Scalding Hot Takes: Godzilla Vs. Kong
COVID 19 has been rough but I have every reason in the world to want to survive this awful pandemic. I’ve needed to stay alive and healthy and productive for the sake of my family, my readers and my listeners but more importantly so that I could see that halcyon day when HBO Max would release the movie where the giant monkey fights the nuclear lizard.
I suspect I’m not alone in that respect. We ALL wanted to survive for the sake of our families and society, I suppose, but also so that we could experience the sweet communal ecstasy of watching the fire-breathing, nuclear-powered terror of Tokyo square off against the Broadway Brawler, The Empire State Building Crawler, the Big Ape Who Loves to Get Into Scrapes, the People’s Champion himself, King Kong. Who could resist such a spectacle?
True, the nature of cinema dictates that Godzilla Vs. Kong would regrettably be forced to include unfortunate elements such as plot, human characters, dialogue and exposition but that is a reasonable price to pay for the primal joy of watching the big monkey fight the atomic lizard.
Godzilla Vs. Kong takes place five years after Godzilla saved humanity by beating the holy living shit out of King Geedorah.
As the film opens, a fragile peace exists within monsters and humanity that is broken when, somehow, Godzilla returns to wreak destruction.
To assist them in their conflict with Godzilla, humanity recruits King Kong to lead them on a journey to “Hollow Earth”, a fantastical land at the center of the planet where monsters are thought to originate.
This allows the filmmakers to quasi-remake both Journey to the Center of the Earth and Kong: Skull Island, since Hollow Earth looks and feels uncannily like Skull Island: a savage and beautiful land beyond our imagination full of dinosaur-like creatures and savage beasties.
Meanwhile a podcaster, conspiracy theorist and all-around abrasive weirdo played by Brian Tyree Henry teams up with Madison Russell (a returning Millie Bobby Brown) and her dorky pal to uncover the sinister secret behind Godzilla’s unexpected return in a subplot just begging for the cutting room floor, in no small part because pretty much everything not involving monsters feels utterly unnecessary.
I appreciated that Godzilla Vs. Kong manages to wrap things up in well under two hours. I can’t even imagine how long this would be with Zack Snyder in the director’s chair but this could nevertheless stand to be even shorter.
In a performance that redefines concepts like “arbitrary” and “contractually obligated” Kyle Chandler spends five to ten minutes onscreen with a bored, annoyed and confused expression that suggests that he mis-remembered his character dying in the last film and was disappointed to discover that wasn’t the case.
Chandler is lucky in having very little screen time and even less to do. He could be poor Rebecca Hall, who spent decades honing her craft and was able to leverage all of that training and award-winning work in film, television and the legitimate stage for the lucrative but perversely thankless role of Dr. Ilene Andrews, who has been gifted the sacred task of explaining what Godzilla and King Kong are thinking and doing at any given moment. She’s the queen of Kaiju exposition burdened with most of the clunkiest dialogue in a screenplay that’s pretty much nothing but clunky dialogue.
Like the first two Godzilla movies Godzilla Vs. Kong is essentially just biding its time between the big-budget, bone-crunching monster mayhem that is its raison d’etre. In its third act a third giant monster enters the picture and a big B movie that seemingly couldn’t get any sillier grows even more preposterous.
Before watching Godzilla Vs. Kong I foolishly wondered how they were going to engineer a battle Royale between a skyscraper-sized super-monkey and a nuclear mega-lizard that wasn’t utterly ridiculous.
I discovered perhaps unsurprisingly that Godzilla Vs. King Kong is utterly at peace with its own ridiculousness. It knows just how relentlessly goofy it is without veering into overt camp like the wildly successful but half-forgotten 1976 version of King Kong or its insultingly awful follow-up 1986’s King Kong Lives.
You know the infamous still from a long-ago Toho monster movie of an earnest Japanese gentleman politely proposing, “It may sound primitive and unscientific, but through the fairies, we could ask Mothra to help?” Godzilla Vs. Kong has that energy and level of foolishness from start to finish. I mean that as high praise.
It’s so gloriously preposterous that when they tease that King Kong’s family might live in Hollow Earth I imagined that his relatives were the Kardashians of the monster kingdom, and made their living designing handbags, doing reality shows and living their best lives as social media influencers.
I thought it would be funny if Hollow Earth was just like regular Earth, but even more shallow and celebrity-obsessed and that once King Kong hooked up with his fame and money obsessed cousins and uncles he’d undergo a dramatic transformation and suddenly only care about social media followers.
Instead we get a King Kong who communicates through sign language with a little deaf girl who is his best friend and conduit for communicating with the human world and has some of the sticky but effective sentimentality Peter Jackson brought to the 2003 version of King Kong.
I had roughly the same response to Godzilla Vs. Kong that I did to its predecessor 2019’s Godzilla: King of the Monsters: I liked it when the monsters fought. I did not like it when they didn’t fight and people are doing what it is that people do, which is talk.
That makes me think that the movie’s truest, best audience might just be people stoned off their ass watching de-contextualized monster fights on Youtube late at night.
Godzilla Vs. Kong’s title promises the greatest movie ever made. It has everything. Godzilla! King Kong! Fighting! Godzilla Vs. Kong is ultimately not the greatest movie ever made but it does feature Godzilla fighting King Kong and that was enough for me.
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