Streamed via HBO Max
Story-wise, it's the weakest compared to other MonsterVerse films. This film is more focused about Kong if you're wondering. I couldn't stand that Millie girl, to be fair I wish the human parts would be removed because I only want to see Godzilla & Kong fighting. But it's entertaining to watch.
[8.6/10] There are two abiding images in Minari. The first is the smoke billowing out of a stack at the hatchery where Jacob and Monica, the parents of a young Korean immigrant family, work. Jacob tells his little son, David, that it’s the male chicks being discarded. When David inquires about what that means and why, Jacob resolutely explains that those male chicks aren’t useful, and this is what the world does to things that aren’t, so they had better keep themselves useful.
It’s a haunting fable for a young father who aspires to be a farmer, moves his family halfway across the country, and struggles to make ends meet. Jacob’s dream is to build something himself, to succeed on his own terms, rather than stare at chicken behinds until he dies. But it’s a hard life, full of backbreaking labor and uncertain prospects for success given the vicissitudes of weather and access to water and other challenges. And it puts a strain on Jacob and Monica’s marriage, particularly when Monica is ready to return to their old life in California rather than brave such hardships with variable, at best, chances for reward.
But it’s also a concerning image for David, a young boy with a heart murmur. Given his condition, his parents discourage him from running or doing much of anything strenuous. His father tells him to use his mind instead, to learn about this world and how to make value with your wits. As the family scrimps and labors, Jacob and Monica working one job during the workday and Jacob slaving away at the farm in his free hours, you can feel them trying to stay ahead of that smoke, to avoid being cast aside or left behind for failing to prove themselves sufficiently useful to this world.
The other abiding image is the titular minari plant. Monica’s mother, referred to as Grandma, brings the seeds from Korea and plants them in a nearby creek with her grandson. She tells David that it can grow anywhere. She reassures him that it’s for rich and poor alike, built to flourish under so many conditions that it’s there for anyone to eat and enjoy.
It feels like a metonym for the Yi family, a Korean family who’ve planted themselves in the wilds of rural Arkansas and find their own way to take root. There is something hearty about the plant, able to grow and sustain itself despite the markedly different conditions from whence it came. For an immigrant family, struggling in places but striving to get by, there is hope in that native plant finding a new home in unfamiliar land and sprouting toward the sky nonetheless.
With those two guiding themes -- the threat of the wafting smoke and the hope of the sprouting herb -- Minari is a heartfelt, hilarious, and ultimately poignant story of this relatable family braving its way through a unique situation. Writer and director Lee Isaac Chung uses that pair of images as his lodestone to guide the film’s story, but more than anything, it plays like a slice of life movie. Just witnessing the vignettes of the Yi family adjusting to life in Arkansas (or not adjusting to it), trying to make farm life work, or acclimate the addition of an elder to the immediate family, is worth the price of admission separate and apart from the movie’s larger aims.
It works as a farm movie. Separate and apart from the compelling immigrant story, folks who grew up reading these types of tales of folks trying to make a recalcitrant farm work will recognize the beats, and they’re done with aplomb here. It works as a transplant story, with the bits of cultural exchange we see both within the family and the community it represents, as well as with the Arkansas community they’ve joined. The glimpses of the places where the two intersect are fascinating, measuring differences and similarities in ways both affecting and amusing.
But boy is there amusement to be had when Grandma shows up. The heart of the movie comes in her relationship with David, and the two make for an adorable and uproariously funny pair. There is a forthrightness to both of them that cannot help but simultaneously endear them to the viewer and tickle your funny bone. Grandma will rattle off lines like “You make this kid so much crap,” or “So I drank a little pee! It was fun!” or David will drink a Korean home remedy and say something frank like, “Grandma, never ever bring this again” and it’s impossible not to be charmed by the homespun and hilarious matter-of-factness that becomes the foundation of their friendship.
The growth of that friendship is the strongest element in an already strong movie. At first, David rejects the grandmother who just arrived from Korea for seeming strange and unfamiliar and “not a real grandma.” But as their time together on the farm progresses, she encourages him, she shares their family’s culture with him, she sees his unassuming strength despite his condition, and in the film’s most heart-warming scene, she wraps him up tight to protect him from death or fate or whatever forces would dare do harm to such a sweet little boy.
And in the end, he returns the favor. After a distraught, stroke-debilitated grandmother wanders off, blaming herself for catastrophe, David and Ann stop her. They try to bring her back home, having accepted her as a vital part of that family, loving her no matter what condition she’s in. Whether it was Grandma’s healing prayer, or the country air, or the simple biological processes of the human body, a check-up for David reveals that his condition is getting better, that he is stronger than anyone but Grandma thought, and he uses that strength to chase after her and bring her home.
Such caring is necessary because she accidentally set the family barn ablaze, replete with the fruits and vegetables Jacob had just made a deal to sell to a shop in Oklahoma City. In one accidental conflagration, months of work, piles of debt, burn up into nothing. It’s telling that Jacob runs in, potentially to be consumed by that same black smoke that would mark him as a failure, as something less than useful to be discarded by this world.
And yet, the wife who was (not unreasonably) ready to move on from all of this, runs in to save him. As the smoke grows denser, they call for one another, fulfilling the promise to save each other. Their future is uncertain, but it points toward hope, toward something binding them together beyond the need for good times and financial security to sustain them.
The closing moments of the film see the Yi family huddled on the floor together in the aftermath, as Jacob wanted the night they moved in. It’s a sign of solidarity and family togetherness. And when Jacob and David go to the “Minari Creek” to find the fruits of what Grandma planted, they find the herb has given them something to hold onto nonetheless. Despite this unusual environment far different from the place where these seeds were formed, they persevere and sustain. So too does the Yi family, despite great hardship, survive and maybe even flourish, with one another’s help.
Wow, this movie had so much potential but in the end it fell well short. The huge plot hole for me was: how did the creature get back inside by going through a thruster bell/engine? The ISS uses a hydrazine compound as a propellant and it is extremely toxic. This would dictate that there is no way that the thruster bell/engine would be connected in any way to ISS internal atmosphere. If it was, the atmosphere would leak into space! There were other things wrong as well but this was the biggee for me.
Awesome and completely original. It's like if Dexter was a bad guy but you were fin with it.
In the next instalment.... John Mcclanes dog joins the S.A.S
we need a 2nd season asap
EDIT: It has now been revealed the original film/script was radically different, longer, and explained many of my issues presented in this review. Studios, stop butchering your films to be more palatable to audiences.
This is what happens when the people who say, "Godzilla movies don't need to have good human stories," get their way. Easily one of the weakest Godzilla films ever made and the worst of this series. You're not a fan of this franchise if you say Godzilla movies don't need story. Every one so far has had an interesting enough script to justify it's monster bits, even the worst Showa or Heisei outings do more. It's not even really sure what it wants to be. Kong is propped up as the hero and clearly the protagonist of this story with Gojira making cameos as he hunts the organization Apex, but then Kong just loses anyways. What purpose is there for even setting up these monsters as sympathetic when all writing and soul is tossed out the minute they start brawling in Hong Kong. It actually forgets humans exist for a good four minutes as these two punching bags throttle around neon buildings. Craft is gone, it turns into The Avengers, with barely any collateral damage. "Oh but, you can follow the journey through the monsters! You don't need humans to have that nuance." Oh really? Godzilla doesn't like Kong being off his island, he puts him in his place, story done. Talk about deep. No moments to breath or for a character to properly react. This is hot off the heels of King of the Monsters, a film that continues the themes of Skull Island and Gareth Edward's Godzilla. Dougherty's outing before this deeply explored the themes of what it means to live with these monsters on Earth. How do you continue living when a relative of yours has been taken at the hands of one of them, do you shut yourself off or do you try to change the world? Emma became essentially so riddled with guilt she released the devil on Earth. How are these monsters really not so different from us, considering they were birthed out of our own arrogant, persistent lust for control over this world. It's too much to get in to, but that film dealt a great deal with overcoming grief, putting your faith in God, coexistence, and forgiveness. Mark's scene where he looks in to Godzilla's eyes and finally restores his faith is one of my favorite moments from this series. There is nothing in Godzilla vs. Kong that could be remotely construed as a plot. Charles Dance's role has been replaced for some reason, we have a wacky podcast conspiracy guy that serves as just a walking prop for the viewer to see world explanations, Kyle Chandler as Mark has been reduced to a cameo, and on that note: Why is he working at Monarch? He consistently hated Godzilla until he had a change of heart and faith by virtue of Serizawa and Mothra. Monarch didn't change to the good guy, they're still an organization on the cusp of lawsuit and government shutdown. Would GvK mind explaining that for us? How and when was Apex formed? How is it possible the creation of MechaGodzilla never leaked out? The world has been introduced to the titans. It's plainly established everyone is obsessed with these things, the internet and news won't shut up about them. The government doesn't know this is how Apex is using their power supply? In '14, it's at least explained their research on the MUTO was a government cover up for Monarch, that's why Joe in that film became a crackpot theorist who wouldn't let the nuclear incident go. But it's not 2013 anymore, the creatures are no longer a big secret. In King of the Monsters, the people unleashing Ghidorah to rival Godzilla are small band of eco-terrorists, they aren't a multi-billion dollar corporation. It makes no sense and done so much more poorly. It's rushed and done with quips. The most we ever get in terms of world building is a single shot of a map and newspapers, talking about the UN vetoing Godzilla or Apex facilities springing up across the map. We don't hear internal communication or even have a Senate scene like in this last film. The world has simultaneously been expanded greatly and shrunken to nothing, something Pacific Rim Uprising also horrifically accomplished. This series was built off the foundation of engaging with this science fiction, government monster universe through the lens of a sympathetic every-man that's been hurt by the monsters in some way, usually a familial death. Dr. Nathan Lind is given two words to establish he lost a brother in the Hollow Earth, but nothing ever comes of that information. Humans? There are storytelling devices used to get the audience from scene to scene. In the same span of runtime, from '14 to this, Bryan Cranston is grieving over his dying wife, to this has a fat guy making jokes about toasters. The most amount of interesting character development are thrown away in two very specific pieces of dialogue. The little native girl's family was killed by the storm surrounding skull island, which we saw in Kong's film, as was the whole island wiped out. I imagine there was a sequence that explored this and able to give a more tragic or perhaps resounding, uplifting message of sticking with family even when you've suffered so much loss. It would fit the overarching narrative that's stuck to this MonsterVerse so far, but it seems the cutting room floor did a number to this movie, as even stated by director Adam Wingard. It really does feel like the movie is playing damage control. Audiences didn't understand the previous films' stories, so they got fed up trying to understand them and just declared they don't want any characters in these movies. So we get walking action figures that say the words necessary to get us to our next fight. The best potential that existed in one of these dolls was Shun Oguri's character, Ren Serizawa, who is related to the Serizawa of previous films, the one who sacrificed himself to save Godzilla and prove humanity needed to accept him as their king. It was a very touching, holy piece in the last film, and Ren could work as an antagonistic son who resents his father for giving up his life to this monster he doesn't understand, and we could go through a similar arc Mark Russel did in the last film. None of this is realized, he is a dummy test pilot told to get in the goddamn chair, like it's an Evangelion reference. The most amount of enjoyment anyone could get out of this is the splodge of CGI dumped on to the screen with no visual grace or narrative substance. If that's all you want, then I pity what this means for blockbusters. Edwards crafted a fantastic character movie in 2013 and the series has been handed a blow here.
