Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) * 1/2

Directed by:  Michael Dougherty

Starring:  Kyle Chandler, Vera Farmiga, Millie Bobby Brown, Ken Watanabe, Bradley Whitford, Sally Hawkins, Charles Dance, Zhang Ziyi, O'Shea Jackson, Jr., Thomas Middleditch

It's hard to be engaged in a battle between titan monsters when it takes place at night during a nasty hurricane.    I'm reminded of My Cousin Vinny, in which a witness is asked how he could possibly identify two men fifty feet away through shrubbery and a filthy window.    You see Godzilla, or is Mothra, or is it Monster Zero, who has three heads?    Who won?   Who lost?   What happened?  In the end, I'm not sure I even cared.

The primary problem with Godzilla: King of the Monsters is that I had no skin in the game.   The human characters are one-dimensional folks who either want Godzilla to save humankind from destruction by the other creatures or want Godzilla dead because he crushed someone under his massive foot five years ago.    Godzilla just wants to be Godzilla, and instead he is saddled with the human species' problems.    I didn't much give a hoot about the humans or the monsters. 

I did not see the original Godzilla (2014), but a brief recap in the film's prologue ensured me that I didn't miss anything.    Dr. Mark Russell (Chandler) and his wife Dr. Emma Russell (Farmiga) lose their son after he is trampled by Godzilla during one of his epic showdowns which destroyed San Francisco faster than the 1906 earthquake.   In the ensuing five years, Mark and Emma divorce, and Emma travels to the jungles of China with daughter Maddie (Brown) in two to study the birth of Mothra and to perfect a device called the Orca, which allows for communication with the beasts. 

The Orca is stolen and Emma and Maddie kidnapped by Alan Jonah (Dance), who is described as an eco-terrorist who wants to rid the world of these gargantuan creatures.    Because there are nearly eight billion people on the planet, the monsters don't have much room to stomp around.    An organization called Monarch, which is supposed to keep tabs on Godzilla and the like, is called before a Congressional hearing and walks out on the feckless committee when word of a Godzilla sighting occurs.    They don't get into any trouble for abruptly leaving a hearing, which sounds very close to the current state of the U.S. House of Representatives. 

Mark is soon lured back into action after spending a few years studying wolves in Colorado.   The Monarch team travels to Antarctica to rescue Emma and Maddie, one or both of whom may or may not have their own plans in mind for Monster Zero, who is frozen in the Antarctic ice.    Think of the monsters as the terrestrial version of Thanos.   The first of the movie's endless fight scenes between the creatures takes place at night in Antarctica with snow swirling around everywhere.    The military is involved, things blow up, bodies fly around, and it is hard to discern what exactly is going on.

There is more where that came from as battles rage from Mexico to Boston.   The Orca comes into play, and Godzilla is seemingly killed by the latest nuclear weapon, but we know there is a way to bring him back.   It is bait and switch to have a movie with Godzilla in the title and then kill him off midway through the movie.    That doesn't happen, so no worries for those of you who truly care.

The humans spend the bulk of the movie either staring out an underwater window at a monster or gazing up at the sky at the titans.    Not much of this is much fun.   Say what you will about the Godzilla movies from the 1950's and 1960's, but they were cheerfully schlocky which made them at least amusing.   There was also a subtext, in which Godzilla represented the result of the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and its unintended effect on Japan.   It was a direct shot at the Americans and American audiences ate it up on Saturday afternoons. 

I recall Kong:Skull Island (2017) in which a giant Kong was the king of all monsters on an uncharted Pacific Island populated by only two humans, both of whom were World War II MIA's.   There was a human story there, and the filmmakers did us a favor by shooting the bulk of the battles in the daylight where we could actually see them, and edited so the action isn't jerked back and forth so quickly that we can't follow it.    Skull Island is mentioned in Godzilla: King of the Monsters, and I would not have minded a Kong cameo appearance.   Godzilla simply lacks in the personality department.