Godzilla vs. Kong (2021)
I’m Fun at Parties
The refreshing thing about Adam Wingard’s Godzilla vs. Kong is that the giant CGI monsters aren’t nearly as important as the innovative sci-fi ideas coursing through its script. An impossibly wealthy (and even more impossibly curious) businessman hires two down-on-their-luck scientists to discover humanity’s secret origins. They are outfitted with a state-of-the-art craft, a rough-and-tumble crew, and directions to a hidden world full of monsters and wonders. Guy Pearce turns in a wonderfully weird performance as the businessman who—
Dammit. I’m writing about Prometheus again.
Take two.
Wingard and writers Eric Pearson and Max Borenstein really deliver the goods in Godzilla vs. Kong, which finds the brutish icons duking it out for supremacy. Yes, everything you’ve heard about the human characters once again taking a back seat to the CGI mayhem is true. But there’s a real story here that reveals a crucial connection to each combatant’s past that will no doubt propel this franchise several movies into the future.
An impossibly wealthy (and even more impossibly eccentric) businessman pits these titans against one another so that he can develop his own proprietary monster in secret. Unfortunately, the creature breaks loose of its master’s control and wreaks havoc on an unsuspecting city. In a surprisingly vulnerable moment for a blockbuster, the titular legends unite against a common enemy after realizing their mothers were both named “Martha”.
I’m doing it again, aren’t I?
Look, folks, this isn’t easy, okay?
Here are the four things I’m not supposed to do when reviewing a movie like this:
Take it seriously (“It’s just big, dumb monsters fighting for two hours—what’d you expect, Shakespeare?!”).
Complain that it’s like other movies (“It’s just big, dumb monsters fighting for two hours—what’d you expect, originality?!”).
Complain about the forgettable, interchangeable human characters (“It’s just big, dumb monsters fighting for two hours—you don’t watch these movies for characters, nerd!”).
Use my brain for anything except pressing “Play” and shoveling snacks in my mouth (“It’s just big, dumb monsters fighting for two hours—what’d you expect…um, what’s a ‘Shakespeare’?”).
And yet…
And yet…
Here I am, stuck with the Scorsese conundrum. A couple years ago, the director of Taxi Driver and Goodfellas accused comic book movies of not being “cinema”. I have vehemently and repeatedly disagreed with his stance, but after having sat through Godzilla vs. Kong I can say that his ire is simply misdirected.
Comic book movies aren’t the vacuous roller coasters disguised as movies.
It’s the “Versus” pictures.
Freddy vs. Jason, Batman v. Superman, and now this. They’re little more than celluloid Pay Per View events that spectators (used to) flock to see in theatres instead of arenas. Maybe it’s time we started treating them as such.
Sure, I could write about blockbuster fandom’s depressing hypocrisy. This odd bunch decried the forty-minute leveling of Metropolis during Man of Steel’s soulless climax, yet they cheer on the relentless destruction of Hong Kong by Wingard’s ape/lizard grudge match. I might also note the meta context of Hong Kong’s real-world struggle to not be crushed under the authoritarian boot of the Chinese Communist Party.
But it’s more fun (and far more appropriate) to gush over King Kong swinging a giant turkey-lizard at another giant turkey-lizard. That was indeed cooler and more awesome than anything in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Speaking of 2001, remember how twenty years ago everyone was momentarily skeeved out by movies where cities were destroyed for sheer entertainment? I’m happy to say we’ve gotten all the way over that hump. Movies like the Transformers sequels and Rampage led the way, but Godzilla vs. Kong completes the evolutionary course-correct of not giving a single fuck about a single person running from their lives, getting trampled by falling debris, or being evaporated in sudden bursts of flame.
I know it’s a “proud” tradition of these movies to have the monsters square off in metropolitan areas, but there’s a world of difference between chintzy model buildings collapsing under rear-projection chaos, and a downtown area so realistically rendered it’s hard to not see them as real places.
Then again, man, it sure was cool to see Godzilla and Kong fight underwater that one time!
As you can probably tell, I am incapable of turning off my brain. To do so in service of a movie would be a disservice to both the people who made the film and the people who want to read what I thought of it (not to mention, myself). This gets me into trouble when discussing movies like this, but it sometimes provides a mental “out” when actually watching them.
For example, isn’t it weird that movie fans are so desperate to return to pre-COVID normalcy that they’ll clamor for a big-screen experience that essentially dresses up CNN headlines in roaring CGI avatars? Have they not had enough of nature run amok, of millions dead around the world, of cities burning, of families ripped apart, of businesses being demolished by spectacular, unthinking violence?
I’ve never cared for Adam Wingard as a filmmaker, but I cannot deny his hypnotic showmanship. After all, this is the guy who convinced an early-screening Comic-Con audience that his Blair Witch sequel was the exact opposite of wretched.
“Jesus,” you’re wondering. “Are there any blockbusters you do like?”
Sure, I like loads of them. Jurassic Park. Die Hard. Michael Bay’s first Transformers movie. A bunch of the Marvel films, and the pre- and post-Snyder DC movies. I even like Rampage, despite lumping it in with the destruct-o-rama pictures a few paragraphs ago.
Notice none of those are “versus” pictures. Sure, they all have a central conflict between two (at least) larger-than-life factions, but they don’t sacrifice characterization, surprise, or empathy in service of “cool” and wanton violence. Despite violating every rule I laid out earlier, there is little denying their effectiveness as popular entertainment and as (in some cases, not all) representing the very best of the blockbuster “formula”.
Godzilla vs. Kong is a state-of-the-art Pay Per View narcotic, the gateway to indiscriminate, lizard-brained mania. For some moviegoers, that’s high praise. For others, it’s the clearest warning to avoid at all costs.
Whose side are you on?
Postscript: Looking back over my notes, I am reminded of a positively breathtaking scene in which King Kong touches fingers with a little girl on a boat in the middle of a raging storm. This fleeting moment doesn’t redeem the surrounding one-hour-fifty-six-minutes-and-thirty-seconds, but it’s too remarkable an image not to call out.
