In short: Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019)

There are some curious weaknesses to Michael Dougherty’s second Godzilla film that keep it rather behind Legendary’s until now best kaijuverse movie, the grand Kong: Skull Island. Most obviously it repeats the mistake of the first Legendary Godzilla movie and concentrates on the least interesting of its human characters, in this case portrayed by Kyle Chandler giving his sad sack character a particularly whiny note (which sure doesn’t help), while he’s surrounded by a bunch of much more interesting actors involved in much more interesting business (Ken Watanabe! Zhang Ziyi! Bradley Whitford! Vera Farmiga! Millie Bobby Brown! Aisha Hinds!), who all do get their moments to shine but are still not allowed to be a proper ensemble for reasons only known to Dougherty. In other regards, the film is actually much better than the first Godzilla at integrating that pesky human element into the plot.

Now, I could go the way of various mainstream film critics and complain about the mild silliness of that human business, but for an old kaiju hand, the mix of earnest eco monologues, mild action, and big fat McGuffins seems perfectly appropriate to the film, and provides quite a bit of entertainment to the friend of explosions, dimly lit corridors and terribly incompetent security forces too. Plus, while I’m no fan of Chandler’s character or Chandler’s acting here, I do appreciate how the film suggests that both he and his ex-wife have lost their respective marbles in very different ways after the kaiju-induced death of their son, turning both the protagonist and the antagonist of the film into characters who have turned to destructive views and ways of life after contact with something they can barely comprehend. It will need a member of the next generation to teach them better. Which, if you’re not a mainstream movie critic, you just might be able to identify as a couple of the film’s themes.


And, you know, then there’s the actual reason for anyone sane to go into a movie called “Godzilla: King of the Monsters”, and that’s enjoying the monster action as well gawking at the way King Gidorah, Rodan and Mothra have been Americanised. And wouldn’t you know it, the monster action is indeed properly great, usually emphasising the sheer size and mass of the creatures, the way they dwarf the human characters not just physically but conceptually. That last element is of course weakened by a modern Hollywood movie’s need to have its human protagonists actually do something that matters, and go through a character arc but that sort of thing is rather inevitable. On the positive side, the film does again and again provide a feeling of sheer awe and wonder at the kaijus that made all of its failings null and void to me while watching, and still looks pretty damn good weeks later.

In short: The Cloverfield Paradox (2018)

In the near future, the world is on the brink of war – or really, a lot of wars everywhere – caused by an energy crisis. There is still one international attempt at solving the world’s energy troubles in form of a highly experimental particle accelerator built in Earth’s orbit. However, the crew of scientists (Gugu Mbatha-Raw, David Oyelowo, Daniel Brühl, John Ortiz, Chris O’Dowd, Aksel Hennie, Zhan Ziyi) can’t quite seem to crack the problem. Time is running out, and tensions between the crew members as well as on Earth rise. Things really start to go to crap when one of the last possible attempts with the accelerator actually seems to succeeds, only with something happening to the station that turns things decidedly weird. Not to speak of the little fact that our protagonists seem to have lost Earth.

Ironically, that isn’t even the most troubling problem our protagonists now encounter. The station seems to take on a life of its own, its walls shifting and moving and even starting to become a bit nippy. And let’s not even talk about the woman (Elizabeth Debicki) the crew finds in one of the station’s walls who says she’s a member of the team. A member nobody seems to remember, but who sometimes appears and disappears in photographs of the crew, for that matter.

After five minutes of intense hype, Julius Onah’s Netflix entry in the Cloverfield universe got a right critical drubbing from mainstream critics. Me, I found myself enjoying the film just fine, sometimes even more than that, but I can understand why not only mainstream critics but also people who actually have a clue about fantastic genre film aren’t terribly happy with the movie at hand. It is, after all, impossible to deny that Paradox does waste quite a few interesting ideas and a wonderful cast on a very standard plot with a very standard finale and on in general not terribly interesting characters. There’s much more – and much stranger things – to be done with its conceit of alternative universes and I wish the film had given more characters than just Mbatha-Raw’s reason to be emotionally involved with the alternative universe they find themselves in. Or, you know, had brought them into a universe that’s just stranger than the one we got.

On the other hand, the actors are good fun in the roles they actually have, and the plot, while not as interesting as I would have hoped for, does hit its standard beats expertly enough. I also like the way the film kinda-sorta explains how the different Cloverfield films might relate to one another in a way that leaves the door wide open for the following Cloverfields to do whatever the hell they want.


Because I’m me, I can’t end this without mentioning the utter glee I felt once the business about the arm (the film’s true hero) started. There’s something to be said about a film that dares to do something so silly (some would say goofy) and even make it important to the plot.