If you like fire and brimstone of a pseudo-ecological flavour, or just smashing stuff up, this is pretty good.

What I like about this film is that it is very honest from the get-go.  The story really doesn’t matter.  If you’re interested it’s about a broken family and parents being played against each other.  Mum’s good. Dad’s bad.  Mum’s getting bad.  Dad’s coming good.  Mum is evil, Dad is great.  The whole world is chaos.  Kid’s life is screwed.  Then scale that vague familiar drama up until it exists in enormous avatars destroying the globe and that’s basically how this plays out.  In some ways it’s a less clever and less connected version of Colossal.  

Then there’s a bit of an environmental overpopulation theme going on, but it’s not as nuanced nor as pressing nor as entertaining as Thanos.  Humans are bad, mmmkay, they’re destroying the Earth.  These beast-disasters will bring balance.  It’s an eco-hard-reset.  Except that three-headed one, that’s not like the other ones.  Godzilla is bad, Godzilla is good, Godzilla is big and just keeps getting bigger.

But none of this human story really matters because this is basically like WWE wrestling with giant beasts of destruction.  This one fights that one, that one fights the one over there, now they all fight or destroy cities or answer the call.  It’s big choreographed madness at pretty epic proportions.  The human lives here are tiny.

But it goes bloody hard on the big-action.  You’ve got glowing stuff shining out all the big beasties, them throwing out huge glowing vomits everywhere, obliterating everything and anything in there way.  Their soundscapes of yowls and growls and guttural yawls are all encompassing and fully immersive.  It’s a very loud movie.  You definitely can’t sleep in it.  

It gets quite vivid in it’s sense of disembodied destruction.  Sometimes you’re struggling to make out forms and shapes in large scale fire-scapes.  Or ocean-scapes, or storm-scapes. You get the idea.  There is a lot of cinema screen taken up with a lot of burny firey stuff for a lot of the time.  And big monsters fighting.  And those snippets of little human stories here and there, for I don’t know, human reasons.

It’s kinda like a more grounded version of Sharknado.  If the sharks had spent the whole movie fighting crocs in the tornado whilst humans watched on from the sidelines.

But as far as spectacle goes, it’s pretty balls to the wall.

J* gives it 4 stars.

PS.  I will never understand why Godzilla’s can’t get their franchising sorted and accept that this is truthfully Godzilla 31 or so.  It’s no where near as epic and neat a story as Godzilla 23 (1998), but it’s pretty bombastic on the action.

PPS.  Accept it has been created without any concern for biology at any level.  Except bioaccoustics, because bioaccoustics are so hot right now.

<review written in 2019>