Let Them Fight!

Sometimes it’s enough to watch a giant ape punch a giant lizard.

I’ve been lukewarm on Warner Brothers’ and Legendary Pictures’ “MonsterVerse” cinematic universe. Though each of the movies its’ produced have been generally fun and featured scenes and elements that I’ve liked, none of them have been anything great, certainly not next to the best iterations of the Godzilla and King Kong IPs. And most of what has held those other movies back is also present in Godzilla vs. Kong, the big crossover that they’ve been building to since at least Kong: Skull Island in 2017: poor writing, dull human characters, dull human storylines between the action that sometimes feels scant. It’s a pattern that persists even with routine changes in directors and casts. This time though I wasn’t bothered so much by that. Could it be I’ve lost my cynicism and just accepted the flaws in conjunction with the stuff that actually works, or could it be the movie is genuinely better? Maybe it’s a bit of both.

It’s certainly better than Godzilla: King of the Monsters, what with its’ endless exposition, convoluted plotting, and poorly thought out themes. The plotting for this movie is a lot more streamlined (even if you can tell where it’s been cut down) and never quite feels divorced from the action. It’s also a lot more openly silly. In stark contrast to the over-serious two Godzilla movies preceding it, this film embraces the fundamentally insane elements of its premise and introduces others that are even more bonkers -we’re talking nineteenth century scientific theory here, Jules Verne-style concepts not even marginally linked to reality. And in addition to the creativity such choices permit, they also give the film more character, which none in this series but Kong: Skull Island were ever able to do before.

Kong is given a bit of depth in this movie, not on the level of something like the Peter Jackson film, but he’s more than just a giant ape monster fighting other monsters this time around. There’s an attempt at least to reconcile him with the classic, sympathetic idea of King Kong. Because he’s got a vessel of a communication in a little deaf girl (Kaylee Hottle), we’re privy to some of his emotions, such as fear, loneliness, and a yearning for belonging. He even seems more intelligent in this film, particularly in some of the clever ways he fights. His opponent actually doesn’t appear in the movie much outside of said fights and one opening attack on northern Gulf Coast Florida -perhaps director Adam Wingard felt Godzilla had already been showcased enough in two movies already. There isn’t much more to him in this, though Godzilla has never been strongly defined in the way Kong has. The purpose for his emergent rampage though reveals an intense survival instinct in light of human activity based around a major story element pretty clear to predict but tying once again into human hubris and quite appropriately that same need for supremacy I discussed in my recent Planet of the Apes essay.

This secret component aside though, the monster fights are the bread and butter of this movie. Both of them. And that may sound like shortchanging the audience for a movie titled Godzilla vs. Kong, but even just these two fights are pretty satisfactory. Wingard and his crew really have fun with how they construct the battles, not just in the choreography of the action but the environment and the tone. They ask how these two behemoths would clash in the open water, Kong outside of his natural habitat, Godzilla directly in his. And they come up with a lot of the fun kind of stupid ideas, such as the two monsters hopping from one aircraft carrier to another or giving Kong a Die Hard leap from an explosion. And though these scenes go on for a while they don’t tire, and maintain a consistent inventiveness. There’s a lot of exciting imagery to these sequences too: the frequently marketed Godzilla dorsal fins above water approaching land and/or boat a la Jaws, or just about any shot in the neon-coated Hong Kong brawl in the climax. Although it is a bit disappointing that in spite of assurances there would be a definitive winner of this match-up (unlike so many past crossover “versus” movies), the movie finds a way around actually delivering on that.

These clashes, though great fun, are not the bulk of the movie, most of which is focused on the human characters engineering them and figuring things out. As much as it’s nice to draw a relationship between Kong and humans again, Alexander Skarsgård and Rebecca Hall are exceptionally dull, there to keep the plot moving as they attempt to relocate Kong. Demián Bichir does the standard corporate villain routine, driven by an impulse that might be fascinating if it were allowed to grow -but then I wouldn’t trust these writers or this kind of movie to explore it adequately. The only human storyline that kind of works is an investigation headed by Millie Bobby Browns’ Madison into a conspiracy within Bichirs’ advanced tech company, aided by her plucky friend played by Julian Dennison, and Bryan Tyree Henry’s radio conspiracy theorist. The investigation itself is just as tedious as any other plot beat, but the trio works well off each other and Henry and Dennison provide the only decent comic relief of the film. Kyle Chandler and Lance Reddick make cameo appearances, clearly cut down from larger roles (Zhang Ziyi wasn’t so lucky -she’s been cut out entirely), but it is for the best, and arguably they didn’t even need the screen-time they were given -it already intrudes too much on what audiences actually want to see.

Godzilla and King Kong went at it before -in the 1962 Toho production of King Kong vs. Godzilla, but there is something to seeing them fight each other in the modern special effects context of a scale such as this. It feels like the kind of pure spectacle we don’t get much of anymore, and it’s fitting considering the original King Kong is considered the first of that kind of blockbuster. Its’ descendant here replicates that in its’ visual effects, its’ very strong visual language, if the properties pay for it by losing some of their camp. The human stuff is largely uninteresting, the plotting fairly lacklustre, but for a film that may be for many their first return to the cinema in over a year, that stuff can be forgiven for a couple good old fashioned satisfactory monster fights.

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