Godzilla: Planet of the Monsters Review

Overview:

Humans were chased off Earth by Godzilla and other monsters who seem to not be very important and now a group are attempting to kill Godzilla so humans can return.

Review:

If I was going to describe this movie very briefly I would say the story was overly ambitious for the short run time. That isn’t the same as being a bad movie, but it just isn’t anywhere near as good as it might have been. Possibly the ideas and events packed into this movie could have been dealt with quite well in a series or in a significantly longer movie that wasn’t so focused on an elaborate fight sequence to finish off, but here the audience is told a whole bunch of stuff and things that you think should really get more attention just kind of get skated right past.

You know, the whole monsters just appeared and started attacking earth thing? Okay, I get you don’t really know the how or the why, but these monsters seem actually inconsequential to the story and once we hear one of the character’s theories about Godzilla being the destroyer of worlds it makes no sense for there to have been other monsters. If these creatures aren’t of importance to anything as the world can be destroyed without them, why even mention them?

Similarly, when humans are losing suddenly aliens show up. Maybe this was to explain how humans actually managed to evacuate anyone at all but really they didn’t go into anywhere near enough depth with this. Aliens show up and offer to destroy Godzilla because their own world was destroyed and they want to colonise Earth (and that would go well I’m sure) but then it turns out they can’t actually destroy Godzilla and what remains of the humans and aliens are forced to flee.

Already, that’s a lot happening and more than enough for a movie in itself and yet this is a monologue told to us in one of the dullest monotones I’ve heard in recent monologues so we are looking back at old events and kept at arms length from them and given no details. Why not just tell us earth was destroyed and let us find out the how and why once we get back to earth? All this segment did was eat up screen time and left us feeling somewhat unsatisfied with the explanation.

Of course, our main character kind of suffers from being angry protagonist A type throughout the whole movie because he was a kid when Godzilla attacked earth and his parents died… Did he need a personal vendetta to get motivated to reclaim his planet? Again, more screen time eaten up for very little consequence given the guy doesn’t really emote anyway. He’s just driven and angry. The most emotion we get is when his grandfather bids him farewell.

The rest of the support cast are almost non-entities. We have the council group that do the usual bicker and delay decisions but not one of them actually stands out as interesting. There’s some other soldiers who get some lines and get to make some decisions but really you’ve got the ‘too cool’ guy, the one who acts tough but wants to run at the first sign of danger, the token female wants to get stronger character, and so on. They aren’t really of any kind of note and mostly just kind of buzz around or shoot things in the conflict on the planet. Also, given some of them have lived the majority of their lives in space, they were buzzing around on the planet fairly competently and I have to wonder where they had the room to practice those formations and manoeuvers on the ship.

The one exception might be Metphies. He’s one of the aliens and he comes from some religious background, probably knows more about the threat than he is letting on, and is definitely manipulating the situation around him to get what he wants. Unfortunately, this movie doesn’t get around to telling us what that is, so the one potentially interesting character thread goes nowhere.

Visually I’m not sure I’m sold on it as distant shots of Godzilla look amazing but up close it just kind of looks messy. The character designs are okay but nothing exceptional, and given they are all in space suits there’s pretty much nothing to be said about the outfits.

Still, if you like the basic man against monster type thing and you aren’t too concerned about the characters, this will work perfectly well to pass an hour or two. There’s some tense moments and one or two moments of exciting action, and at no point does the story fail, it just doesn’t have as much impact as it might have if handled a different way.

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Karandi James.