Godzil­la: King of the Monsters

Michael Dougher­ty is best known for direct­ing and writ­ing Trick ​’r Treat and Kram­pus – both hor­ror fea­tures com­ing with a good deal of fes­tive black humour – but he also helped write the big-bud­get block­busters Super­man Returns and X‑Men Apoc­a­lypse. So he is espe­cial­ly well placed to be helm­ing (and writ­ing, with Zach Shields) Godzil­la: King of the Mon­sters, a crea­ture fea­ture on a mas­sive scale, pep­pered with the odd black­ly fun­ny line.

This is in fact the third instal­ment in Legendary’s Mon­ster­Verse, fol­low­ing Gareth Edwards’ Godzil­la and Jor­dan Vogt-Roberts’ pre­quel Kong: Skull Island. It’s a mega-fran­chise which not only mod­els itself on Disney’s MCU and Warn­er Broth­ers’ rival DCEU, but which sim­i­lar­ly fig­ures its crea­tures as super­heroes and supervil­lains slug­ging it out in a world where humans are for the most part help­less bystanders or col­lat­er­al damage.

Edwards’ 2014 Hol­ly­wood reboot of Godzil­la (who first appeared in Ishi­ro Honda’s 1954 film, and has since been in 34 fea­tures) played out like a long, slow reveal of the mon­ster. Dougherty’s sequel opens with a flash­back to that film’s cli­mac­tic may­hem and its har­row­ing ground-lev­el effects on a fam­i­ly, and then unfolds, like Zack Snyder’s Bat­man v Super­man: Dawn of Jus­tice, in the after­math of this hid­den monster’s first very pub­lic appearance.

Ever since, the cryp­to­zo­o­log­i­cal research group Monarch (the Mon­ster­Verse equiv­a­lent of MCU’s S.H.I.E.L.D.) has ever since been track­ing Godzil­la and mon­i­tor­ing many oth­er ​‘Titans’ found dor­mant beneath the Earth’s sur­face. The the­o­ry, already prof­fered in the franchise’s ear­li­er entries, that these behe­moths have long exist­ed to bring bal­ance to the world, is here more ful­ly explored, as their epic bat­tles are made to alle­gorise and embody the cat­a­clysmic upheavals of nature that man­made cli­mate change is bring­ing to us all.

Con­flict lies at the heart of Godzil­la: King of the Mon­sters. If the great tech­no­log­i­cal MacGuf­fin here is an acoustic device named ​‘Orca’ that echoes the char­ac­ter­is­tic sounds of the mon­sters to sum­mon or repel, anger or calm them, then the film’s cen­tral con­flict is also echoed, at micro- and macro­cos­mic lev­els which res­onate with each oth­er so that the human and Titan­ic strug­gles always seem inter­re­lat­ed. Godzilla’s big fight against two ​‘Mutos’ in 2014 tore apart not just San Fran­cis­co, but also Doc­tors Mark (Kyle Chan­dler) and Emma Rus­sell (Vera Farmi­ga), the hus­band-and-wife team who had devel­oped Orca togeth­er, but whose young son was killed in Godzilla’s dev­as­tat­ing onslaught.

Now divorced, they are dri­ven by diver­gent ide­olo­gies: Mark wish­es to destroy all mon­sters, while Emma sees them – or at least some of them – as a force for glob­al good. This same divi­sion can be seen between Monarch and the mil­i­tary, ever dis­put­ing whether to pre­serve or pul­verise the Titans. Mean­while ex-mil­i­tary rene­gade ecoter­ror­ist Alan Jon­ah (Charles Dance) has stolen the Orca device – along with Emma and her daugh­ter Madi­son (Mil­lie Bob­by Brown) – and plans to intro­duce colos­sal chaos to the cur­rent, ter­mi­nal world order.

Once reawak­ened, lep­i­dopter­an Moth­ra, three-head­ed King Ghi­do­rah (John Carpenter’s The Thing meets the mytho­log­i­cal Hydra) and winged Rodan – reg­u­lars of the Godzil­la franchise’s Japan­ese strand who all, accord­ing to the clos­ing cred­its, appear as them­selves here – will fight their own bat­tles in an attempt to destroy or per­haps to renew life’s hopes on Earth.

So this is a pow­er strug­gle that reechoes at the domes­tic, the urban and the glob­al lev­el, as our envi­ron­men­tal anx­i­eties, and the dif­fer­ent approach­es to tack­ling them, all assume mon­strous form and are resolved – at least until Adam Wingard’s forth­com­ing sequel Godzil­la vs Kong – in out­sized com­bats where coex­is­tence, col­lab­o­ra­tion and a respect for nature’s might are key to the con­tin­ued sur­vival of our species.

Godzil­la may be a mon­ster, but he is much less of a threat to the plan­et than sev­er­al of his fel­low mon­sters, or indeed than the more mon­strous of the human play­ers. He is mas­sive and relent­less, con­stant­ly adapt­ing and evolv­ing, but also a con­ser­v­a­tive guardian of the ecosys­temic sta­tus quo. He is also our mon­ster – in a sur­re­al xeno­pho­bic touch, it turns out that local leviathans are more wel­come than alien abom­i­na­tions (even when the lat­ter migrat­ed here mul­ti­ple mil­len­nia ago).

In the par­al­lel rush by Jon­ah and Ghi­do­rah to top­ple incum­bent hier­ar­chies, to kill the king and to set an unruly replace­ment on the throne, the fate of dan­ger­ous, destruc­tive Godzil­la proves inti­mate­ly inter­twined with that of the entire human race. In all these dra­mas, there is plen­ty of room for human hero­ism, sac­ri­fice and redemp­tion to keep view­ers emo­tion­al­ly engaged, while the spec­tac­u­lar city-lev­el­ling fights mount­ed by Dougher­ty and his vast crew of SFX and CGI wran­glers bring the shock and awe, show­ing in con­crete – and con­crete-smash­ing – form the dire, unpre­dictable con­se­quences of mess­ing with nature or with our world’s del­i­cate equilibrium.

Godzil­la: King of the Mon­sters rat­tles and races along through a vari­ety of set-pieces to a lit­er­al­ly explo­sive fin­ish, while leav­ing the impres­sion that a Pandora’s box, once opened, may unleash a per­pet­u­al pan­de­mo­ni­um of sequels. The sheer scale of these humon­gous crea­tures’ siz­ing off is such that it may in the end seem like an abstract piss­ing con­test to deter­mine whose irra­di­at­ed emis­sions cre­ate the great­est dam­age – but fans of kick-ass kai­ju are going to have a blast.