Godzilla vs Kong

Gillipedia Official Rating: It’s like a heartfelt familial drama mixed with a dysfunctional coming-of-age comedy…. Or it’s a giant monster fighting movie. Who’s to judge

          Every company has a Verse. There’s the MCU, DCEU, this is the MonsterVerse I guess, I’m not sure if Jurassic World is part of a bigger DinoVerse that’s still just speculation at this point, and heck, Tom Cruise was supposed to kickstart the Dark Universe for Universal. Anyways, leading up to this we had the flawed but still quite enjoyable Godzilla (not the underrated Matthew Broderick one), Kong: Skull Island which I admittedly haven’t seen yet, and Godzilla: King of the Monsters. If you’d like to refer back to episode #22,714 of my podcast, I was not a fan of King of the Monsters. At all. And for full disclosure, I went back and looked at the review I did for King of the Monsters, and I completely stand behind it. If you want a halfway-decent review, that’s actually a pretty good one to look at.

          I want to start my review off with easily the biggest takeaway from this film. King of the Monsters made 4 huge mistakes:

1) It focused on the characters and not on the monsters.

2) It was so dark you couldn’t see any of the action.

3) Anytime any cool moment was about to happen from the Titans going at it with each other, they cut away to freaking reaction shots from the freaking characters that nobody freaking cared about.

*I stand by the idea that there were 4 huge mistakes, but for the life of me I can’t think of what the last one was. Use your imagination.

          Thankfully, G v K is the opposite of all of these points. The action scenes are all varied in location and are properly lit, so we see all of the glorious fighting. I almost recommend going and watching King of the Monsters beforehand just so everyone can appreciate how much better this film is. What this movie feels like is a sandbox where the monsters were dropped in, and the filmmakers just got to have fun playing around with what they wanted to do and where they wanted to put the camera. There’s a couple things I think they still could’ve done, but for being able to keep this film under 2 hours, they fit in quite a lot.

          As far as story and characters are concerned, there are a few returning members from King of the Monsters that will make things a little easier, but there isn’t anything really vital from the previous films to enjoy this one—and I think that was the right call. The focus is put more on King Kong and uplifting him as the main protagonist. The humans that accompany him are actress Rebecca Hall who you might know from The Town or Vicky Cristina Barcelona while I know her as the most underrated element from The Prestige, the Skarsgard brother that doesn’t play It, a deaf girl (vibes from A Quiet Place or Babel if you’re an egotistical cinephile) that is Kong’s bff and shares a guardian-like relationship with Hall, and a Mila Kunis lookalike who holds no real purpose except to be a minor inconvenience as an antagonist.

          Milly Bobbie Brown returns as the best part from King of the Monsters and teams up with a Ned rip-off from the Spider-Man films and Brian Tyree Henry. Henry plays the fanatic conspiracy theorist who runs a podcast convinced that the main corporation in the film is behind some dark secrets. While very cliched at first, Henry does exercise his comedic chops to better effect in the second half. And granted, Henry is correct in basically all the assumptions and claims that he makes, but it’s something that teenager Milly believes in and convinces her friend to illegally take a van to go meet up with Henry. If I were Kyle Chandler (Milly’s father), I would be quite concerned about my teenage daughter listening to the crazy podcast. But he’s pretty absent throughout the film, and this movie isn’t concerned about setting real world examples and morals and junk like that.

          This should be an early contender for best visual effects at the Oscars for the following year. There’s an occasional shot where humans are closer to the camera and Kong or a landscape is in the background and only really then does it slightly feel like they’re on a green screen partly because the lighting doesn’t quite capture what it needs to. But beyond that the visuals are solid and take some interesting directions later in the film. For instance there’s these flying ships that run on purple beam fuel looking like they’re straight outta Galaga. There’s some pretty stupid science that gets explained, but the movie isn’t worried about it, so neither am I.

          A couple quick points here. The music works, but it could have gone for a more operatic feel and really propelled the film this film into awesome territory. Going back to a previous point a bit, the action scenes here definitely take some Pacific Rim inspirations in how they’re shot (I assume from just the first film. I’m also assuming that like me the filmmakers haven’t even seen the sequel). What I mean by that is you can expect mainly 2 things from the action: wide shots that allow the audience to grasp all of the surroundings and the two titans, and shots from street level to provide that sense of scale as well as what a human perspective would look like if Godzilla was strolling down 2nd Ave. And last random point: Lance Reddick (most known recently for his cool character in the John Wick films) receives prominent billing, and I swear I can recall him having literally 1 line in the film, that’s it.

          Spoiler alert but there’s a climactic showdown between my boy Zil and the King of the Kong. It’s plenty of fun, but I did expect more buildup to an epic final kill shot or something—like how they did it in Godzilla. It felt like they could’ve added a couple extra minutes of fighting here. But all in all, the entertainment value is significantly higher than King of the Monsters, and it’s honestly the most fun film to come out in many, many months. I streamed it using HBO Max, but you will get your money’s worth by venturing to the theaters to watch it. Go in, have some fun, wear matching #TeamGodzilla or #TeamKong shirts/onesies, whatever you got. Oh, and to save you the trouble, there isn’t an end credits scene. I know, I was shocked by this as well.

 

In Brief:

• The Suicide Squad got a trailer and it looked good enough, didn’t blow me away.
• Voyagers is coming out soon and I’m a big fan of Tye Sheridan, but it seems to have a mix of premises that have been done already.
• My understanding is that Raya and the Last Dragon has not performed well in theaters, but I have no idea about its numbers from its premier access on Disney+. I do feel like the $30 price tag on top of the monthly subscription is overkill (I mean I just did a review on a film I streamed for free using my HBO Max subscription); however, I see the mindset where if you buy 3 tickets at the theaters, that’s going to already put you at $30 just about. And chances are that people aren’t buying the film for just themselves to watch. So I get it. I still don’t agree with the final tally, but I understand it. With that said if it’s like Mulan and streams for free after 3 months, why in the world are you paying that premier access to watch it now. If there’s any kind of premier access for Black Widow, I’ll for sure be showing up in the theaters to watch it that way instead.