GODZILLA 2 REVIEW: Loud and proud of the monsters on show, but offers very little to the overall fra

Godzilla: King of the Monsters: lights up the night sky like a giant nuclear candle…

It’s 1954, and the nuclear age is in full swing. “Duck and Cover” is the first line of defense for a school kid.

H-bomb testing is nightly news, and Mickey Rooney makes America laugh as “the Atomic Kid”.

Meanwhile, across the sea . . . something rises out the depths of Tokyo Bay to stomp into the minds of Japanese audiences, and begins to lay waste to Tokyo.

Godzilla (“Gojira” to his homeys) King Of The Monsters has risen, and the world trembles at his passing.

Now, 70 plus years on from that first encounter, the monster sets its sights on America and the global audience of world cinema again. The film is the sequel to 2014’s Godzilla, and the 35th film overall in the broader Godzilla franchise.

In a busy period packed with blockbusters – from Avengers: Endgame and Aladdin to X-Men: Dark Phoenix and Rocketman – can this next MonsterVerse story break through? And in Warner Bros.’ third Godzilla entry, (that’s correct, we said 3rd film!) the studio is pitting the iconic monster against some of his greatest foes; Mothra, Rodan, and King Ghidorah.

A match made in heaven and in hell, and what plays out across the earth, as the showground between the mighty foes, Culturedemandsgeeks asks the more important question…

Was it really worth the entry fee?

ABOVE: Apparently caveman drew these sketches!

If there’s one positive outcome from Godzilla: King of the Monsters, the summer’s first bad, bad, bad blockbuster, it should be that the marketing team at Warner Bros receives a monstrous raise and they are offered up as a sacrifice for Godzilla.

On paper, the $200m sequel seemed like an unnecessary addition to 2014’s brilliant, but ever so (we can’t actually see Godzilla in much of the feature film, Gareth Edwards) reboot, a recklessly expensive extension to a franchise-restarter that no one cared for, except for die-hard Kaiju scholars. With production finishing almost two years ago and with two projected release dates scrapped, the bad buzz, ju-ju was starting to grow and just like Godzilla’s atomic powered breath, we were feeling fretful.

But then the first trailer was released and naysayers fell silent. Flashes of grandiose imagery were matched with the lush sounds of Clair de Lune and what seemed to be a bravely apocalyptic tone, the sort of preview that suddenly vaults a previously discounted film to the top of your must-see list. The more recently released “final trailer” was similarly artful, hinting at a monster movie with heart, and the joys and tears of Millie Bobby-Brown.

But smoke, mirrors and then more smokey smog, (much more than you’d find on a trip to one of China’s overpopulated cities), can only do so much.

Within minutes of the film itself, expectations start to dissipate, quickly replaced with crushing disappointment like you are actually getting trampled upon by the Big Guys massive scaly feet.

ABOVE: Apparently the color choices were white and black for snow jackets.

The plot picks up after 2014’s Godzilla. The premise is this: Monarch, a shadowy cryptozoological agency that studies such ancient, ­physics-defying monsters as Godzilla, has discovered that more and more of these creatures, known as titans, exist and that they are entombed in some of Earth’s farthest reaches.

BOOM!

Then we have a sonar device developed by Vera Farmiga’s Emma to control the monsters has been hijacked by an eco-terrorist; her ex-husband (Kyle Chandler) is drafted in to track it down.

Their teenage daughter (Millie Bobby Brown from Stranger Things) is a distraction, caught in the middle of her divorced parents. The family is torn apart when Godzilla takes the foreground. Alas, our fan favorite, Brown is totally underused — delivering shrieks in the face of the story’s twists and turns, but not much more.

There are also haphazard attempts to weave in the themes of government interference, climate change and East Asian mythology as motivation for some of the characters.

But…

If you’re looking for some Kaiju-on-Kaiju action, you won’t be disappointed, but, battle scenes occur in weather conditions so extreme that the action is rendered indecipherable (as are the beloved giant creatures, including the three-headed serpent King Ghidorah, bird-like Rodan and winged Mothra).

Ken Watanabe returns as Dr. Ishiro Serizawa in ‘Godzilla: King of the Monsters’ (for a sizable payday, we suspect!), but was it worth it from the actor?

Nope.

Ken Watanabe, reprising his role as a scientist, is the only returning character who is given anything to chew on here. But any fresh emotional weight that his character carries is undercut by the memory of his comically underwritten role in the 2014 film, in which the actor had little to do except pronounce the name “Godzilla” in a Japanese accent.

Also very underused in Godzilla is the talented Sally Hawkins and Charles Dance.

SEEING MORE OF GODZILLA: NEGATIVE OR POSITIVE?

Gareth Edwards, who directed the 2014 “Godzilla,” was criticized for waiting too long to reveal the titular Japanese movie monster in that film. In contrast, the new film’s director, Michael Dougherty (“Krampus”), seems to revel in wreaking havoc in the kaiju sandbox, showing off every last trick and ability possessed by Godzilla and the other classic movie monsters that are reintroduced here.

Not so much, the film is so murky, it looks as though it was put through a dark blue Instagram filter.

ABOVE: Poor Millie, we feel your pain, too!

FINAL THOUGHTS:

A clunky sequel has rare moments of visual splendor but they can’t disguise a laughable script with a ramshackle narrative.

The ugly visual effects are outdone only by the sound design, which is relentlessly loud and thunderingly tedious. Verbal exchanges between the humans are devoid of wit and barely functional in communicating the story. Godzilla: King of the Monsters is every bit as redundant as one would expect, a hollow piece of business masquerading as something necessary.

Stay tuned for the next entry in the Warner Bros. MonsterVerse: “Godzilla vs. King Kong” (scheduled for release in March 2020). But if you want to see good Godzilla, then pop over to Netflix and watch the animated show.

2/5 STARS