Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: “Nobody goes to Godzilla movies for the characters!” Such an oft-repeated refrain isn’t entirely without merit, to be fair, as what kaiju fan wouldn’t crave wildly entertaining monster mayhem over a quiet character study? However, there is so much more to director Michael Dougherty’s Godzilla: King of the Monsters than just kaiju-vs-kaiju set pieces.

What allows this film to both have and eat its cake is in its handling of the human element. Not that anyone on paper is much more than a familiar archetype (this is a Godzilla movie, after all), but Dougherty and his writers are almost fervent in grounding their script with profoundly human perspectives on one of the story’s main running themes – namely, facing the consequences of our hubris and grasping at the possibility of redemption – to lend meaning to all the loaded religious allusions and mythic underpinnings found among the larger-than-life entities of King of the Monsters.

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Source: IGN.com Finding Humanity in the Gods of Godzilla: King of the Monsters