Godzilla: King of the Monsters

“Godzilla: King of the Monsters” has a sense of wonder. After I left the screening late at night and emerged onto a dark city street at nearly one a.m., I wanted to look up rather than straight ahead, just in case Ghidorah the three-headed dragon or Rodan the giant pterodactyl came screaming down from the clouds. That's not the same thing as saying this is a perfect movie. It's far from that. But its errors fall mainly under the heading of failing to get out of its own way, and its imperfections are compensated by magnificence. 

Directed and cowritten by Michael Dougherty ("Krampus"), the movie follows on the heels of the 2014 "Godzilla" and the 2017 "Kong: Skull Island." It's conceived as part of a shamelessly Marvel-styled "shared cinematic universe" of stories that interlink and gradually build towards a series of peaks (the first of which is 2020's "Godzilla vs. Kong"). The human heroes are part of a top-secret project called the Monarch Initiative. This mythology visualizes Godzilla and the other giant monsters made famous by Toho studios, including Ghidorah, Rodan, Mothra, and King Kong (an American creation folded into that universe) as part of an ancient ecosystem of long-hibernating giant monsters that predate the dinosaurs. They can travel from one part of the globe to the other quickly via tunnels through the center of the planet (this is what's known as "Hollow Earth theory"). They are emerging now  in response to humanity's despoiling of the environment through atomic testing, nuclear and chemical waste-dumping, mountaintop demolition mining, and other practices that amount to assaults on Mother Earth.

This Hollywood-financed American series is an internationalization of original Toho Studios-produced Godzilla pictures, with a correspondingly international cast, all representing different takes on the monster problem, such as it is. There are appearances by characters from the 2014 film, including a couple of monster specialists played by Ken Wantanabe and Sally Hawkins, but the main characters are a fractured nuclear family, consisting of two Monarch project scientists, Doctors Mark and Emma Russell (Kyle Chandler and Vera Farmiga) and their teenage daughter Madison ("Stranger Things" star Millie Bobbie Brown). They lost the fourth member of their family, Madison's older brother, five years earlier during Godzilla's battle with the MUTOs in San Francisco, and the parents ultimately separated. It soon becomes clear that the split was equally due to grief and a philosophical disagreement over how to deal with Godzilla and his ilk—the father thinks they should all be exterminated, while mom believes they can be manipulated through a special sonar device that mimics the dynamics of whale songs. 

At least that's our impression of the mother, but everyone in the family (indeed everyone on the planet, probably) is dealing with the monster problem in their own emotional way, and some of them are secretly or not-so-secretly destructive. The openly destructive contingent is defined by Charles Dance's Colonel Alan Jonah, a former British Special Forces veteran turned eco-terrorist who seems to believe that the monsters are punishment for humanity's sins against the environment and is working to awaken as many of the hibernating beasts as possible, the better to hasten the thinning of the human herd. As revealed early in the film (as well as in all the teasers and trailers), Emma is on board with Jonah's take on things, and actively participates in waking up the beasts—including Ghidorah, a lightning-spitting dragon who represents the only serious threat to Godzilla's position as the Hollow Earth's apex predator. 

One of the fascinations of this film is the way it treats the monsters as outward manifestations of the characters' personal issues, at times like enormous dopplegangers or golems representing their grief, trauma, post-traumatic stress disorder. But in addition to the individual grief being experienced by the characters, "King of the Monsters" is suffused with grief for what might be the impending death of human civilization itself, which according to real scientists is a certainty if we don't turn our environmental act around over the next hundred years or so. Jonah and Emma are quite explicit (too explicit; this is a talky film when it's not blowing stuff up) in their belief that the human species has, via inattention and greed, become bystanders in the drama of its own extinction—and that we might as well go ahead and speed things up with a little help from Godzilla, Ghidorah and company, since that's what the planet itself needs, and what humans deserve. 

Emma even compares human civilization to a virus, and the monsters to a "fever" that could wipe most of it out and restore biological balance. A sort of compacted TED Talk in the middle of the film even reveals that once the monsters have finished fighting, and depart the ruins of a city, the radiation they leave behind acts as a biological accelerant, activating the rapid growth of plant and animal life that all the concrete, glass and steel once restrained or destroyed.

But at what price balance? That's the big question, the Thanos of it all. The great Ghidorah—frozen in a wall of ice in deep underground in an Antarctica-based Monarch facility, and looking like the biggest, baddest art installation of all time—is this film's equivalent of the extinction-level threat, the fever bomb who's fated to burn through the human virus. Dougherty and his army of designers and special effects people do a great job of building up Ghidorah as if he (it?) is an ancient and unstoppable evil force whose very name fills the human heart with dread, even envisioning him as a Voldemort-like threat, the dragon whose name can't be spoken (he's also called Monster Zero, shades of Patient Zero) and whose image must be distorted, because to picture him exactly is to summon him. (A selection of past artwork allegedly depicting Ghidorah includes William Blake's painting "The Great Red Dragon and Woman Clothed in Sun," also a fixture in Hannibal Lecter stories). 

Gareth Edwards' franchise'-starting "Godzilla" was a huge International hit, but divided viewers because of its flat, action figure-like characterizations, its meticulous, almost "Jaws"-like unveiling of Godzilla and the two Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Objects (MUTOs) that he ended up fighting, and its relative dearth of actual Godzilla footage (about seven minutes). The movie also placed the big fella within the larger ecosystem of wolves and snakes and birds and such. It contained more nature footage than you expected to see in a city-stomping kaiju epic, to the point where you half-expected Terrence Malick shots of honey-tinted fields and perhaps a narration by Godzilla ("Fire...water...why do you wrestle inside me?"). There were fears (among those who loved the original) and hopes (among people who hated it) that future movies would offer less philosophizing and atmospheric indulgences and more footage of giant monsters beating the tar out of each other, and the Vietnam-era period piece "Kong: Skull Island" delivered plenty, pitting the now super-sized ape against a series of Lovecraftian giants that seemed to be half-insect, half-demon, and making sure that the story didn't go five minutes without a burst of violent spectacle. 

"King of the Monsters" tries to blend the two approaches, not always successfully, and it suffers mightily from its inability to trust the audience to understand both the substance and implications of the action that it presents so boldly and intelligently onscreen. This movie is a succession of miracles and cursed disasters, wheeled or unfurled onscreen with dazzling showmanship and plenty of overscaled grace notes, from the way Rodan chases and catches an F-14 fighter jet and bits off its nose cone like a hawk beheading a sparrow, to the way Ghidorah's three heads talk and whisper to each other, and at times even abuse each other, like the Three Stooges treating slaps as the continuation of conversation. (The middle head is Moe, the other two are Larry and Curly.) The constant need to summarize and annotate every significant moment grows wearisome (it's like being stuck watching a sporting event with a couple of sportscasters who don't know when to shut up) but at the level of image, sound and music, this is a frequently brilliant film: simultaneously real science fiction that earnestly grapples with the ideas it presents, and a religious picture about faith and spirituality, sin and redemption, where monsters die for our sins so that humankind won't have to. 

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An Ode to Mothra, Co-kaiju of Godzilla: King of the Monsters

Ma

The thrills come extra cheap and late in Tate Taylor’s “Ma,” a horror movie torn between campiness and compassion, all while an Oscar-winning actress struggles to hold it together. It's the initial ambition of the story that’s likely to keep you in your seat, as Octavia Spencer adds a wicked smile to her maternal persona and treats the mammy archetype as a predator. But as great as that all sounds, the film proves to be more shallow than its edgy premise and subsequent themes promise. 

The first red flag about “Ma” is that it’s dreadfully boring for the first hour of its 90-minute running time. Usually there’s something at the beginning of a horror movie to bookend its overall terror, but Taylor and Scotty Landes’ script plays it mighty vanilla by focusing on high school-age Maggie (Diana Silvers of “Booksmart”) and her mother Erica (Juliette Lewis) settling into the Ohio town her mother grew up in. It immediately feels like the wrong narrative focus, offering a bland idea of how a decent new kid could be corrupted by the schoolmates who wield their popularity like they're the one-percent, or how returning home can be embarrassingly painful, like when Erica runs into her classmate Ben (Luke Evans) and his friend Mercedes (Missi Pyle). 

Octavia Spencer’s Sue Ann randomly pops into the lives of Maggie and her new friends, as a passerby outside a liquor store who agrees to buy them booze. She's a wolf in vet clinic scrubs and a Dorothy Hamill haircut, and wins their respect quickly, sharing her own fondness for drinking in the same rock quarry they're going to. But not long after, "Ma" enacts one of its unforgivable caveats: the youngsters don’t deduce that when a cop arrives later to break up their party, maybe it was Sue Ann who reported them. It's not the last time "Ma" has a laziness for its teen writing, and that lack of honesty rots at the screenplay: you don't buy that a cavalcade of teens would find it cool to hang out in a random woman's basement, or that pissed-off adults wouldn't just stop the movie's villain by means of "Local Woman Charged with Hosting Underage Alcohol Party" news headlines.

In one of Taylor’s cheapest methods to show that danger is coming, the narrative simply expands to show Ma’s point of view, which largely concerns her quiet life as a vet (in which she's often yelled at by her crotchety boss, played by Allison Janney). Ma stalks Facebook, and then stares into space. We’re supposed to feel uneasy about these inserts, especially as they flash back to when she was in high school, when she was unaware of the traumatizing bullying her classmates put her through. But these prove to be over-baked moments, one that would defeat a performer not of Spencer's fortitude. Taylor just can't find that nuance between creating pity while also making everything unsettling. 

Soon enough, the teens treat Sue Ann like their servant, and a novelty: they rename her "Ma," and throw loud parties in her basement while she serves up shots. An emotional, tragic note is hit: these scenes give Sue Ann the opportunity to experience popularity she never had in high school, and she finds a relevancy and excitement in being needed. It’s mildly amusing, too, to see her teasing her new young friends, or getting down to "Funky Town." But then Ma starts to push boundaries, like when she pops up on campus and asks them to come over and party on a school day. She's too much for these kids, but she's also persistent.

Spencer paints her monster with splashes of recognizable emotions in these passages, of loneliness, neediness, and someone more disturbed than their giddy Snapchats indicate. But as Sue Ann gets to know the kids, she starts piecing together their connection to those who traumatized her in high school. A switch is then flipped, simple as that. Sue Ann simply chooses to start wreaking havoc, allowing the script to go from barely a slow burn, to weak jump scares, to its final form of diet torture porn. Even the secret that Sue Ann has in her house, meant to make her more complicated than plainly monstrous, feels too much like a device. 

Meanwhile, the doomed teenagers of “Ma” form an amorphous blob, one that grows with each rager that Ma throws in her remodeled basement. The one standout is Silvers, who has a dull storyline of growing apart from her mother, and starts an innocent relationship with a boy named Andy (Corey Fogelmanis). But Silvers is better at leading us into the horror of the story, working as a frightened surrogate who at one point dares (along with McKaley Miller's Haley) to break Sue Ann's strict rule of never, ever going upstairs. 

Taylor’s most distinct stylistic choice here, preceded by obvious music cues and stale party scenes, are Sue Ann’s torture methods. Given the unwritten rules for horror villains, one can be grateful that Taylor and Landes stay true to her physical capacity and accessibility—I’ll let you imagine what clever terror a middle-aged veterinarian can orchestrate, but some of it had my screening audience wriggling in unison. And yet delivered within such a gutless course of events, Sue Ann’s actions feel less like a cumulative grand finale, and more like a reward for simply staying tuned. 

It’s hard not to fault “Ma” for being such a lost opportunity. You desperately want the movie to take its cultural context and go wild, like how “Brightburn” last week imagined a pseudo 12-year-old Clark Kent as a super serial killer. The set-up for “Ma” has that same inherently disorienting quality, but it abandons the many discernible themes that come to its surface: popularity as power, tokenism, the lingering horror of our high school years. “Ma” can’t even muster a delicious slice of nastiness—it’s not sharp enough for that. 

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