A Journey into the Monsterverse
Godzilla and King Kong are without a doubt the two most infamous monsters of all time. King Kong first debuted in 1933, and Godzilla in 1956, making their run of infamy even better. In 2014, Godzilla was released and it kicked off the Monsterverse. Now the Monsterverse is home to four movies, and in my opinion, most of them are good. However, they can toe the line of being so bad that it turns out to be good. Today I’ll be breaking down whether you should watch the Monsterverse movies or whether they’re worth sitting out on.
I’m just going to go down the list of the movies for this franchise so I’ll start out with Godzilla (2014). There is a lot in this movie. I think one of the coolest things it does is the opening credits. It shows us the history of the world trying to kill Godzilla by using nukes and how it seemingly worked. I was a little shocked by the cast at first also. Bryan Cranston, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, and Elizabeth Olsen are not small names. The whole time I was watching the movie I thought that it was crazy they were all in it, but then I realized that I’d also want to be in a Godzilla movie if the opportunity came around.
I did genuinely enjoy this movie, but my biggest criticism of it is that it didn’t have enough Godzilla. It was too focused on the human characters that the title character wasn’t even a backseat character; Godzilla was stuffed in the trunk. The entire movie felt like it was teasing the audience for what Godzilla looked like because he had to have had only about five minutes of screen time. It was unfortunately the case for both Godzilla movies in this universe, but Kong somewhat makes up for it.
Kong: Skull Island was almost everything you want from a monster movie: great cinematography, fun settings, and monsters fighting. None of the movies from the Monsterverse are really something to write home about, but this one had the sauce. King Kong reigns supreme on Skull Island and is the protector of the native people who live there. Tom Hiddleston, Brie Larson, Samuel L. Jackson and so many other recognizable faces show up in this truly awesome, and good time of a movie.
This movie had some unique designs for the monsters, specifically the Skullcrawlers. It also had genuinely funny moments, but also some horrifically cringey moments. Good and bad, this movie kept a smile on my face as I watched. It’s definitely better than both Godzilla solo movies in this universe and it works very well as a standalone movie.
Truthfully, I don’t even want to talk about this movie. Godzilla: King of the Monsters was easily the worst of the four movies in this universe. The more I watched, the less I enjoyed it. It felt like a filler episode of a TV show where the only purpose is to keep you excited for next week’s episode. In this case, the next episode is Godzilla vs. Kong. It did not feel like there was a whole lot to this movie. It brought back some characters from the 2014 Godzilla movie, but it really only introduced the character of Madison Russell, played by Millie Bobby Brown. I did not expect much watching these movies for the first time, and this is the only movie that met my initial expectations. If you choose a movie to skip in this franchise, let it be this one.
Godzilla vs. Kong was the pinnacle of entertainment in 2021. Nothing was coming out other than Zack Snyder’s Justice League and Mortal Combat. The biggest difference between those three movies is that Godzilla vs. Kong had it. This movie was awesome from top to bottom. The shortest and best summary of it is that Godzilla and Kong have an ancestral instinct to beat each other up, and that’s the whole plot of the movie.
Even with the fairly basic premise, it dives deeper into the hollow earth theory explored by the previous two movies in the franchise. It builds a whole new world which can lead to who knows how many different stories it can lead to. Overall, the movie is what it was like playing with action figures when you were a kid. Pure awesomeness that doesn’t really stop.
The newest movie, Godzilla x Kong, comes out on March 29th and everything I’ve seen about it has been very good. To me, it looks like a buddy cop style movie but with the two most iconic monsters of all time. People are saying to go see it on the biggest screen possible, and that you should. The Monsterverse movies aren’t must see movies by any means, but they’re loads of fun that you won’t forget soon.
If you liked this, leave a comment and subscribe to my blog!
Comments
Post a Comment