'Godzilla Vs. Kong' Review
PG-13: Intense sequences of creature violence/destruction and brief language
Runtime: 1 Hr and 53 Minutes
Production Companies: Legendary Pictures
Distributor: Warner Bros. Pictures
Director: Adam Wingard
Writers: Eric Pearson, Max Borenstein
Cast: Alexander Skarsgård, Millie Bobby Brown, Rebecca Hall, Brian Tyree Henry, Shun Oguri, Eiza González, Julian Dennison, Kyle Chandler, Demián Bichir
Release Date: March 31, 2021
THEATERS & HBO MAX
Big Monkey vs. Giant Lizard. Here we go. The movie that everybody has been waiting for since the inception of Legendary Pictures’ Monsterverse franchise has finally arrived. Considering how scattershot the overall quality of the Monsterverse series has been thus far, there has been a fair amount of hesitance towards this film, and for good reason. After two underwhelming, mediocre Godzilla movies and one really fun Kong reboot with an Apocalypse Now coat of paint over it, we finally have the highly anticipated meeting of these two titans where they battle it out to see who comes out on top.
Fearsome monsters Godzilla and King Kong square off in an epic battle for the ages, while humanity looks to wipe out both creatures and take back the planet.
You see the title of the film. You know what it’s all about, and by all means, it’s the first thing I have to commend. Godzilla vs. Kong delivers a series of thrilling, epic brawls between the titular titans. Unlike the predecessor Godzilla: King of the Monsters, director Adam Wingard makes sure the fights between Kong and Godzilla are as clear as day in terms of filmmaking and location. Even if they’re fighting at night, Wingard illuminates the backgrounds with enough color in order to make them visible. With its shot composition, you see the effort to bring you to the passenger seat for the fights. The film thankfully doesn’t emphasize too much on showing the action from the human characters’ viewpoint, so you can see the kaijus duke it out on a large scale.
The action sequences are visually stunning and are some of the best the Monsterverse franchise has to offer to date. Whether you’re Team Kong or Team Godzilla, you will be losing your shit and rooting for your boy like a wrestling fan. The effects team made sure the fights were a spectacle to witness on the big screen; they went above and beyond to make sure it looks and feels exhilarating. The fight choreography is fantastic where, brute force aside, the environments are fully utilized, making anything a weapon, a shield, or anything that causes damage. Apart from the look and choreography to make the action sequences intense, the sound plays a major role as well. Past Godzilla films prided themselves on being as loud as a Michael Bay film. I never particularly notice sound design in monster movies because they’re often way too loud, but the mixing in Godzilla vs. Kong is phenomenal. The sound team made sure every moment of violence between the titular leads packed a punch. Whether they’re crashing into buildings or throwing punches at each other, you hear the painful roars when they take damage and it’s blisteringly effective. The sound mixing during the Hong Kong battle is something to behold and you’ll be in absolute awe of how, even from a technical standpoint, Wingard and his team of sound designers and visual effects artists put their absolute best into the fight. It’s absolutely epic in every sense of the word.
Fights aside, there’s enough fan service for monster fans that pays homage to elements of classic kaiju movie history, including King Kong vs. Godzilla, but it’s never enough to alienate casual audiences. For how jumbled the franchise has been thus far, this serves as a much better sequel to KOTM and Kong: Skull Island, delivering a focused and tonally fluent narrative that offers a fun and silly old-school monster flick on top of an excuse to make the titular characters fight.
This film is more Kong’s than Godzilla’s. Sure, it’s very much a Godzilla movie in its own right, and characters from the predecessor return, most notably Millie Bobby Brown as Madison Russell, who aims to uncover the truth behind Godzilla’s most recent attacks with her friend and a conspiracy theorist. However, Kong’s given more humanistic expressions and personality outside of just being a giant monkey. He’s a sympathetic character you can root for, especially when you see his POV as he fights Godzilla. The film has Kong ditching Skull Island and trying to find a new home to reside in since Godzilla is out on the hunt for him… because, well, they can’t coexist in the same world. He’s paired with a deaf Iwi native girl who he communicates with via sign language and her adoptive mom. Between all the mayhem and violence, the bond between the two serves as the emotional center point and heart of the whole film. Kong loves that little girl and he’s there to protect her and the team she travels with. There’s a balance of story arcs between the Kong crew and Godzilla crew, and while thematically one team has a sillier tone than the other, it’s a perfect fit for the overall kooky film itself.
Every piece of negative criticism regarding Monsterverse films involves the weak-ass writing for the human characters. They’re often given way more focus than necessary and it takes a toll on the movie as a whole. Godzilla: King of the Monsters was so damn bad because the screenplay was so weak, emphasizing an overall stupid story with so many human characters who were either one-note or unfunny. I’ll be damned, that weakness carried over to Godzilla vs. Kong. Criticism number one that spanned in all the movies was never fully taken into account. Granted, there’s a marginal improvement over King of the Monsters in terms of pacing, focus, balance, and most importantly tone but the weaknesses are glaring. The first 30 minutes of the film are so rough to push through, for the dialogue is either really simplistic or too over the top where every character is narrowed down to the most basic of stereotypes, including (but not limited to):
The reluctant white male hero
The cute child who connects with the monster
Rebellious teen
Rebellious teen’s platonic best friend who is also the comedic straight man
Nutty comedic relief nerd (in this film’s case, the nutty conspiracy theorist podcaster)
The rich antagonistic asshole who thinks man can rule over monsters
Shady industry agent who has their own ulterior agenda and will most likely betray the people they’re working with
Many of the characters feel more in tune with a Jurassic World movie than a Godzilla film. The humor falls completely flat. You can tell how long this movie sat on the shelf because you get jokes that are outdated on arrival. There’s a Tide Pod challenge joke… in 2021…. in a Godzilla movie. Nice to know the Tide Pod challenge was a thing in the Monsterverse. The Godzilla team, composed of Brown, Henry, and Dennison was grating early on, for they are so one-note and comedy-based. They tried so hard to be quippy like a Marvel movie and everything regarding them fell so flat for me. That being said, they’re not unlikable. Compared to other Monsterverse movies, I wasn’t irritated by the characters or the overarching plot at all, for everyone assists the monster they’re paired with in some capacity. Though nobody comes even close to being as dimensional as John C. Reilly in Kong: Skull Island, the ensemble here plays a progressive role and the performances are pretty good all around. The film would have benefitted from one more screenplay pass, but you know the studio was rushing to put this in production faster than you can say, “King of the Monsters bombed at the box office.”
Godzilla vs. Kong finally delivers a long-awaited good Godzilla movie, showing the beloved titular monsters duking it out in a fun and silly blockbuster that deserves to be seen on a big screen… if you can do it safely, of course.
