“Godzilla VS Kong” Movie Review by Josh Davis
April 4, 2021 9:41 am |
The best Godzilla and King Kong movies tease the creature lurking in the shadows, building up tension and anticipation before finally revealing the giant monster we all know is coming. “Godzilla vs. Kong,” however, does not fuck around.
Right away, we see Kong and it’s not 10 minutes later before Godzilla shows up. The two titans battle soon after, living up to the movie’s title and then some.
Set five years after “Godzilla: King of the Monsters” (based in and released in 2019), there are now all manner of “Star Wars” and “Blade Runner” tech. Whether flying in space cars to the planet’s core or transcontinentally from the U.S. to China, rides seem to take only a matter of seconds.
The science in this movie makes no sense and the filmmakers don’t seem to care.
Likewise, the majority of the human actors serve little purpose other than to deliver exposition that’s necessary only because nothing here makes any sense.
But does any of that matter if you’re watching a movie called “Godzilla vs. Kong”? No. Not really.
It’s been quite a while since we’ve seen Kong, the giant monkey from “Kong: Skull Island” set in 1973 and and released in 2017.
He’s grown a lot and his best friend is now a young orphan named Jia (played by deaf actor Kaylee Hottle in her film debut).
Jia was a native of Skull Island before titan attacks destabilized it, killing all the inhabitants and causing it to sink into the sea.
She now has a surrogate mother, Ilene Andrews (Rebecca Hall, “The Town”), who works for the Monarch corporation and studies Kong on a habitat designed to protect him from being detected by Godzilla, now the undisputed king of the monsters.
Another scientist, Nathan Lind (Alexander Skarsgård, “True Blood”), is convinced by billionaire industrialist Walter Simmons (Demián Bichir, a Best Actor Oscar nominee for 2011’s “A Better Life”) to travel to the center of the apparently hollow earth on behalf of his Apex Cybernetics company.
Nathan convinces Ilene to convince Jia to convince Kong to come along, and off they go with technology possibly borrowed from one of the X-Men movies.
Through several exposition dumps, we’re essentially told that the key to saving the earth from the devastation of a Godzilla vs. Kong throwdown may lie in the center of the earth.
There’s also a b-plot that doesn’t matter at all with Millie Bobby Brown (“Stranger Things”), Brian Tyree Henry (“Atlanta”) and
Julian Dennison (“Deadpool 2”), three fantastic young actors utterly wasted here.
Again, does it matter? No. Not really.
The CGI in this movie is fantastic and there are gorgeous and fun giant monster battles on land and on sea. What’s more, the audience is given a real rooting interest in Kong, who is easily the best developed character in the film.
That’s largely thanks to the fine performance from Hottle, who — with Kong — is the heart and soul of this movie. Despite being stuck in a ridiculous story with impossible technology and adults who continuously say and do dumb things, she manages to convincingly connect with a 300-foot prehistoric CGI monkey.
That part matters.
As an audience, we care about Jia and through her we care about Kong. That, and the amazing visuals make for a fun and entertaining movie that is light years better than 2019’s “Godzilla: King of the Monsters.”
Speaking of Godzilla, that gargantuan radioactive lizard — and his powers — look cooler than they have in a while, and when the saw-it-from-miles away twist happens … it doesn’t dampen the spectacle.
Director Adam Wingard (“VHS,” the 2016 “Blair Witch” reboot) deserves a lot of credit for turning in a movie that’s noticeably shorter and better paced than any of the three other movies in this franchise. Screenwriters Max Borenstein (“Kong: Skull Island” and “Godzilla”) and Eric Pearson (“Thor: Ragnarok”) did him no favors.
In a normal year, without 13 months of a devastating global pandemic, “Godzilla vs. Kong” probably would have dominated the box office and delighted scores of theatergoers.
This year, it’s a welcome distraction that most of us will probably watch in our living rooms.
For anyone who misses those packed theaters and big, dumb, lovable blockbusters, this is probably the best movie of its kind since 2019. Just … don’t think about it too much.
PCL Rating: High Taste It
Rotten Tomatoes Rating: FRESH
Tags: Adam Wingard, godzilla, godzilla vs kong, Godzilla vs. Kong, Godzilla: King of the Monsters 2019, HBO Max, Kaiju, king kong, MonsterVerse, pop culture leftovers
Categorised in: Movie Reviews
This post was written by Leftover Brian
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