Godzilla, King of the Monsters (2019)
I grew up watching the old black-and-white Godzilla movies. The local TV station showed one every Saturday afternoon, and my friends and I would get together just to watch them. Godzilla, Son of Godzilla, Rodan, Mothra, Gamara, even King Kong vs Godzilla and Godzilla vs the Smog Monster. Good times.
So anyway, I saw most of the Matthew Broderick Godzilla movie from '98 and thought it sucked, and I guess I vaguely knew that they'd done another in 2014 but I never saw that. And this one is apparently a sequel to the 2014 movie, but I didn't know that going in. I knew basically nothing about this movie going in, except that it was on HBO so I recorded it to watch while my wife worked and I ate some gummies.
It was perfect! Realistic? Hell no! Did people act rationally and intelligently? Hell no! Did we spend more time on people and their completely irrelevant personal stories than we did watching the monsters fight? Of course! That's what made it perfect. It captured the tone of the old black-and-white monster movies from the 50's and 60's, but updated to glorious widescreen color with amazing special effects. Lots of fun editing cuts between the monsters fighting and the people supposedly standing 50 feet away watching them with frightened expressions on their faces. I mean, two 300-foot-tall monsters are fighting, entire city blocks are being wrecked, and these people are standing there watching (with frightened expressions on their faces). So cheesy, so bad, so perfect.
Also, lots of great callbacks to original lore. Godzilla is the Anglo-nickname; his true name is Gojira. Ken Watanabe, the Japanese guy who plays The Japanese Guy, explained that to us. The explanation for why all these huge creatures are here on Earth was new, but that was one of the very few updates. At some point, they found a giant caterpillar or something, and I said "That's going to grow up and be Mothra" and of course it did. So later when a pteranodon showed up, of course it was Rodan. Then I thought "Wait, it's like they're getting the band back together to fight Ghidorah, The Three-Headed Monster" and they were! He was referred to as Monster Zero (an alt ID from at least one of the movies) but eventually The Japanese Guy gave us his true name, Ghidorah.
They actually took a lot of trouble to get backstories right. They changed some details, but were always sure to include the important ones, to let us know that they'd done their homework. This is not Oscar-level cinema. This is good old-fashioned Saturday afternoon brainless fun. And it was great.
Five atomic bombs out of five. Would watch again.