Godzilla II: King of the YAWNsters

I'll make this quick.

Whilst the original Godzilla film from 1954 was an allegory for the death and destruction inflicted on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the American A Bombs - something that was still very much fresh in people's memories at the time of production - the movies that followed were colourful, fun, prosthetic pro-wrestling with little human drama to speak of. 

Not that there was no human drama, but in the case of one of my favourites "Destroy All Monsters" a lot of that drama is relegated to men running around in ridiculous space suits chasing after alien nuns. 

And that's pretty much what you want out of human drama in a Godzilla movie. Make it interesting enough for it to drive the movie forward and for the audience to relate to what's going on. Just make sure there's a lot of people in costumes wrestling and boom, you've nailed it. It's a hard formula to fuck up. 

Well apparently not, because our American friends never really seem to get it right. The Roland Emmerich Godzilla film in 1998 mixed bloated "Independence Day" story-telling style with a monster that in no way resembled Godzilla and the 2014 film was so unmemorable that all the legacy it was able to spawn was in the form of a semi-regularly seen meme.  

So how does its sequel hold up?

It's been a long time since I saw the 2014 Godzilla film. In fact I think I only ever saw it in the cinema. I remember Godzilla's design being a marked improvement over the Emmerich travesty but story-wise it wasn't much better. There was a dreariness that one should never see in a Godzilla movie and it had a habit of cutting away from monster fights to focus on the uninteresting exploits of uninteresting human characters. 

Unfortunately the new film hasn't changed much in that regard. There are nice shots here and there punctuating the otherwise horrid visuals and some of the monster designs, particularly that of Mothra, are quite beautiful. It's just a pity you barely get to see them. 

Most of the film, particularly the fights themselves, are awash in a hazy bukkake of special effects only exacerbated by the fact that the studio clearly hired a man with Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease to do the camera work. With all the rain, tornadoes, shaky cam and extreme close ups you'd be forgiven for thinking the movie was trying to induce the audience into some kind of seizure; which would have been welcome since all it did was induce sleep. I don't know who it was that decided that making absolutely sure the audience can't see a damn thing that's going on was the height of action movie-making but their vivisection should be livestreamed to every film school on the planet as an example of what happens when you ruin cinema as an art form. Action movie makers in the past didn't do this for the same reason people who run carnival haunted houses don't lock you in a dark room and beat you with hammers. There's a line between genuine thrills and genuine discomfort. 

Speaking of genuine discomfort, there's only one word I can use to accurately describe the human drama in the midst of the glorified video game cutscenes this film calls monster fights; pretentious. The moment Vera Farmiga's character willingly allowed Ghidorah to be unleashed on the world (up until this point its assumed she's doing the villain's bidding unwillingly) I knew exactly what her motivation was going to be. 

Right after Ghidorah is released she makes contact with Monarch (the kaiju management corporation that her husband is working with) and we are treated to what seems to be some kind of live edited lecture on how humans totally suck man cuz climate change man; because let's face it, screenwriters don't want to write movies nowadays, they want to write TED Talks, and they'll do it in the middle of Godzilla movies and we'll pay to see them like fucking suckers because our culture is based on masochism and Hollywood is the dominatrix cracking the whip of nostalgia. 

Godzilla on his way to give a TED Talk on Fat Acceptance in the Kaiju Workplace

    
Charles Dance's character, the former MI6 and British Army Colonel Alan Jonah, is relegated to a background character responsible primarily for providing a good line for the trailer (Long live the King) and it's a shame because despite his own motivations being largely the same he's far less pretentious about it all and probably would've made it more palatable as such. "Yeah, yeah, I don't like humanity, it sucks, no I don't care that's it's a three headed murder dragon, can get we get this done please? I have to attend a convention panel so I can watch David Benioff and D.B. Weiss grovel for forgiveness from a horde of angry GoT fans."

He's basically there to set up the sequel. And that's essentially what this is. A set up for a sequel. There's little of lasting value to this film and it will most likely be forgotten just like its predecessor.

Avoid like this film's cameraman avoids tripods.