So, 2014's
Godzilla, the second attempt by an American studio to adapt the series, is probably one of the worst movies ever made. It's a boring slog that feels ashamed to be a Godzilla movie, given that Godzilla himself appears in less than 12 minutes of it's 124 minute run-time. When rumors came up that, like nearly every movie studio at the time, the American Godzilla franchise was going to try and ride Marvel's coat-tails and start their own "cinematic universe", I was not looking forward to the result after such an awful film. I remained skeptical, but when 2017's
Kong: Skull Island turned out to be an entertaining movie, and confirmed the existence of the so-called "MonsterVerse", I hoped that future
Godzilla movies would improve. As the years have gone on, most of those studios attempts at a shared universe have petered out with mediocre flops. But the so called "MonsterVerse" is one of the only series still making an attempt at it. In 2019
Kong: Skull Island was followed up by
Godzilla: King of the Monsters, the first of these crossover movies to actually feature more than one established monster. While
King of the Monsters is far from a perfect movie, it is a vast improvement on the previous Godzilla movie, in that, Godzilla actually appears in it.
One thing
King of the Monsters gets absolutely right is how to portray the destructive power of kaiju. Look at this scene that introduces Rodan. Look at the way Rodan causes massive destruction just by moving through the area. This movie makes it clear how we should be thinking about these creatures. These aren't just big animals, they're
forces of nature. Like a hurricane or a typhoon. Their very presence causes destruction and is a danger to humans. This movie does a better job of showing that than I've seen in a disaster movie in a long time, and I don't think I've ever seen in kaiju film. At least not at this scale. If you slept on this one because of how terrible
Godzilla (2014) was, I highly recommend you seek it out. Because of the
current health crisis, the next film in the series
Godzilla vs King Kong has been delayed until summer 2021, meaning you have more than enough time to
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