Finally! caught up with this. It's not hard to see why everyone's already lost interest - I didn't think it was especially bad or good, just a hodgepodge of interesting ideas, fanservice, dumb politics and mediocre family drama, none given enough time to stand out. Particularly the loudly iterated but never explored themes of can we live alongside monsters, is there a natural order, who is responsible for making this decision, etc. These are good questions, and good questions for a Godzilla movie, but after the establishing 30 minutes everything is exploding so quickly that no one has a moment to think.
What works: Rodan looks better than ever, I loved the fiery redesign and trailing embers. Took an indistinguishable giant flying thing and made it into a true fire demon. Ghidorah's and Godzilla's designs are perfectly passable, although the new potbelly (a GMK reference?) does Godzilla no favors. The Mothra CGI is weak. The movie is full of incredibly striking frames of monsters-as-gods in conflict, clearly taking visual inspiration from mythological artwork and succeeding with flying colors. The most garish and also the coolest is Ghidorah atop a volcano with a leaning cross in the foreground. Oddly, each of the monsters gets an opportunity to menacingly emerge from darkness (ocean/ash/stormclouds//waterfall), and those individual shots are like lightning.
I liked most of the fanservice too (like a protest sign reading DESTROY ALL MONSTERS), and in that vein I'm glad that they recognized this was the correct moment to open up the floodgates and start bringing in the crazier genre elements of the franchise. If you'd told me at outset that this movie was going to end with a dozen monsters kneeling and bowing their heads in front of Godzilla's throne, I'd have said fuck you. After the return of the bird machine, the oxygen destroyer, G-Force (basically... Monarch even has a flying fortress, not called the Super X), Ghidorah being a confirmed alien, and best of all, thermal Godzilla, I still wasn't fully sold on the moment, but I was willing to nod and say okay.
The right visuals, the right elements, so what went wrong? The script is fine enough. It gets the roles the characters should be in, how to relate people to the monsters, and how to establish a rising threat. But the movie is incredibly busy and noisy, the perennial Hollywood shaky-keys in front of a crying baby. So much effort, energy, and animation is put into simple establishing action like "a helicopter lands and the characters get out" (already a rather loud way to open a scene) that the movie is bulldozed into a pile of atonal rubble. The camera is constantly swinging, the soundtrack is constantly blaring, the lighting is constantly shifting, all to the effect of a quickly tiresome movie wasted on moments where nothing spectacular is happening. I expect Godzilla movies to have boring parts, and I expect dumb characters and pointless conflicts, but I'd rather them be sleepy and sobering than blaring and melodramatic, because the way this movie is, the actual monster action I'm here to see doesn't stand out, and I have no time to process it.
Which is of course not helped by the incessant cutting. Jesus is this poorly edited action. Is it too much to ask for 30 uninterrupted seconds of a single shot? Or even 30 uninterrupted seconds without shifting locations? All of the fights are chopped up with asinine crap like landing a helicopter with no characters on it in an airplane that has unclear problems solved by an otherwise useless protagonist. The only thing as galling as the editing is any scene with the nonsensical Emma, a character that is maybe supposed to be a villain, or maybe supposed to be a hero, but I can't tell because the actress and/or mannequin in the role doesn't move a single part of her face or body during the entire film. Also, can anyone explain why Sally Hawkins is in these movies? It was so weird seeing her *yet again* show up to give a single scene of backstory exposition.
Given Michael Dougherty's history (I like Superman Returns and X2, but don't love either), I think he was just fine to write this film, and as with Superman and X-Men he seems to get the characters and make sure their traditional presence is maintained (Ghidorah is an intelligent evil alien, Mothra is a benevolent martyr who always loses her fights, Rodan is angry). I would've much rather seen Gareth Edward's take on that script, but as such, KoM doesn't do any real harm to the franchise.
