Godzilla: King of the Monsters

5 years have passed since the last appearance of Godzilla. Since then, the Monarch Corporation, which studies huge prehistoric monsters, has found more than a hundred similar creatures and built a network of institutions and bases to contain them. Dr. Emma Russell (Vera Farmiga) works on one of these — she is developing a system that will help restrain Kaiju and communicate with them. On the day when the device works properly for the first time, a squad of ecoterrorists attacks the base and kidnaps Emma and her daughter Maddison (Millie Bobby Brown). They want to free all the Kaiju so that they can establish a new order on earth and erase the human civilization that pollutes nature. Now the "Monarch" needs to find a doctor and her device to prevent a catastrophe — for this they call her husband Mark (Kyle Chandler), who has not recovered from the tragedy five years ago.

In 2014, Gareth Edwards launched MonsterVerse with his Godzilla, an ambitious new film universe that threatens to combine all the stories about huge mythical monsters, gigantic monsters and other kaijus. The film itself, however, hardly met those ambitions — unlike previous iterations, he preferred to stay near the ground, instead of the heroic pathos of the conditional "Pacific Rim" and blockbuster kitsch by Roland Emmerich, he built almost a Spielberg suspense, where Godzilla lived most of the time in the background, in fragments of memories and TV shows. Edwards filmed the giant reptile mainly from subjective angles, tried to identify the viewer and the characters, make the monster scary again, which has not caused any trepidation for a long time — it is too familiar, familiar, "pop". And sometimes he even succeeded.

The audience, however, did not appreciate the efforts too much — instead of this human drama and boring suspense of yours, they demanded bread, circuses and more fights. To satisfy their insatiable attraction appetite was a sequel, whose synopsis looks like the dream of any adult child: a bunch of monsters collide foreheads to finally figure out who is the most monstrous of them. The only thing that really confused in all this outrage was that Michael Dougherty, a director with, to put it mildly, not the most expressive filmography, was set to shoot the film (before Godzilla, he made two not the most outstanding horror films and wrote scripts for two not the best parts of X-Men).

Dougherty, as it turned out, is really far from Guillermo Del Toro, not Rolland Emmerich or even Gareth Edwards. His, God forgive me, directing managed to collect almost all the sins of the out-of-fashion post-Nolan blockbusters, who suddenly decided that the action should be shot with the most complex facial expression and exclusively in dark tones (and even daytime action scenes were made too dark here). Godzilla almost never manages to stand up to his full height — he is imprisoned in claustrophobic close-ups of a shaking mockumentary camera, a dull slideshow of details, faces and color flashes. More precisely, as colored: in principle, there are only two colors in the world of the film — orange and blue, as well as all fifty shades of nasty brown between them