The New Godzilla, Reviewed as an IMAX-Sized Melodrama
IndieWire's reviewer frames the new Godzilla film around its centrepiece bout: Godzilla squares off against King Ghidorah, and the fight arrives inside what the review calls an IMAX-sized melodrama — one it says features some of the most thrilling kaiju fights ever put on screen. That last part is a critic's superlative, not a measurement, but it is a clear one: the fights are the reason to be there, staged at the biggest scale available to them.
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It is easy to read 'melodrama' as a put-down. Here it sits alongside the fights rather than against them — as if the emotional register and the spectacle are the same instrument.
Or it is a hedge. Grand feeling is one claim; two monsters leveling a city is another. The review's enthusiasm is for the staging, and staging is not the same as earned emotion.
Then the wager is that scale can carry feeling on its own — that a big enough image does the work quieter scenes would otherwise have to do.