The Doctor’s Diagnosis: B
Well, you can’t say that this movie doesn’t deliver what it promises. Godzilla vs. Kong is a big, dumb, fun popcorn flick featuring two of film’s most famous monsters pummeling the shit out of each other. It’s certainly not a smart movie or a perfect movie. The plot is asinine, the script is choppy and a lot of things make no sense whatsoever. But none of that matters once the epic monster bashing begins. If you are thinking about plot holes when King Kong punches Godzilla in the face, then giant monster movies probably aren’t your cup of tea. For anyone that can turn their brain off for a couple of hours, this movie is a lot of fun despite its flaws.
The plot is fucking absurd to the point that the screenwriter seems to be just throwing nonsense together to get to the fight scenes. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but crap is this thing all over the place. So we find out about Hollow Earth, which is the concept that there is another world inside of Earth and this is where giant monsters come from. What evidence is this based on? Who the fuck knows, so let’s just go with it. Godzilla has seemingly turned against mankind (after protecting humans in Godzilla: King of the Monsters) and scientists are convinced that the source of power in Hollow Earth can be weaponized against Godzilla. This theory is also based on seemingly nothing, but the humans need to get to Hollow Earth. In order to do that, they need Kong because Kong can lead them there for some reason (Kong has been living on Skull Island, which now has a containment shield built around it; how they built that around Kong, I have no idea). They bring Kong to Antarctica because that is where the entrance to Hollow Earth is, which begs the question of why they needed Kong since they already built an entrance to the place. And, um….screw it, I’ll just stop there. Who cares. I actually somewhat appreciate how arbitrarily these things are thrown at the audience because it allows the film to get to what we actually want and keeps the running time under two hours. It’s dumb, but it’s damn efficient.
What’s important is that, in the middle of all of this nonsense, Godzilla and Kong beat the living shit out of each other several times and it is frigging awesome. I saw this in IMAX and it was absolutely worth it, as this is what I imagined as a kid when I saw the original 1962 version of King Kong vs. Godzilla (and this version has several nice little nods to the original). As much as I love those old rubber suit monsters and usually hate computer effects, these are perhaps the grandest monster battles ever. And, unlike in Godzilla: King of the Monsters, you can actually see what’s happening! Whether it’s at sea (which was my favorite scene) or rampaging through Hong Kong, this is everything that one could ask for in a fight between these titans and each character gets moments to shine with signature moves and growls. It’s really hard to describe in words the joy of a giant lizard and gorilla kicking the hell out of each other and tearing down buildings, so you really just need to see it for yourself. I also appreciate that, unlike Freddy vs. Jason, there is a winner here. Sure, there are a couple of asterisks with the victory, but there is victor and I was genuinely surprised.
As a quick aside: In case anyone is wondering, there are not two versions of the original King Kong vs. Godzilla from 1962. It’s only an urban legend that there is an American version with Kong winning and a Japanese version with Godzilla winning.
Back to 2021, as awesome as this movie is when Godzilla and Kong are on screen, they are immediately and dearly missed whenever they aren’t on screen. The biggest issue with Godzilla (2014) and Godzilla: King of the Monsters is that the human characters are unbearably boring. That is improved here, but is still an issue. We have two groups of humans to follow with their own distinct plots. The first group, consisting of a little deaf girl and two scientists, isn’t awful. They at least serve to move the plot along and have a few nice moments. Rebecca Hall is also always a welcome sight both because she is an excellent actress and because she manages to be hot and dorky at the same time, like Anne Hathaway crossed with a high school English teacher.
The second group, consisting of a conspiracy theorist and a couple of teenagers, is insufferable and grinds the film to a halt every time they are on screen. I literally groaned every time the movie switched back to them. They serve purely as unnecessary comic relief and exposition dumps for information that could have been communicated to the audience in a much more organic way. Also, their primary purpose is to lead to the reveal of the big, secret third monster in the film that will be very familiar to Godzilla fans. In fact, if you are like me and you have seen every Godzilla movie, you will likely figure out who it is very early in the film and then you have to watch these dingbats slowly, slowly figure it out. It’s excruciating. By the hallway point, I wanted to scream “just reveal the goddamn thing already!”
Despite its flaws, Godzilla vs. Kong is a lot of fun and reminded me of being ten years old and watching old Godzilla movies on tv on Saturday afternoons. Granted, I haven’t changed much since I was ten, so your results may vary. But this is a well-done, fast-paced throwback to when rubber-suited monsters punching each other could make me overlook the most contrived of plots. See it on the biggest screen that you can, don’t think about it too much and have a good time.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godzilla_vs._Kong#/media/File:Godzilla_vs._Kong.png
