Movie Review: "Godzilla vs. Kong" (2021) · 1:31am Apr 4th, 2021
WARNING!
This post will contain spoilers because that's honest to goodness the only way I can really talk up a movie like this. If you're allergic to spoilers, read after you've seen the movie. If you don't give a care, read on.
59 years after the original King Kong vs. Godzilla, 2 years after Godzilla: King of the Monsters came and went to divisive reception and an underperformance at the box office, and after a whole year of pandemic delays, the rematch between the King of the Monsters and the Eighth Wonder of the World has finally arrived.
As of now, I've just gotten out of watching this movie.
And hoooooooo boy, that was a lotta fun.
Let's make this clear, Godzilla vs. Kong ain't Shakespeare. It doesn't try to reach for the themes of either its predecessor or some of the more thoughtful films of the kaiju genre. But I don't mean that in a bad way. It's simply a big fun movie about big dinosaur and big monkey going at it, and it revels in it.
The fight scenes are spectacular and even downright vicious. There's one part towards the end when Godzilla starts going after Kong on all fours like a crocodile and slashing him across the chest and it's just savage. Heck, the whole movie is savage. Godzilla tries to drown Kong; Kong rips off the head of a giant snake monster and literally drinks green blood from its skull; Mechagodzilla pulls a Skullcrawler's limbs apart and bisects it with its laser breath. Director Adam Wingard really wasn't kidding when he said the PG-13 rating was an understatement.
Oh yeah, Mechagodzilla's in the movie as the "secret" final boss. But let's be honest, at this point it's about as big a plot twist as Citizen Kane's sled.
The human side of the story has been getting some flak for being underdeveloped, and okay, it kind of is. Really, I think it's more simple than anything, and I found the characters to be serviceable enough to entertain me when Goji and Monke Boi weren't on screen.
I will say that my biggest disappointment with the movie lays in this department, unfortunately. There's a character who's supposed to be the son of the late Dr. Ishiro Serizawa from G2014 and KOTM, now working for the evil Apex Cybernetics. But he doesn't get much to do before he gets killed off by a rogue Mechagodzilla.
Anyway, that little let-down aside, I thoroughly enjoyed myself. It was the big fun break from COVID I think we needed. And the world seems to agree, if the Certified Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes and the cash that it's rolling in right now is any indication.
Long Live the Kings.
7/10
Honestly, it helps to think of this as a Showa film given a Hollywood beef up, right down to the insane plot and laughably stupid villains.
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Eeeeyup.
Heck, even the way they moved gave me big Showa vibes.
I liked it too. Who cares that much about human development in a movie about these two titans? They're the ones on the side.
The first three-quarters of the film kinda felt like an Ancient Aliens documentary. There's a hollow earth with reversed gravity, and it has dinosaurs and big animals, and the only way to access it is to go to a hole in the Antarctic, which Kong needs to use in order to find a power source to kill off a giant laser lizard, who the world thinks is evil, but is really just reacting to the government building a giant robot to keep him in check, and only a group of conspiracy theorists can uncover the truth. It's so utterly ridiculous, and I live for it. There's a reason why this movie is the best of the Monsterverse. It thoroughly buys into the ridiculousness of it all. We can't help but go along with its confidence.
Overall, a movie I'd forget about a week after watching, but it's captivating once it starts playing. Fun. Not really deep, but it doesn't need to be. Best film of the year so far.
Now, considering Black Widow is about to come out, I'm actually kinda hoping it gets delayed again. That'll be the running joke of the movie--that no matter how long we wait, the movie will never come. It's like Tantalus, reaching for the fruit but it gets pulled away just in time. There is no Black Widow movie! It was all just a conspiracy to keep Marvel fanboys placated!
(Sure, Falcon and Winter Soldier is also going on right now, but to be honest, I'm not as invested as Marvel wants me to be. Every episode feels like a slog for me. There's only so many times Marvel can do the same thing before I start to dislike watching them.)
Bad Batch is definitely going onto my priority list, though.