Godzilla vs. Kong (2021)
dir. Adam Wingard
Rated: PG-13
image: ©2021 Warner Bros. Pictures
And so, in Godzilla vs. Kong, we come to a natural culmination of Legendary Entertainment’s stab at a Marvelesque shared cinematic universe. I phrase it that way not because we actually have come to an end to the MonsterVerse, but because a movie centered around the two biggest draws of that universe, squaring off like Ali and Frazier, seems like a logical end point. Fans can take heart. The pocketbooks behind the franchise have assured us that if enough money rolls in, we’ll be getting more stories featuring MUTOs – Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms. A brief bit of research reveals that a Skull Island series is in development over at Netflix, and Guillermo Del Toro has expressed interest in the MonsterVerse crossing over with his Pacific Rim franchise.
Personally, the greatest achievement of Godzilla vs. Kong was that it helped me define exactly what I want out of mega-budget action blockbusters. All due respect to Martin Scorsese, but I think these movies can be cinema, instead of, as the titan director and champion of cinematic arts called them, theme parks. (Admittedly, that’s an oversimplification. In addition to the fact that he was talking about the MCU in particular – which the MonsterVerse movies are clearly an attempt to replicate – Scorsese was making the point that while they can be fun, they are threatening to swamp the theatrical exhibition landscape, choking out smaller, more intimate films with a focus on narrative storytelling over sheer spectacle.)
There’s nothing wrong with enjoying a movie that feels like a rollercoaster, which is what I want out of a Theme Park Movie. If I’m seeing that kind of movie, give me half-a-dozen or so gargantuan set pieces that roll seamlessly, one right into the next, with a few precious moments here and there to let me catch my breath.
Godzilla vs. Kong is not a successful Theme Park Movie. Of the four movies in the MosterVerse – Godzilla (2014), Kong: Skull Island, Godzilla: King of the Monsters, and now GvK – only Kong: Skull Island came closest to replicating a visual rollercoaster. Massive bonus points are given to any movie that can provide that breathtaking experience while also giving me sub-textual social commentary to chew on.
The very first King Kong, released in 1933, accomplishes all that – although, admittedly, the race and gender politics one can mine from that film were most likely unintended by the creators and, to stamp a recent neologism onto an 88-year-old film, are often problematic. The phenomenal Mad Max: Fury Road is the seminal modern-era rollercoaster movie.
It’s taken me this long to get around to the plot of Godzilla vs. Kong because, like both the 2014 Godzilla and Godzilla: King of the Monsters, I really didn’t give a damn about most of it. Instead of making sure that the customers’ lap-bars are securely locked and everyone is ready to blast off down the track, screenwriters Eric Pearson and Max Borenstein – the former has worked on numerous Marvel scripts, the latter was involved in every MonsterVerse entry – added layer upon layer of plot into the movie.
The most uninteresting of these kinds of movies always present subtext as text, and in the case of GvK that means the characters openly address issues like nefarious corporations exploiting the earth for fun and profit. Here we have one side-plot involving Maddie Russell, the child heroine from Godzilla: King of the Monsters, played by Millie Bobby Brown, teaming up with an anonymous podcaster and conspiracy theorist named Bernie Hayes, to uncover the duplicitous motives of the Apex Cybernetics corporation. Bernie is an Apex technician who turned whistleblower (via his podcast) when he started uncovering his employer’s destructive motives.
The talented Brian Tyree Henry is on comic-relief duty as Bernie, and he is one of GvK’s bright spots. In one of the movie’s rare opportunities for sub-textual analysis, it’s interesting that one of our heroes is a QAnon-style crackpot who just happens to be right about everything. Come to think of it, maybe that’s why I was so resistant to the movie in the first place. GvK ultimately vindicates, through Bernie, a segment of our population who are contributing, with glee, to the destruction of the democratic process.
Godzilla has turned against humanity, and we learn it’s because of Apex Cybernetics’s mysterious new project. It’s never explained how Godzilla has intuited this information – because, come on, he’s a giant lizard – apart from vague explanations about how he can sense a threat from humans. I won’t out-and-out spoil it here, but if you know anything about Godzilla lore, the fact that the shadowy corporation is a cybernetics company should clue you in to a major showdown in the third act.
Meanwhile, an anthropological linguist named Dr. Ilene Andrews has been studying Kong in a Monarch-constructed containment dome on Skull Island. Monarch is the government organization that has been tracking and cataloging MUTOs for decades; they are the organization that gives the MonsterVerse its cinematic universe connectedness. Dr. Andrews discovers that Jia, her deaf adopted daughter, and the last of Skull Island’s native Iwi tribe, can communicate with Kong via sign language.
GvK deserves a lot of credit for casting a deaf actress, eight-year-old Kaylee Hottle, as Jia. That positive act of deaf representation is tempered, however, because the filmmakers use the character’s deafness as merely a plot device in order for humans to communicate with Kong.
Walter Simmons, the head of Apex Cybernetics, organizes an expedition for Dr. Andrews and Dr. Nathan Lind, a geologist and cartographer, to take Kong back to his native homeland. Simmons chooses Dr. Lind to head the expedition because of his groundbreaking work on hollow earth theory. (Seriously, if we get a connected universe of movies focusing on lizard people and shadow people next, I’m checking out of pop culture for good.)
Simmons believes that there is an unimaginable power source available for his Apex project in the hollow earth. Lind believes the world-within-a-world at the heart of earth is Kong’s true home, and that the giant ape can help guide and protect the mission. Simmons’s adult daughter, Maia, comes along to oversee her father’s interests.
There’s a bunch of nonsense about the reverse-gravitational effect of hollow earth, making a HEAV (Hollow Earth Aerial Vehicle) necessary. The tortured exposition and logic of it all is fairly ludicrous and overwritten. This is the stuff that turns my eyes into pinwheels when all I really want from these kinds of movies is a fun ride. Conventional Hollywood screenwriting wisdom on blockbusters seems to be that the more complex and layered your plot is, the better. I raise a meek hand in protest to this idea.
As ridiculous as the previous short paragraph (believe me, it could have been MUCH longer) is, the most thrilling moments of GvK come during the hollow earth segments of the film. The special effects employed when our intrepid heroes get to the center of the earth are inventive and awe-inspiring. (Although, I laughed at the silliness of it all, wondering where on earth (literally!) the sunshine in the hollow earth was coming from. Every shot has the light source just off-frame.) There is a new creature discovered in this realm as well; it’s a kind of massive vulture-like flying dinosaur. The visual design for the monster is creepy and cool.
The best part of the movie is revealed in its trailer, and it lasts about two seconds. It’s a slow-motion shot of King Kong punching Godzilla right in the mouth in their first battle. It’s pretty great, the reason I showed up in the first place. The final battle between the great beasts takes place in a neon-lit Hong Kong that is as visually exciting and adrenaline-pumping as you could hope for. But it’s not enough to overcome the overstuffed plot and boring human plot-lines you must put up with along the way.
Why it got 2 stars:
- Godzilla vs. Kong suffers from what many mega-blockbusters these days fall prey to: the “everything but the kitchen sink” approach. While every second of the fights between the two titans weren’t always captivating, I was much more interested in that than I was in what the humans were running around doing.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- It’s a bad sign when you catch yourself thinking, in the middle of watching a movie, about another franchise. I took a few seconds during GvK to wonder if Universal’s Dark Universe — their take on the MCU — which was launched with Tom Cruise’s disastrously received The Mummy reboot, was still a thing. Spoiler alert, it is not.
- Seriously, the hollow earth stuff. Not only does it have an inexplicable light source that mimics the properties of the sun, but it has trees, grass, and a whole ecosystem. In the center of the earth. Like, what?
- I can’t count how many times I made the realization that nothing I was looking at on the screen was real. Probably 25% (or more!) of the movie could rightly be called an animated film. I know that’s not really new, or a revelation, but for some reason, I felt it more acutely while watching GvK.
- Film critic Josh Larsen coined the term “punch-plosion” to refer to the moments in Marvel movies when the hero and villain duke it out during a typical fight when the entire universe hangs in the balance. Noting my last point, I’d like to add to that. GvK is filled with “pixel-plosions.”
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- Godzilla vs. Kong is the trumpeted return of blockbusters to the big screen. Instead of watching it at home on HBO Max (where it’s available to subscribers until April 30th), I got together with a few of my pandemic-bubble friends (we’ve all had at least our first dose of the vaccine) and rented a theater to see GvK. I might not have been won over by the movie, but the experience of seeing friends and a movie on a giant screen was amazing.