From the time-travel aspect to a soldier with a dinosaur exhibit who venerates Godzilla as almost a pagan god who saved him on the battlefield, Godzilla Vs. King Ghidorah is one of the more loopy and exuberant of the Toho series. For that, I concede a standing ovation since it isn’t another belabored exercise in conference room scenes where scientists and bureaucrats are bellicose about Gojira’s resurgence.
It also doesn’t landlock itself from the continuity of the others. It explicitly references the previous skirmishes between the two titans and the aftermath of Biollante’s bacterial warfare. Some purists might quiver at the retconning of Godzilla from apocalyptic, radioactive lizard to a relatively innocuous Pleiosaur off the coast of Lagos but once again, I applaud the fresh perspective.
At times, the film is too rapidly paced with the scenes sublimating and seguing quickly from a human-interest journalist to the discovery of the military discovery of a UFO. However, the critiques of a film that fritters away too much time on the indolent mankind drama are completely invalid here.
In fact, the outlandish elements around the “little green men” from the flying saucer is intoxicating enough that film doesn’t wither when the mammoth critters aren’t cudgeling each other. It’s as if the filmmakers have encroached a 23rd century episode of Battlestar Galactica upon our kaiju festivities with an android and teleportation in tow.
Another quagmire for sticklers will be the cuddly three puppets that interfused and evolved into King Ghidorah but I love the unorthodox origins for such a cataclysmic destroyer. In a shrewd critique on the deus ex machina plot device of time displacement, the government is culpable for a loop in which they must annihilate him and then resurrect a “new” Godzilla when Khidorah is rampant.