Cinema Reviews: Godzilla: Kong of the Monsters

This is awful, from go to whoa – actually, I should amend that statement, for, dazed and confused and with perforated eardrums, I scarpered before the humungous end-fight. In the not-too-distant future, there is an organisation called Monarch that has a web of bunkers around the world designed to protect people (presumably a chosen few) from the predations of the Titans – huge, prehistoric monsters that bring death and destruction to cities in their way. A maverick scientist, Dr Emma Russell (Vera Farmiga), has, like Doctor Frankenstein, been developing a monster of her own to confront the rampant bad creatures. The kernel of the story, the idea that is meant to make it relevant (as was the original Godzilla to its Japanese audiences in 1954, after the apocalypse of Hiroshima and Nagasaki), is revealed in a five-minute period during which the cacophonous CGI abates and a ‘serious’ issue is examined. Russell’s insight tells her that the world’s over-population has become a threat to humanity’s survival (with standing room only now on the slopes of Mount Everest, it’s hard to disagree), and that, as a species, we are exploiting the planet to death. If it takes a crap movie like this to press that unarguable point on the bonehead young blokes who go along to lap up the violence, then all well and good, I suppose. On the down side, in the same vein as all other super-hero and monster franchises, bonanzas though they may be at the box office, it only serves to perpetuate the depressing paradigm that brutal, deadly conflict is the only solution to the problems that beset us – perhaps we are hard-wired to see the world that way? Whatever, Emma’s husband Mark (Kyle Chandler) opposes her, while in the meantime, good old Charles Dance turns up as the evil bloke who wants to own the power that Emma has created. I glanced at my bored companion and we agreed – a masala dosa at the nearby Bombay to Byron was the better option, so we bailed.