Godzilla vs Kong
Godzilla vs. Kong is a crowd-pleasing, smash-’em-up monster flick and a straight-up action picture par excellence. It is a fairy tale and a sciencefiction exploration film, a Western, a pro wrestling extravaganza, a conspiracy thriller, a Frankenstein movie, a heartwarming drama about animals and their human pals, and, in spots, a voluptuously wacky spectacle that plays as if the creation sequence in The Tree of Life had been subcontracted to the makers of Yellow Submarine.” It has rainstorms and explosions and into-thewormhole light shows, giant mammals and reptiles and amphibians and insects and beasts that might be hybrids of one or more of the animal kingdoms, with some zombie, robot, or demon thrown in.
It dares to dream big and be goofy and sincere as it does it. And yet, for an over-scaled and incident-packed tent pole flick, “Godzilla vs. Kong” stays light on its feet, like its co-leading man, a skyscraper-sized primate who bounds through jungles, tropical and concrete, like an astronaut skipping on the moon.
It might be the best studio film so far this year.
Directed by Adam Wingard (The Guest), and written by Eric Pearson and Max Borenstein (who wrote the first film in the series), Godzilla vs. Kong continues this series’ tradition of moving the master narrative about the Monarch project forward while letting each successive team of filmmakers do their own thing. The first entry in the series, Godzilla, was Close Encounters of the Kaiju Kind, unveiling its creatures in Steven Spielberg magic-and-wonder mode, and introducing the franchise’s unifying premise: giant creatures older than the dinosaurs once lived on the earth’s surface, feeding on residual radiation from the Big Bang, then moved inside as that energy ebbed, hibernating in the Hollow Earth until humans disturbed their slumber with nuclear testing, strip mining, and the like. How strange and wonderful, though, that after all the ecstatic slapstick ultra violence, we come away from Godzilla vs. Kong recalling not just the mayhem, but the many (comparatively) quiet moments that build out Kong and Godzilla.