GODZILLA VS KONG
Titanic failure
Baff! Ow! Oooof!
RELEASED OUT NOW! 2021 | 12A | VOD
Director Adam Wingard
Cast Millie Bobby Brown, Rebecca
Hall, Alexander Skarsgård, Brian Tyree Henry, Demián Bichir, Julian Dennison
If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to be a character in a kaiju movie, faced with an aweinspiring monster so destructive that all you can do is run from it screaming, Godzilla vs. Kong delivers the experience. Not because it gives you the streetlevel perspective of a yelling extra, but because it’s so monumentally awful that all you can do is stare at it in wonder, before backing away as quickly as possible. It’s positively Lovecraftian in its gibbering badness.
The film opens with Kong waking, scratching his giant ass, and taking a shower in a waterfall. This is a genuine high point of a film that spends the next 30 minutes on exposition. We find out, almost exclusively through dialogue, the plot. Kong’s in a Truman Show-style dome recreating Skull Island to hide him from Godzilla, because apparently alpha Titans will always fight, since the giant ape and the giant lizard can sense each other. How? The script doesn’t know, but don’t worry about it. It’s just something that happens, okay?
Cut to podcaster Bernie (Brian Tyree Henry) breaking into the villain’s lair, Apex Cybernetics, so he can tap into a computer and mumble exposition to himself. “Sub Level 33” he mutters to no-one, just like real people do. Godzilla attacks, people scream, and it feels like the Heisei era. Okay, maybe the Millennium era. All right, fine, the 1998 cartoon series. And because this film doesn’t trust its audience, we cut to a CNN broadcast with the ticker stating “Godzilla no longer Titan Saviour” just in case you didn’t quite get that.
Millie Bobby Brown’s Madison Russell listens to Bernie’s podcast, because it’s been 30 seconds since we’ve had some exposition, then we go to Alexander Skarsgård’s Dr Nathan Lind for some more exposition. Lind’s an ex-monarch scientist who’s written a book that suggests Titans come from a lost land at the centre of the Earth. The head of Apex, Walter
Simmons (Demián Bichir), believes there’s a power source within this Hollow Earth, and he wants Lind to find it, even though Lind’s brother died there. One of the golden rules of storytelling is “show, don’t tell”. Still, Lind clears his throat at the mention of his brother, and describes his death while looking moodily at a globe. Film is a visual medium, but everything outside of the fights in this thing feels like a radio play.
Sadly, even the fights don’t particularly work. They have less logic than the plot, with Godzilla choosing to slap Kong with his tiny hand as opposed to, say, using his atomic breath. There’s no real escalation within the fights, no beauty – but they’re still the best bits of the movie.
One more golden rule: cause and effect. Godzilla vs. Kong too often feels like a child telling a
It’s so monumentally awful that all you can do is stare at it in wonder
story: “And then the man randomly decides Kong can lead him to Hollow Earth and then he goes to see his ex who just so happens to be looking after Kong and then someone listens to a podcast and then they take Kong on a boat and then Godzilla shows up and then they fight!”
That’s it for the set-up and, as much as we’d love to lay out the entire plot as a warning, we don’t want to ruin the “twists” and “turns” (though, let’s face it, this thing is a straight line). Still, without spoiling it, we do have to mention a moment in the third act where the screenwriters, having clearly written themselves into a hole, use deus ex Godzilla to get themselves out. It is, hand on heart, the dumbest thing we’ve ever seen in one of these movies. That includes Godzilla’s victory dance in Invasion Of Astromonster, or the bit where Kong makes Godzilla eat a tree in King Kong vs. Godzilla (referenced here, because of course it is). You’ll know it when you see it.
The more you stare into Godzilla vs. Kong, the stupider you feel. Why two stars, then? Because it looks pretty in places, especially in the Avatar-influenced environment in the middle of the film, Kong’s lovely (possessing a silent movie star charm), and the cast are trying their best. Brian Tyree Henry is a genuine talent, not that you’d know it from the script he’s been handed here. But really, we can only recommend it to organisers of bad movie clubs, and their audiences. Whatever happens, don’t pay premium prices to watch it at home.
Sam Ashurst
After King Kong vs. Godzilla’s success, Toho considered pitting Godzilla against a giant Frankenstein’s monster.