One star. Rated PG-13, for relentless monster carnage and fleeting profanity
By Derrick Bang
Sigh.
I’ve seen a lot of stupid over the years, but this one takes every cake in the bakery.
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| Not yet having realized that she's standing alongside a deranged sociopath, young Madison (Millie Bobby Brown, right) watches while her mother, Emma (Vera Farmiga), activates a whatzit in order to unleash a whozit. |
Rarely has a big-studio blockbuster been directed this clumsily, written this poorly, and acted this atrociously. Doctoral theses could be written, about everything wrong with this misbegotten mess.
It’s a $200 million embarrassment.
When a film is this bad, every minute wasted with it — and we’re looking at 131 minutes here — is an exercise in put-me-out-of-my-misery tedium. Root canal surgery would be preferable.
This second entry in the modern Godzilla series once again demonstrates the folly of pleasing too many international masters, given that this is a co-production by Warner Bros. and China’s Legendary Entertainment. In theory, that should be a good thing, since it assures international casting; in practice, it has been the death of quality cinema.
Recent exhibits of shame include Skyscraper, Pacific Rim: Uprising, Man of Steel and, yes, the previous Godzilla. Among many others.
Each one is characterized by noisy, cataclysmic, landscape-leveling mayhem that goes on and on and on and on. Along with atrociously dumb dialogue, and performances so wooden they could warp.
And — worse yet in this case, with respect to emotional resonance — people who mostly stand around, slack-jawed, impotently staring at screens, or out windows. It’s difficult, nay impossible, to get involved with characters in a thriller of this sort, unless they’re pro-active and do something to make a difference.
One of this film’s major stars checks out so quickly, we scarcely have time to register the individual’s presence.
Three-quarters of the way into this debacle, somebody finally does something heroic. And then there’s an act of noble self-sacrifice, and for a moment — just a fleeting moment, but still — we actually care. A teeny-weeny bit.
Prior to that…
Events kick off during an international hearing, to determine what should be done about the clandestine activities of the crypto-zoological agency Monarch, the representatives of which — in the wake of Godzilla’s earlier battle with a Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism (MUTO) — have steadfastly refused to acknowledge what they’re up to, and how many other “titans” are hidden elsewhere.
Seriously? Major world cities are completely destroyed, and those In The Know insist on holding back crucial information? And the international body puts up with this?
Not even five minutes in, and this script — co-written by Zach Shields, Max Borenstein and incompetent director Michael Dougherty — already is ludicrously unbelievable.
Elsewhere, in what’s left of San Francisco, Monarch scientist Emma Russell (Vera Farmiga) has developed a gizmo — dubbed the Orca — capable of generating an audio frequency signal that can calm an enraged titan. Emma and her husband Mark (Kyle Chandler) lost their young son during Godzilla’s previous rampage. Emma and Mark have grown apart, much to the distress of their surviving daughter, Madison (Millie Bobby Brown, of TV’s Stranger Things).
Farmiga gives Emma the determined scowl of a woman who Won’t Let That Happen Again. Cue our uneasy suspicion that Monarch intends to use the Orca to “control” Godzilla and whatever other titans emerge during the course of this story: a classic plot contrivance that never goes well.
But no; it’s much worse than that. Emma actually has allied with eco-terrorist Alan Jonah (Charles Dance), in a scheme to employ the Orca as a means of enraging currently calm titans, so they’ll emerge from their Monarch facility “prisons” and lay waste to the planet. Her justification? Mankind is on a path to self-destruction — via unchecked pollution, wars and yadda-yadda-yadda — and Godzilla and his kind are a necessary means of “restoring Earth’s balance.”
So let me get this straight: Emma, distraught over having lost her son during a monster rampage, unleashes a catastrophe that guarantees millions of other parents will lose their children. And vice versa.
Golly. What a humanitarian.
I can’t help thinking of journalist Peter Arnett’s infamous, oft-quoted (and of dubious authenticity) 1968 Vietnam war dispatch: “It became necessary to destroy the town, to save it.”
One can’t help wondering about Emma’s endgame, after she and Jonah successfully unleash Mothra, Rodan, three-headed Ghidorah and a couple dozen other humongous beasties. Let’s see … there’s the spider-titan, the mastadon-titan, and one that looks a lot like the first film’s MUTO. And more, but they’re mostly off-camera.
Emma’s bonkers attitude is echoed by Monarch scientists Ishiro Serizawa (Ken Watanabe) and Ilene Chen (Ziyi Zhang), who speak with fortune-cookie solemnity about the need to “respect” and “honor” Godzilla and his kind. (In one of this film’s fitful stabs at meta-humor, at one point Serizawa acknowledges sounding like a fortune cookie).
Yeah, right. After all these titans finish their squabbling and mass destruction, and settle into the mundane need to simply feed themselves, how much of “lower” life on planet Earth is likely to survive?
And we just know — after Farmiga is given a third-act moment of silent, agonized soul-searching — that this film’s misbegotten script will be tone-deaf enough to give Emma a shot at redemption.
Redemption? Redemption? After she coldly watches while Alan and his gun-toting mercenaries slaughter scores of innocent scientists, technicians and guards at several Monarch facilities? After she has unleashed hell on Earth? Redemption?
Ain’t enough Hail Marys in the known universe to compensate for this level of pure evil.
Which is this film’s most reprehensible failing: It’s not savvy enough to deal with “good” or “evil.” Dougherty and his co-writers couldn’t care less about feelings, character motivation or anything else that qualifies as reasonable human behavior. They just want to destroy stuff — endlessly, and without consequence — while the human cast members stand around like department store dummies.
And don’t get me started on all the violations of physics and human frailty. We expect our hapless heroes to survive body-slamming explosions that — in the real world — would turn the average person into blood-soaked pulp; that’s a long-established cliché of such silly stories. But today’s better action thrillers have gotten smarter about STEM-related details, because we viewers are more savvy.
But you won’t find any smarts here. A critter of Ghidorah’s size need flap its massive wings only once, and every airborne plane within a radius of five miles would go into uncontrolled spins. Monarch’s bad-ass V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft would drop like rocks.
It’s impossible to discuss this film’s acting, because — for the most part — there isn’t any. Most of these characters aren’t even developed enough to qualify as one-dimensional. Monarch scientists Rick Stanton (Bradley Whitford) and Sam Coleman (Thomas Middleditch) do nothing but deliver snarky one-liners. Aisha Hinds, O’Shea Jackson Jr., Elizabeth Ludlow and Anthony Ramos get some face time as Monarch’s gung-ho “G-team” command force. They’re good at Looking Stern.
To his credit, Chandler puts plenty of passion into Mark’s determination to save Madison (who allowed herself to be “kidnapped” alongside her mother). Mark also is the token voice of reason, not that anybody ever pays attention.
Which brings us to young Millie Bobby Brown, making a solid big-screen debut. She’s the sole bright spark in this mostly listless cast: the one character who goes through a genuine emotional arc, as Madison gradually realizes that her mother is the true monster. Brown makes her intelligent, plucky and resourceful: this story’s one true hero, and good for her.
In fairness, as I also noted about the previous Godzilla and 2017’s Kong: Skull Island, these films give us a persuasive depiction of scope, scale and grandeur. We’ve long left behind the rubber suits and cardboard cities that typified the 1960s Godzilla flicks; this film’s titans look and feel impressively massive, as they gleefully annihilate equally credible cityscapes.
All well and good, if you enjoy monotonous obliteration for its own sake.
But on all other levels, this travesty doesn’t even have the appeal of a cartoon.
I see that we can expect Godzilla vs. Kong next year, with Chandler, Zhang and Brown returning for the ride.
God, give me strength.
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