Review: Godzilla vs Kong

 

Yeah I know I know.  This is like four to five weeks late.  Especially since the peak time to talk about this movie has come and gone.  But I wanted to give this movie the treatment it deserves because I think its success is an understatement at this point and time.

But first a little bit of backstory.  This has been in the works for nearly ten years when Warner Brothers first decided to revive the Godzilla franchise; which has been dormant for close to fifteen years prior thanks to the god awful 90’s Godzilla film that brought us classic lines like this:

 

For those of you who don’t know of it, the less you know the better.  Its seriously one of the cheesiest movies I’ve ever seen in my life and not in a good way.  Either way, this film killed the interest in the classic movie monster stateside for quite some time, but you know where Godzilla still reigned supreme?  The worldwide box office as the Godzilla movies still have major worldwide appeal at the box office, especially in the Asian markets.  That’s why most of the films take place there due to its film legacy status.  So no matter what the domestic haul is for these films, the worldwide box office is where these movies make major bank.  And studio executives knew this.  So if they were to make more massive appeal Godzilla films, they had to plan a major way to reignite the Godzilla franchise for a new era.

Enter Marvel Studios and the new way to make franchise films.  Everyone caught on with how the cinematic universe trend soon after The Avengers made massive amounts of money in 2012.  Especially Warner Brothers, who decided to turn all their franchises into cinematic universes of sorts from DC Films to The Conjuring to Harry Potter.  And I absolutely understand why Godzilla got one with all of its years and years of lore to pull from with all the titans Godzilla has gone up against in the 50s onward.  There were tons of opponents for Godzilla to go up against, but studio execs knew that they needed a major trademarked character for Godzilla to go up against in order to get their Avengers style storytelling payoff.  But who?

Enter King Kong himself.  Another major character from years past in the Warner Brothers IP library.  Kong’s history hasn’t been nearly as shaky as the king of the monsters, but Kong’s history is more diverse as nearly every decade had a King Kong movie of some sort.  Hell this isn’t even the first time he has fought Godzilla either as he fought him once before in 1963.  The Kong movies have always been fascinating to me of sorts.  They are never boring as Kong seems to be more about trying to connect with the humans that are terrified of him.  Even the admittedly most boring Kong movie, the 2005 Peter Jackson three hour longed snoozer was more or less about Kong’s longing for some sort of connection despite his monstrous size and rampaging anyone who threatens him.  In other words, he’s the perfect sort of rival to fight a radioactive lizard that wants to protect us from other titans that want to destroy us.

And this is the part where I talk about the films that led up to the gigantic showdown, but I’ll be honest.  Except for Kong: Skull Island, which was a gloriously cartoony B-movie with a legitimately good cast of actors and actresses, I’ve not been all that impressed with the two Godzilla movies.  The first one was hideously boring and had a lack of Godzilla.  King of the Monsters had some great fights, but I couldn’t give two shits about any of the story because it was so plot hole filled and had so many irredeemable characters that pissed me off.  That’s been the problem with this “cinematic universe”, even Kong: Skull Island which I liked.  None of these movies have successfully managed to juggle between showing the titans clashing with their enemies and giving us an interesting story or likeable characters.  The only reason Skull Island worked was because it knew not to take itself too seriously.  When you have Samuel L. Jackson staring off against King Kong with a ridiculous score blasting over it, how serious am I supposed to take this?

Needless to say, Godzilla vs Kong finally got the middle ground right.  They gave us exactly what we wanted from a popcorn blockbuster movie in an era where we don’t have any of these at the moment.  I mean it’s not god’s gift to cinema because there is still plenty to nitpick, but it more than made up with it by giving us the right amounts of fighting between two cinematic behemoths.  That’s exactly what the title and it lived up to the fucking hype, my god.

I’m just going to get my needless nitpicking out of the way first.  The characters are still plenty flat.  But unlike the other films up til this point, we don’t need them to be THAT interesting.  And unlike the other movies, the ones that we are supposed to like are likeable.  Alexander Skarsgard and Rebecca Hall are good actors, but I honestly couldn’t tell you anything about any of their characters, no offense.  The unlikeable characters rightfully die without overstaying their welcomes.  Literally, that’s all we are asking for with these monster movies.  The only character I don’t like was the podcast guy, whose name is not that important but he’s played by Brian Tyree Henry, but thankfully he doesn’t get too much screen time and at least his subplot with Millie Bobby Brown and Julian Dennison leads to something.  Something incredibly stupid, which is the other major nitpick I have with this.  This subplot, without giving away any major spoilers, has an incredibly stupid leap of logic that it wants you to take no questions asked.  And I honestly have a lot of questions as to how we are supposed to believe that could even possibly happen.  Let’s just say that a character died in King of the Monsters and its spirit somehow was still alive to be brought back to life in a new form.  Yeah I guess that’s a slight spoiler in a way, but that’s the best I can describe it.

But look, we all know we didn’t pay for a ticket or a subscription to HBO Max for this movie expecting a coherent story or deep character studies.  No.  We paid to see Godzilla and Kong wrecking shit and beating the hell out of each other.  AND MY GOD DID THAT DELIVER.  All three fight sequences fucking delivered the goods.  The way these sequences were filmed were great as we got exactly the right amounts of both characters having the upper hands and the right amounts of focus on each.  We understood why Godzilla was rightfully pissed off and played the antagonist, that wasn’t really the antagonist.  The movie rightfully made Kong the protagonist as its in his lore and the human aspect to his character was played perfectly with his friendship with this little deaf girl, played by Kaylee Hottle, who by far was the best actress in this movie.

You know what the best part of these fight sequences were?  THEY WERE FILMED WITH LIGHT!  HELL YES!  That has been a major complaint I’ve had with so many blockbusters as of late.  Including the previous films in this cinematic universe.  We are getting way too many dark and gritty stylized fight sequences were you have to squint at times to see the action.  I get that’s the way things are now, but I wish it wasn’t.  Because it may add a cool style to it, but it makes the movie hard to follow at times and is kind of a detriment.  Not here and thank you Adam Wingard for not following the trend.

Bottom line.  You're getting what you get when you watch this.  It's not something prolifically deep or life-changing.  It's just Godzilla and King Kong duking it out with some human interaction to further along the story leading to more Godzilla and Kong fighting.  And you know what?  That's all I really wanted from this movie and it absolutely delivered on that front.  My only regret is not seeing this movie in theaters.  Which is not this movie's fault that it came out during a pandemic, so nothing against it.  I bet it would be even more amazing in IMAX.  But yeah, this is a really fun action movie that is great popcorn fun.

Final Grade: A-

Not sure if or when we'll get a sequel to this because this was the big event that this cinematic universe was building up to.  Don't really see this being a long-term cinematic story, but if they can find more ways to continue this, then yeah; consider me intrigued.  It was at least one of the more cohesive attempts at studios outside of Marvel being able to build a larger story more successfully.  Hope we see more.

Thank you all for reading as always.  Sorry this is late.  Expect more reviews on the way and more projects in the works.  Until next time, take care.