Michael Dougherty
Godzilla II

Sometimes the only sensible comment is silence. And that would be what this film deserves, if it weren't for the fact that it follows two works that somehow had fueled hope for a cinema about monsters and gigantic creatures, but still moderate, balanced, in some way.

Evidently, they decided to throw everything away, and it's a bit disappointing. I claim the right to watch Godzilla, King Kong, and their fire-breathing siblings without having my brain curse at the absurdities that scripts and dialogues are invariably stuffed with. As mom says: "A beautiful silence was never written." Pure spectacle cinema, even if tacky, has the right to exist. But not at this price.

Even 2014's Godzilla, signed by Gareth Edwards (the one from Rogue One), allowed itself to interrupt the duels between beasts because at that moment the humans' view was obstructed by some obstacle or filtered through television images, train windows, rails. The monsters would appear and disappear from behind doors, through holes in the train tracks. They would slowly emerge from the mist, the sea, or deep lairs. There, human actions were futile, like ants walking on the beast's back, which ignored them.

Even Kong: Skull Island had its merits, albeit loosening the "theoretical" dictates and focusing on adventure. But it was a juicy adventure, in the Jurassic Park style, full of details and scenes of true cinema. Two films that each grossed half a billion: apparently not enough.

This new chapter has grossed 177 million in less than a week, and it's not certain that the extreme simplification and trivialization will bring great box office advantages. A very predictable and ugly story, yet according to the screenwriters, it needs multiple explanations from the characters, whose human side I'd prefer to remain silent about. A mess full of arguments taken directly from great masterpieces of cinema on the theme of the nature-man conflict, good nature and bad nature, good man and bad man: a paraphrase of a bad student who poorly reprises the lesson.

The conceptual poverty is immediately evident: if in Edwards' film man was powerless because the monsters shut down technology, here he even has the means to "command" the giants. They are vintage, and this is understandable, but they clash with a hyper-technological world and are poorly integrated into the scenarios. The dragon seems taken from an outdated fantasy depiction. The luminescent butterfly, on the other hand, is beautiful. The cyclopean battles are also decent on a technical level, and it would have been absurd otherwise: those 170 million dollars of budget surely weren't spent on the screenwriters (nor on the actors, given that the lead is the resistible Kyle Chandler, while Millie Bobby Brown plays the rebellious girl, but don't get me started on that disastrous family). On a conceptual level, even Godzilla's character is trivialized: no longer a stern and grim guardian of the world, but almost a spandex-clad paladin.

In the end, it becomes a brawl not so different from Marvel's (but much less beautiful, club fight vs duel at sword's point, or the like). And just look at the international box office to understand the problem: Avengers is first in 2019 with 2.7 billion, Captain Marvel second with 1.1. They set the rules, and as already seen with the DC Comics saga, other proponents of "big" entertainment cinema have to pump up their creatures to compete. The fact is, often the steroids end up choking them.