, Godzilla is fighting Ghidora, Mothra is helping Godzilla, volcano bird Rodan is helping Ghidora, and so on. It’s all state of the art - no barely glimpsed figures in the night. I kind of wish there had been more of guys in rubber suits stomping miniatures, but I’ll take what I get.

Also, there’s a fairly cheesy score by Bear McCreary, but the roars and screams of the monsters made the best music - up until the credits. That’s right: With a purposeful grimace and a terrible sound, he pulls the spitting high-tension wires down!

Aside from the very far-fetched eco-tourism angle, there’s another, deeper, “loving the alien” theme. Millie Bobby Brown hints at it a few times when she reacts to a monster like Mothra with awe at its majesty rather than fear of it’s power. But they don’t seem to be able to pull this off, so it’s like a glimpse at a plot point that was mostly written off. Which is too bad, because I like that theme.