Godzilla vs. Kong

Now, I wasn't too amped for this fillum. I'd seen the previous entries in the so-called MonsterVerse from Legendary Pictures - Godzilla (2014), Kong: Skull Island (2017) and Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) - and they were pretty much bobbins. I'd have to say though, this is the pick of them. Director Adam Wingard trims most of the fat and simply allows us to enjoy massive beasts thumping seven shades of shit out of each other. If that's your thing, fill your boots here.

Admirably, it didn't waste much time setting things up (they either assume we know the back story or don't care about it), whipping through the motivations for getting Kong away from Skull Island and therefore onto the radar of Zilla. It would seem casting agents are on a hiding to nothing in finding human actors that can compete for the spotlight with the monsters in films of this kind. They've conceded defeat here with Professor Bland (sorry, Lind), Alexander Skarsgård taking the nominal lead credit. He's woefully dull, but others come off better. Rebecca Hall plays it straight; Julian Dennnison and Brian Tyree Henry, for the giggles; Demián Bichir and Eiza González bring the panto menace. 

But the standouts are, of course, the ape and the gorilla/whale. Kong in particular looks great, the rendering has advanced incredibly, even in the few years since Skull Island. And the world building of Hollow Earth, the suspected home of the pesky Titans, was the best part of the film. The entry from Antarctica, the discovery of aggressive fauna, the gravity sweet spot, Kong's palace, the power source MacGuffin, all these elements looked fantastic and were on screen for the optimum amount of time. A top diversion, but fill the whole film with this place and you're back to Skull Island again (via Journey to the Centre of the Earth).

Another feasible wrinkle was that the motives of the 'evil' company Apex and its CEO, Walter Simmons (Bichir), were actually understandable, even commendable. A little like Tony Stark's ambitious plot to create a 'suit of armour for the earth' in Avengers: Age of Ultron (though we know what happened there). Alternatively, this could be seen as another example of humanity attempting to rule over nature, and the culmination of the plan, accidental as it may have been, removes much of the potential nuance from the table.

While some aspects of Godzilla vs. Kong work, there are almost as many missteps. The music volume was expectedly bombastic but way too much for these ears from the middle ages. The Millie Bobby Brown/Dennison/Henry subplot, while necessary, didn't really hold much interest. Once we get to the reveal of what Apex are planning, the outcome of the film becomes luminously predictable. And hasn't Hong Kong been through enough lately? Give a city a break!

There are a few more head scratchers within but these are best shrugged away. It's probably advisable to put logic aside and revel in the whacking and the roaring.

See also:

Two failed films that have character cross-overs (and were slightly better than history suggests) are The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003), directed by Stephen Norrington, and Van Helsing (2004), directed by Stephen Sommers. 

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