Of course, in the grand tradition of monster movies, these outposts are staffed by scientists and support personnel and heavily armed security forces, all of whom are shocked beyond belief and pretty much helpless to defend themselves when the creatures come to life and get cranky and start roaring and stomping and chomping. We’re told there are some 17 gigantic beasts, all in dormant states (for now), in secret outposts in China and Mexico and Arizona and Antarctica, and that’s a lot of secret outposts to keep secret.

(No really, that’s essentially one of the arguments presented.) Do we blow ‘em all up, or try to co-exist with them, because after all, they were here first, and maybe they’ll let us hang around as pets once they regain power. Now everyone is trying to figure out how to deal with these “titans,” as they’re called. “Godzilla: King of the Monsters” (a continuation of the “MonsterVerse” that includes 2017’s “Kong: Skull Island”) takes place in present day, five years after the world (and San Francisco in particular) learned the hard way ancient, supposedly mythic creatures were in fact real.

(I mean, the action takes us to Fenway Park and nobody even makes a bad Green Monster joke!) As we get mired in storylines about a squabbling divorced couple and a Bond-like villain’s truly ill-conceived plan to create chaos, and we get heavy-handed lectures about how humans are the REAL monsters destroying the planet, it’s all so … serious. “King of the Monsters” is most entertaining when the camera lingers on Godzilla’s big, goofy, 1950s-looking face, or when we see Zilla et al., facing off from a bit of a distance, so we can appreciate the sheer silly fun of it all.Īh, but that’s the biggest problem here: the overall dearth of a sense of fun. When the monsters DO butt heads, the battle sequences are often maddeningly dark, and jam-packed with too many quick-cut closeups, making it difficult to keep track of the cage-match type confrontations. Rated PG-13 (for sequences of monster action violence and destruction, and for some language). presents a film directed by Michael Dougherty and written by Dougherty and Zach Shields.

Godzilla king of the monsters 2019