Will it all go King Kong for Godzilla?
Earth’s mightiest beasts come to blows in a chest-thumping blockbuster, so...
Godzilla vs Kong (12A) Verdict: Needs a big screen ★★★II
THE notion of an irresistible force confronting an immovable object has excited storytellers for centuries, and now we have Warner Brothers to thank for abbreviating it to Godzilla vs Kong. We can doubtless expect this film title to pop up in the context of sport, politics, business and heaven knows what else for years to come.
In truth, it is not the first cinematic showdown between the Hairy One and the Scaly One. They first squared off in the 1962 Japanese film King Kong vs Godzilla.
This latest blockbuster, too, should have been well behind us by now, but not even Godzilla and Kong together were a match for the Covid-19 pandemic.
The original November 2020 release was postponed; shortly after that Warners became the first Hollywood studio to snarl openly at the cinema industry, declaring that all their 2021 movies would be made available, on the day of release, to stream at home.
With Godzilla vs Kong, that policy might yet bite them where it hurts. On the other hand, box-office returns so far, where box offices are open, are looking healthy. Plainly, this is a film that needs to be seen on the biggest screen possible, so unless you have one that covers the living-room wall, I’d recommend hanging on until cinemas re-open.
As for the story, it’s the usual formulaic nonsense, contriving a way for Kong to emerge from his rainforest-covered Pacific island, and Godzilla from the ocean depths, mainly so they can both start flattening skyscrapers. But, for once, America’s great cities are spared. This time it’s a Hong Kong ding-dong, as if that benighted former colony didn’t have enough on its plate.
REBECCA HALL plays Ilene Andrews, an American scientist whose cute, deaf, adopted daughter Jia (Kaylee Hottle) has a unique rapport with Kong. Jia is the spiritual successor to Fay Wray in the 1933 classic King Kong: the pretty female who shows that a big, soft heart beats beneath that gruff exterior, even when Kong goes, well, ape.
Godzilla’s fundamental decency is less easy to recognise, especially once he is provoked into an orgy of destruction by a fiendish corporate conspiracy, behind which lurks a powerful U.S.-based cybernetics company called Apex.
At the suggestion of another scientist played by Alexander Skarsgard, Kong is duly removed from Skull Island to help overcome the titanic lizard on behalf of all humankind.
He is sedated and transported on a suitably enormous ship, taking care not to venture
into Godzilla’s known territorial waters. Nor, presumably, through the Suez Canal. That’s not a vessel anyone would want stuck.
For reasons both too complex and too silly to get into here, there is also a plan to reintroduce Kong to his ancestral home at the planet’s very core, the entrance to which is in Antarctica. I expect director Adam Wingard and his writers would have quite liked to call this place Middle-Earth. That being taken, they have settled for Hollow Earth, which, as it happens, turns out to be something of a subterranean Jurassic Park.
In fact, knocking off ideas from other blockbuster franchises doesn’t stop there. Soon there are Star Wars-style high-jinks going on, too, as futuristic aircraft whizz around in a flurry of specialeffects which, like everything else in this film, are diminished by the small screen.
Meanwhile, in a parallel narrative, a spirited teenager (Millie Bobby Brown) and her hapless friend (Julian Dennison) team up with a snooping conspiracy theorist (Brian Tyree Henry).
In terms of the plot, the trio’s aim is to uncover the shady goings-on at Apex.
But for the audience, more significantly, their adventures are intended purely to provide some kind of comic relief. In this objective they are only intermittently successful, just as Godzilla vs Kong as a whole (and this needs reassessing when it hits the big screen) roars loudly but lacks teeth. n Godzilla vs Kong is available on premium videoon-demand platforms now.