Post-Viewing: The Monsterverse's Character Problem

Taking cues from the likes of Marvel and DC, Universal and WB’s “Monsterverse” is on the way. It promises showdowns of epic proportions, a modern-day update to those classic rumbles between monsters in rubber-suits. But there is a serious obstacle stopping it from reaching the heights of its gargantuan monsters; the trend of one-dimensional characters.

Around halfway into Kong: Skull Island, a character is picked off from a makeshift boat by a group of fluffy Pterodactyls in a nasty death scene and John C Reilly’s character says: “He’s gone, there ain’t nothing to say”. This one line perfectly sums up the issue that plagues the modern incarnations of the classic movie monsters; both films have human characters but they aren’t worth caring about. They get big name actors to draw people in, but they don’t do anything with them. They give the human characters plenty of screen time to try and get the audience on-board but then fail to follow through by not making them interesting. In short; having bad characters means that an entire chunk of your movie is lacking which takes away from the package as a whole.

Bruce Cabot, Fay Wray and Robert Armstrong in the original 1933 King Kong

A mournful choir in Godzilla's 1954 debut from Toho

Both the original Kong film in 1933 and Godzilla in 1954 had their strong moments for the human characters; King Kong had three great leads for Ann Darrow, Carl Denham and Jack Driscoll respectively whereas Godzilla melded the tragedies of nuclear war with a population under attack by an unstoppable monster. As silly as the premises were, they did pour in plenty of substance on top. Modern films seem to have a much harder time with this balance; do they focus more on the monsters and delivering that unabashed destruction, or do they try to tell stories with people caught up in the chaos with the monsters as a side-note? Both modern incarnations have tried to offer some human drama but have fallen flat on both occasions; the characters aren’t relatable, don’t go through much change and don’t display many emotions. These modern monster films are far from dramas but if they plan on dedicating most of the screen-time to the humans, they need to deliver on that front.

It also doesn’t help that the motives of the human characters can be very silly at times; in Godzilla, Brody constantly leaves his family behind to focus on other things and towards the end of Skull: Island, one character tries to sacrifice himself, out of nowhere for no discernible reason, by detonating grenades to kill one of the creatures, only to be tail whipped into the side of a cliff and blown up. This creates an even bigger disconnect with the characters; when you have them do these nonsensical things, it makes their demises comical as opposed to feeling sorry for them. Special effects and seeing monsters chomp down on humans can only get you so far; the Alien vs Predator films made the terrible mistake of making all their characters vastly unlikeable, creating a desensitising effect that hung over all the bloody carnage, which didn’t fare much better. It would be a shame to see the upcoming monster-thon sink to that level.

In a developing film series that’s trying to give some humans as well as the monsters some time, these issues will only stick out more and more the longer it goes on. The best films and the cinematic universes that surround them can balance these elements together seamlessly and if the upcoming Monsterverse wants to be taken seriously by audience, it needs to achieve this balance.

(Images used for the purposes of review and criticism under fair use)