My most anticipated turned into my most hated movie of that year.
The crypto-zoological agency Monarch faces off against a battery of god-sized monsters, including the mighty Godzilla, who collided with Mothra, Rodan, and King Ghidorah.
Talk about your all-time letdown. I had this number one on my most anticipated list, and quite frankly it wasn’t even close. When the first trailer dropped for Michael Dougherty’s follow-up to the 2014 Godzilla my breath was taken away. It was one of the most beautiful movie trailers I’d ever seen. The mixture of gorgeous visuals and scored by the emotional Clair De Lune, I couldn’t get enough of it. I couldn’t believe that we were finally going to get the Godzilla film I’ve always wanted. Hard-hitting action, incredible actors, and larger-than-life Monsters, that would make Guillermo Del Toro proud. By the looks of the trailer, the Titans as they are called would come to life in ways we couldn’t even imagine, and they all looked so flawless in design. Everything leading up to it, the marketing, the trailers, the images, made me believe this would be truly special. In fact, I love monster movies so much, this had the potential to be one of my favorite monster movies of all time. After about an hour, I knew we had a complete disaster on our hands. Everything good that happens in this movie, lasts for no longer than 15 seconds. Whether that’s some incredible visuals or action. It just doesn’t last and is immediately drowned out by one of our incessant human characters.
Looking back, there are so many similarities between BvS and Godzilla, the religious mythos, larger-than-life icons finally coming together on the big screen, both bloated with too much plot. I can see parallels everywhere between them. But I have recently come around to BVS and appreciate it so much more than when it first hit theatres. I can’t quite put my finger on what went wrong with this movie for me. Maybe it was all the human characters or just something about how the monsters looked? Don’t get me wrong, the monsters look incredible but at times I just found them to be a little too cartoonish. The battles are great when the times come, but I wanted maybe a little more darker tone from them? Perhaps they just made them almost likable when they should have been terrifying creatures that were wreaking havoc on the entire planet.
This is the co-main event for the biggest thrown down this world has ever seen. Pitting Godzilla vs King Kong and I just felt like this was a major disappointment. No doubt they have nailed down Godzilla since they reintroduced him in 2014 and he is not the problem with this film. Bogged down by a handful of human characters you never fully get invested in which always is the problem with these big monster movies. I always look at Aliens as the prime example of who did it best. You have a large team of characters and simply kill 90 percent of them off leaving us with the ones we truly care about. Even seeing this on the biggest screen I could find, I just never felt satisfied.
I think the biggest problem I had was my expectations were so high, because of how well they marketed the movie. Releasing two of the best trailers of the last 5 years, I couldn’t help feel that this movie was going to blow me away. Maybe that’s my fault for having higher than high expectations, but at the end of the day, that was just the tip of the iceberg.
Even on future rewatches, one being very recently, this movie just kind of pains me. Now, I couldn’t be more excited for what’s to come in this monster-verse and I can’t wait to see where they go. It’s just a bloated, nonsensical blockbuster, that didn’t have to be. You can have a move like this and have it make sense and be somewhat plot-driven, but at the end of the day, it was just loud and over-stuffed beyond belief. It was a sad day for this movie fan when I walked out of the theatre that day.
I’ll be heading back to where it all started with Godzilla, with a review tomorrow!
Godzilla: King of The Monsters = 60/100
