Godzilla: King of the Monsters was...awful.
I didn't have high expectations for this, I just wanted to enjoy some Godzilla silliness. But this turned out to be the most joyless film I've seen in a while; the script feels like a rough draft with lines that come off like placeholders. Due to the terrible writing, all of the characters are uninspired, generic puppets. What's really heartbreaking is this film is overflowing with incredible talents like Millie Bobby Brown, Ken Watanabe, Charles Dance, Sally Hawkins, and Bradley Whitford, among many others. But they're given absolutely nothing to work with and stage presence will only get you so far when the things coming out of your mouth sound like they were written by Michael Scott.
The entire human component of this film is utterly unwatchable tripe, and there's entirely too much of it. This movie is a little over two hours and it felt like four as a result of the constant need to wade back into this slog of human drama.
In contrast to that, Godzilla looks freaking awesome as do most of the other monsters, many of the classics are back, so longtime fans can see them all rendered in glorious modern CGI. But that and the casting is clearly where all the money went.
The plot structure barely holds together, the writing is dead on arrival, especially the dialogue. The film’s pacing goes from glacial to sprinting and then back to glacial again. There's no sense of urgency or stakes, they barely even acknowledge there are other people living in this world besides the ones in the fishbowl talking about tracking down Godzilla. The whole thing is a big steaming pile of lizard shit if I'm being honest.
3/10 Kaiju not?