Roy Smallwood

About 40 min in, I turned to my friend and said "this movie's kind of a trainwreck, huh?" A lifelong Godzilla fanatic, so excited minutes earlier, apparently still holding out hope up to that moment - he just let out a crestfallen groan and shook his head. This is one of those stories (the trilogized Matrix comes to mind) that doesn't have an arc at all - just a seemingly-endless series of tacked-on plot contrivances. You get the feeling that this director fella (I refuse to look him up right now) must've had historically-high numbers of yes-men around him, and that he liked it that way. But the most painful thing about this mess is surely the dialogue. Every line is dated by decades. It's like a Trey Parker/Matt Stone production, but it's (presumably) not a parody. I've never felt so bad for such an enormous waste of talent. Farmiga is god-like to me, and I hate seeing her get punched in the gut by Dumb. Working with the self-given gift of Bradley Whitford's hilarious control-room wacko character from the wonderful Cabin In The Woods, this film gives him not one quip that isn't embarrassing. His one joke - that he believes in a hollow Earth - is so bad simply because it is so plausible in the context of the 2 films. "Oh, that wacko science fella and his crazy notions! Whoah - look out! Another 1,500-foot dragon!" But the Dumb here is so fantastically Dumb, that's nitpicking. So here's the grandaddy of them all, from one of several climactic scenes that sadly weren't: (About the title monster) "He fought to save us. He has not only proved our coexistence is possible, it is the key to it." Yep. Also the monsters are pitifully rendered. They stumble about in a ubiquitous and confusing cheat-cloud that connects one bland action sequence to the next by hammering home the director's central message - "I was out of ideas." The 2014 Godzilla set the monster bar so high, I kept in check any hopes I had about round 2. But I surely never imagined that, rather than trying to clear the bar, the producers would see it as a challenge to a game of limbo. It is just that bad.