Godzilla: King of the Monsters
published 2025-12-06 | tags: #backlog #movies #godzilla
This is a sequel to Godzilla (2014) with many of the same characters and similar visual language carrying over, clearly starting an American Godzilla franchise.
While I liked the last Godzilla in the series, for it's sense of scale and delivering on visual effects Godzilla has always deserved, this one felt shallow, scattered, and formulaic.
Here's the thing though... I think that's intentional. Viewed from the lens that this is a modern American interpretation of specifically the 60's era Godzilla films I think this nails it:
- A scientist who is done dirty holds the key to fixing all of our problems.
- Not one but TWO people make the ultimate sacrifice.
- There is a single comedy relief character.
It also faithfully references the classic 50s/60s films:
- They drop an "Oxygen Bomb"
- Not only do they have the big hitters like Godzilla, King Ghidorah, and Mothra but they threw in Rodan!?
- They clarify that King Ghidorah is from space.
Nobody else got those references but I DO! I JUST WATCHED ALL OF THE GODZILLA MOVIES! I GET ALL THE REFERENCES!
So yeah, we've come a long way from Godzilla (1998) barely referencing it's original canon to now very much honoring not only the lore but even the formula of the classic Godzilla movies. I think that's cool.
I'm not saying it's a good movie. Kinda the opposite actually; the 50's and 60's Godzilla movies were bad. They were campy as hell, but they were not good movies. So while this movie is also bad I think that it's a faithful-to-the-original kind of bad which is at least interesting.
All that said, the movie ends with basically Boston being nuked and I like... I might be too dumb but I don't know what that means metaphorically speaking. What does an American Godzilla movie where a major American city gets destroyed... mean? Email me if you know the answer.