It has been four years since I last felt moved in a cinema, and that was because someone told me I was sat in their seat. But upon my most recent visit to the multiplex to see Godzilla: King of the Monsters, I found myself overcome with emotion as the film’s rich themes transported me to Plato’s World of the Forms, through space and time and then to a Homebase car park.
Directed by someone or other, Godzilla: King of the Monsters sees the mammoth lizard awake from a five-year nap to sumo wrestle several other titanic beasts, all of which are easily bigger than your house. The plot also involves a bunch of humans and a box that makes whale noises, but I was far too busy being in awe of Godzilla (Glenn Close) and his glowing back ridges to worry about any of that.
When Godzilla first squeezed onto the IMAX screen that could barely contain his godly girth, I immediately burst into tears. The auditorium glowed an atomic blue and I was temporarily sucked into a vortex where circles became triangles and squares became biscuits.
By the time I came out of the vortex, Millie Bobby Brown had said a few lines and Godzilla was now twatting the three individual heads of a three-headed dragon, which was quite clearly a metaphor for the age-long political disparity between the East and West.
As Godzilla showered the dragon in his atomic breath, time stood still, then rewound, then skipped forward, then I was plucked from my seat and dragged right up into space, out of our solar system, out of our galaxy and out of our dimension. I was surrounded by nothingness, except for a black window directly in front of me that seemingly had white text scrolling through it. I reached out towards it only to suddenly find myself clawing at a bin.
Somehow, I’d been transported from the screening to my local Homebase car park, where a rat and a pigeon were engaging either in battle or epic coitus. As I wiped the blood from my knees and tried to recall how I got there, the only explanation I could muster was that I must have had some sort of profound religious experience watching Godzilla: King of the Monsters.
Two out of five.