I find it rather disturbing:
We keep hearing, in movie after movie, TV series after TV series that we are on the brink of some massive ecological cataclysm that will wipe out the entire human race “Real Soon” (to quote Dr. Lizardo).
And yet, even the most alarmist models of global warming usually end up admitting that it will be at least a century before any serious warming takes place, and one can point to plenty of evidence that a lot has been done to clean up our air and water. There is no hard evidence out there that suggests we only have a few years left, and yet we keep hearing it over and over.
Very disturbing. But then, I said that already.
Now, in Godzilla: King of the Monsters we are told that having your city trampled by a giant monster is a good thing, and in fact, having Godzilla blast everything with his deadly radioactive breath is going to…ummm…make plants grow better?
Seriously?
We get a bit of glib nonsense about volcanoes producing rich new soil (true, by bringing lots of carbon and mineral rich materials up to the surface), but spraying everything with enough radiation to set buildings on fire, or melt down other giant monsters is going to sterilize the all important bacteria in the soil, melt it into a glassy mess and leave it pretty much unable to support life.
And what exactly is Godzilla’s deadly blue breath made of anyway? Uranium isotopes? A hint of Plutonium? Maybe radioactive cobalt with just a smidgen of Iodine?
Not exactly what I’d chose to fertilize my garden.
Fortunately, all this is in a movie big enough and dumb enough to make us forget the silly ideas spouted by the human actors and let us get on with the whole business of badass giant monsters going mano a mano with each other (or would that be garras a garras?). Which is a good thing because that is what Godzilla: King of the Monsters does best.
The Legendary Godzilla was already an imposing beast, but this time we also get to see a dazzling version of Rodan emerging from a volcano dripping lava (okay, it isn’t Mt. Fuji, but we’ll ignore that), a luminously beautiful Mothra (although her legs are just way too big — and the suggestion that she and the Big G are…ummmmm…”close” is just too strange to even begin to discuss). But the show stopper is their truly monstrous take on King Ghidora, who is nightmarishly familiar yet bigger and nastier than ever. This time he even generates his own storms to hide himself, and emerges from his frozen tomb in the Antarctic in a bravura sequence. Let’s face it: Toho never made any of them look this good before.
And, of course, the hard core fans will recognize a lot of the Easter Eggs, particularly that visit to that ever popular land (in Kaiju Eiga films, at least), Mu.
Not that they actually call it that.
So turn off your brain and leave it at the door with your cell phone: you won’t need it. This is strictly fun for the kiddies — the grown up ones, that is, not the little ones who will only end up crying because this is a very intense film.
And let’s just hope that the upcoming Legendary film where King Kong takes on the big green guy will be even dumber. After all, no one really cares whether Godzilla’s going to help to bring balance in our world by reducing it to a radioactive slag heap.
We’re only waiting for that moment when someone says “Let them fight.”
Preorder the DVD or buy the Action Figure at Amazon:
rivets on the poster 
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