Now Reading
Let’s Discuss the Utter Insanity of ‘Godzilla: King of the Monsters’

Let’s Discuss the Utter Insanity of ‘Godzilla: King of the Monsters’

Watching Godzilla: King of the Monsters is like asking your mom to buy your favorite cereal at the grocery store. Imagine this:

Your mom is going to the grocery store. You ask her to buy Cinnamon Toast Crunch because it makes you feel hyper, tastes like dessert and offers zero nutritional value. Your mom says okay but she doesn’t write it down on her list. You flag this deficit but you don’t say anything because it’s your mom and you trust her. An hour later, your mom comes back from the store but instead of Cinnamon Toast Crunch she has something called “Breakfast Bread Crunchies,” and you’re like, Mom, what in the name of my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ is this, and she’s like, The cereal you wanted, and you’re like, No it’s not, and she’s like, Well I thought the toy it came with looked cool, so you open the box and dig around and pull out the toy and, Huh, you guess it is kinda cool. The cereal still doesn’t taste great, but hey, the toy lights up and and actually works pretty well, as far as cereal toys go, so maybe the Breakfast Bread Crunchies Incident wasn’t a total disaster.

That’s Godzilla: King of the Monsters. If all you need is an expectations-setter, you can stop here. However, if you’d like a little more detail regarding how utterly bonkers the movie is, please keep reading for further analysis of the movie’s ambitions, themes and monster-on-monster fight choreography.

**Mild spoilers ahead for Godzilla: King of the Monsters**

The following statements are facts about Godzilla: King of the Monsters.

  • If you’re wondering how many non-Godzilla monsters are in the movie, the answer is seven. There are three giant bugs, a giant firebird, a three-headed dragon (does this count as more than one?), some kinda mammoth thing, and there might have been a giant turtle? I dunno. That actually might have been one of the giant bugs. It’s hard to say because it kept burrowing underground. You know now that I’m saying it that probably means it was a bug. Turtles don’t really function on dirt terrain.
  • Really though, the point of King of the Monsters is that humans—GET A LOAD OF THIS—might be the reallllll kings of the monsters. In which case, there are billions of monsters in this movie. Billions!
  • The cast of Godzilla: King of the Monsters is loaded. It includes Kyle Chander, Vera Farmiga, Millie Bobby Brown, Sally Hawkins, Ken Wantanabe, Thomas Middleditch, Bradley Whitford, Ziyi Zhang, David Strathairn (you don’t know who he is, probably, but you’ll Google him and be like, “Oh! That guy!”) and O’Shea Jackson, Jr. That’s a lot of enjoyable people.
  • In total, the cast of Godzilla: King of the Monsters has been nominated for five Oscars, 11 Golden Globes (1 win) and 16 Primetime Emmys (4 wins). That is, as we say in the biz, hilarious.
  • The first 15 minutes of Godzilla: King of the Monsters certainly exist. I can’t say anything more because I missed them. However, I can say that missing them does not diminish your enjoyment of the movie.
  • Godzilla’s first appearance in this movie is super dang cool. I won’t ruin it all the way, but it takes a lot of inspiration from Jaws, features some rad lighting and lets Ken Watanabe do that awesome thing he does where he mutter-whispers his lines and it’s such a perfect intonation that he could legit just be saying the lyrics of “Old Town Road” and you’d be like, Dang, never thought of it that way.
  • Kyle Chandler’s in that scene, too, mostly to just stare in awe at Godzilla.
  • In fact, 73 percent of Kyle Chandler’s performance in this movie is staring at things in awe. Another 20 percent is him yelling in desperation. 7 percent is him hugging Millie Bobby Brown. Those are the best parts.
  • Oh, as for Millie Bobby Brown, she’s good in this movie! A little too good, maybe. She doesn’t seem to understand that Godzilla: King of the Monsters is closer to The Meg than Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In other words, she’s trying to be more serious than the movie.
  • Because King of the Monsters is not a serious movie. How do I know? Because in one part Godzilla rips the head off a monster and swings it around like a chew toy before spitting it out and roaring. People in my audience applauded when this happened.
  • In another part of the movie, a giant bird dinosaur thing comes crawling out of a volcano, where it had been lying dormant for thousands of years. When this monster flies around, chunks of the volcano fall off of it and devastate the citizens below. One citizen runs from the monster and is doing great but then a giant chunk of lava comes tumbling out of the sky and crushes him. I applauded when this happened. Nobody else did.
  • Whenever a monster is onscreen in Godzilla, it is a great movie. When the monsters go away to rest in between their giant monster battles, the movie becomes very lame. Instead of two hours and fifteen minutes of monsters fighting, it’s an hour of monsters fighting and another hour of surprisingly well-pedigreed TV actors pointing fingers at each other and arguing.
  • There are two high-profile deaths in Godzilla: King of the Monsters, both happening to Oscar-nominated actors. One of these deaths is amazing and emotional and almost profound. The other involves being eaten by a hydra. I can’t wait for you to see both of them.
  • One of the best things about Godzilla: King of the Monsters is how all the monsters have their own fighting styles, especially Godzilla. He’s more of a ground-and-pound specialist than the others, so if you were to give him a WWE comparison, it would probably be Stone Cold Steve Austin. If Godzilla had a scene in this movie in which he cracked open a beer and chugged it while standing on top of his fallen enemies, this entire article would just be about that.
  • There are going to be more Godzilla movies. He fights King Kong in the next one. I have no idea how this matchup will work but I’m excited to see which Oscar-nominated actors die in that movie. They should make three of these every year.

View Comments (0)

Leave a Reply

© 2023 RELEVANT Media Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Scroll To Top

You’re reading our ad-supported experience

For our premium ad-free experience, including exclusive podcasts, issues and more, subscribe to

Plans start as low as $2.50/mo