Doug Bolden's Reviews > Godzilla: King of the Monsters - The Official Movie Novelization

A novelization of a "summer" blockbuster in the general "emoting heroes wisecrack while swirling sky things go boom" category has the obvious flaw of translating a sub-genre designed around big visuals, loud sounds, pretty actors, huge soundtrack, and too many quick cuts into...well, the very nearly opposite thing. Still, there is a place for these sorts of things, right? Scenes cut or trimmed or special effects tweaked that can survive in book form if not in theatrical release. Descriptions of internal thoughts that might not have translated well to screen. A few pages of backstory that would have disrupted narrative flow in the movie but work just fine in the movie. Little literary games and tricks.*

This novel has most of that. Some nice added bits of backstory. A lot of internal thoughts that helped explained what the filmmakers were going for. This is especially true with the human villains which were very nearly background decoration (especially after the first forty or so minutes) and here are more like...background decoration with some motivation besides as an excuse for Charles Dance to steely glare at you. It helps even more with tying together the "Monsterverse" and its various parts and people and geographies [an issue the movies need to patch up, some, I think, if they are truly going for a cohesive whole]. It only gives a few extra detail to "lesser" Titans (aka, kaiju), which was a disappointment, but even those little extra details were nice since the movie glossed over them so much.

Interestingly, it brings in elements from the graphic novel prequels that help to actually make this whole thing feel like universe building up to something. There are chunks of the movie where you have to have a bit of faith that it makes sense, while the novel does a better job of putting the puzzle together.

The "real world" quotes that show the history of Titans/kaiju were kind of fun, but also got a little old. Maybe less of those would have been better (the last one, a quote from Job about the Leviathan, is relatively huge for chapter-intro flare) but, again, it helps to flesh out the vision of the world. Reminds me of the Pacific Records used in some recent Ultraman stories.

Overall, I liked it. I already know the story, having caught the movie on opening night, but now I feel like I know more about the intent, the behind the scenes concepts. Nothing was significantly gained, meaning nothing added by the novel is required to understand the story, but sometimes it is the small bits that make things more rounded. There were a couple of scenes for which I have a fairly different take, now, and some characters I understand better.

* There is also the practical element that not everyone can get to the movie theaters to watch a movie in a timely fashion (due to location, or opportunity, or social anxiety, or what have you). I grew up in a backwoods community and often I had to wait until things hit the (usually rental) VHS format to have a chance to see them. Novelizations used to help me fill in the gaps and "rewatch" movies.