Colossal disappointment
‘Godzilla vs. Kong’ delivers some CGI spectacle but offers little to care about
If you’re looking for scenes of big, awful creatures fighting each other and knocking over skyscrapers — and for the spectacle of people scurrying below, running from the huge stomping feet — you will find little to dislike in “Godzilla vs. Kong.” It does its job. It’s a monster movie.
If you’re looking for anything more or better, perhaps for something on the order of “Kong: Skull Island” (2017), which had a pretty good story and some noteworthy performances, then you’ll be disappointed. “Godzilla vs. Kong” — in theaters and streaming on HBO Max starting Wednesday, March 31 — is like an amalgam of every bad movie tendency that exists currently, or at least that existed at the time this movie wrapped up filming in 2019.
This scifi extravaganza touches on all the movie concerns of the immediate preCOVID19 period: the threats posed by alien beings, artificial intelligence and civic chaos. It combines that with some phony environmentalism that ends up undercutting most of the movie’s potential for drama.
From the standpoint of 2021, “Godzilla vs. Kong” can’t help but seem colossally insensitive and lacking in insight. It begins in a world community that has already seen some of its great cities destroyed by monsters risen from the depths of the Earth. In 2019, that might have seemed like something the entire world might absorb after a short period of adjustment. Now we recognize that such a calamity would change not only people’s lives but their entire way of seeing themselves and interacting. It would be spiritually devastating.
“Godzilla vs. Kong” is a sequel to “Kong: Skull Island” and “Godzilla: King of the Monsters” (2019). In both, the monsters — or “titans,” as we’re expected to call them here — were portrayed sympathetically. But here, their ancient rivalry puts these two ostensibly good guys at odds.
As the film begins, Godzilla, who has been living at a facility in Pensacola, Fla., destroys the complex of a company called Apex. In Pensacola, Madison (Millie Bobby Brown) the teenage daughter of one of the Apex scientists, teams up with a wacky conspiracy theorist (Brian Tyree Henry) to investigate Apex. This is their idea: Godzilla is a really nice creature, and if he destroyed Apex, he must have had a good reason.
It’s around this point, very early in the proceedings, that we get our first hint of the contorted nature of this movie’s point of view. Question: Would you want to live in a world in which, at any possible moment, a monster might come and destroy your city, your home, your livelihood and all the places, people and things that you love? Or would you rather live in a world without monsters?
The answer is obvious. Yet the supposed villain of “Godzilla vs. Kong,” the only certified wicked entity, is a wealthy businessman (Demian Bichir) who dares to say, “Mankind will once again be the apex species.” What’s wrong with that?
Yet, in the world of this film, that character is antinature and antienvironment because he’d like to get rid of the irrational, destructive monsters that have brought the world to its knees. The absurdity of that might make one suspect the movie to be some antienvironmentalist satire of true environmentalists but, no, it’s too naive to be subtle.
Here’s the problem: If Godzilla and Kong are both fine fellows, what’s the fun in watching them fight each other? So Kong, in the first of their two battles, hits Godzilla in the face with a roundhouse right — Godzilla has little arms and can’t do much to block. Then Godzilla hits Kong, and we’re off to the races.
Everything besides the fighting is extraneous. In one long section, Alexander Skarsgard, Rebecca Hall and Eiza Gonzalez, among others, journey to the center of the Earth, with a sedated Kong along for the ride. That results in some nice computerishlooking spectacle, but in terms of story, you could cut almost all of that out of the movie.
To comment on the performances is almost pointless, though Kaylee Hottle makes a lovely impression as a little deaf girl who can communicate with Kong through sign language. Everything else is about the fighting, and most of the time, the wrong entities are fighting, and for little reason. Later, even when the fighting does makes some kind of sense, it takes place in a world in which the worst has already happened. There’s nothing left.
“Godzilla vs. Kong” lacks the power to inspire any emotion, but if did have the power, that emotion would be sadness.