A Monster Mash - Godzilla Vs Kong (2021)

Like most of the other movies that are, were or have been due for release through 2020 and 2021, the release of Godzilla Vs Kong has turned into something of a mess. Originally due in cinemas November 2020 (cinemas? What are they?), rather than sitting on release for an indefinite period (cough, Disney, cough), the film’s release dates got moved around a bit and then got itself a home release.

That…is not necessarily a good thing, but it’s also not bad: home releasing at least means that your film gets out there, it gets seen and talked about. But it also means that you’re going to miss some of the cinematic experience itself, the grand breaths and comments from the rest of the audience that turn a film from more than just a movie into an experience.

That experience is something that is missing from Godzilla Vs Kong. While the film is an enjoyable watch, writing this less than twenty-four hours after watching, I don’t really have a memory of the important beats and moments of a film that is less than two hours long. In saying that, it’s also occurred to me that I have similar (lack of) memories of the film’s predecessors, namely 2014’s Godzilla, 2017’s Kong: Skull Island and 2019’s Godzilla: King Of The Monsters; the fact that I’ve had to look up those films for their name and the order they dropped in says a lot, and I’m confident that it’s more than just my brain.

Such films were entertaining watches, and I am totally prepared to watch them again and enjoy doing so. But I am not driven to make the time to do that. These are all popcorn movies, cinematic experiences (with the key word being cinema) that you can watch in the dark with at least a couple of other people, all of whom can and will react accordingly with breaths, shocks or laughter, all of which you can talk about on the way home…and then forget that you’ve seen them at all.

With all of that experience in mind, Godzilla Vs Kong getting a home release…well, I’ll be honest and say that’s not a good thing for a film like this. There’s just that bit too much room for things to go awry: any sort of home release gives the viewer the opportunity to comment out loud, making those sighs of frustration at a narrative beat that just doesn’t appear to make sense all the more obvious and jarring.

There were a lot of such beats in Godzilla Vs King Kong and I can’t help but feel that maybe, just maybe, I would have preferred to see such a film with a hell of a lot more humans around me, and a hell of a lot less humans in it.

And there are a lot of humans in this film, the type of things that we’re expected to relate to, to have heart and feelings. Eww.

Where Godzilla: King Of The Monsters gave us the family of Madison Russel (Millie Bobby Brown) and the strained relationship between her parents (Kyle Chandler and Vera Farmiga), Godzilla Vs Kong tries to revisit Madison and her father Mark. Merely touching on the relationship between them both, their inclusion in this film feels somewhat forced or else totally irrelevant. The film doesn’t even embrace Madison fully, instead opening with a different kid interacting with Kong, followed by a brief introduction to Bernie Hayes (Brian Tyree Henry), something of a conspiracy theorist with corporate goings that happen to be related to a Godzilla attack. Madison has become a spunky teenager between films, capable of driving and all, and is convinced that Godzilla’s attack was a misunderstanding. She is looking for a reason for this madness, convinced that Godzilla has a heart of gold, while her father is nothing more than a talking head distracted by work. For the heart that the two characters had in the previous film, that same heart is wholly missing in this film, with neither character nor interactions given a chance to breathe.

You might think that would be because of the film focusing on grand action sequences and the beasts rather than the humans?

That would be acceptable if the film didn’t go out of its way to introduce other characters as well, without really having the dignity to give the time to develop. Rebecca Hall plays Ilene Andrews, staff at the Monarch authority who are currently keeping Kong locked up on Skull Island; Kaylee Hottle plays her deaf adopted daughter Jia who ends up communicating with Kong through sign language, while Alexander Skarsgård plays Nathan Lind, the scholar whose published book suggests that Godzilla, Kong and various other beasts are generated from the Hollow Earth. Although original characters appearing solely in this film, one can’t help but feel that they are duplicates, with Jia providing nothing more than a younger Madison (albeit dealing with Kong rather than Godzilla), while her mother feels (to me, anyway) like she should have been the same character as played by Sally Hawkins in the previous two Godzilla films (and missing here).

Meanwhile Skarsgård’s character is nothing more than a talking head of science, with a butch physical element that feels like he should have some military background; such a character only served to make me wonder why he had not been in previous films, and seemed interchangeable with Tom Hiddleston’s character in Skull Island, which then just sent me down a rabbit hole of wondering where all the other characters and beats created for that movie, a film that so intentionally going out of its way to create a solid world for this universe, would then drastically ignore some of those elements.

There are other human characters too, and there are just too many of them to name or reference, especially when given that the this is a film that, ultimately, could be just Godzilla, Kong and the other Titans, all with minimal (if any) reference to all the humans whose lives they impact. Such human beats might have worked in some of the previous movies within this universe, but by the time we reach our crossover film in Godzilla Vs Kong, we really don’t need, nor want, new human characters and back-story in order to keep the viewer entertained.

You just want to watch the bloody big things fight already, dammit!

There are a couple of glorious fight scenes within Godzilla Vs Kong, and they are an absolute joy to watch. But the film has already spent too much time and energy on its humans to relish in that grand action, and the film even itself refers back to those humans regularly enough to make sure that we mere viewers know that they have survived.

All while our Titans take down multiple boats and most of Hong Kong.

I get the human elements of the film: these characters are relatable in what could and should be this grand battle between Titans large enough to destroy cities. But maybe, just maybe, I (and many others, I’m sure) want to see those beasts fight each other and destroy cities without having to wonder about the corporate effects of such drama.

And yeah, there is corporate villainy at play within this film, all coming from even more secondary characters in a film that doesn’t spend enough time or energy developing either the character or the corporation. However, the film still gives significant time, energy and screen-time to explain those roles.

Such villainy doesn’t merely want to control these Titans though: they want to wipe them out, creating their own Apex predator in the form of a MechaGodzilla that both Godzilla and Kong can, eventually, put their differences aside in order to team up and fight.

In some ways, it’s sort of like Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice all over again, only with a hell of a lot more kids, a hell of a lot more, meaningless supporting characters and no real acknowledgement of the fact there is a corporate bad guy who is manipulating things all along.

All of that said: I should really to stop there and be fare.

I sort of loved Godzilla Vs Kong. Had I watched this in the cinema, I (like many others) would have gasped and cheered, enjoying my popcorn and hoping that I would not need to visit the bathroom for fear of missing some (visually) awesome scene. With that in mind, I think my issues with Godzilla Vs Kong aren’t in the film itself, nor even in its release, but merely the fact that, watching in this format, the script just doesn’t stand up, reading like it is desperately in need of an edit, that will happily get rid of at least a few of these minor, meaningless characters and beats.

Setting those characters aside, the film is gorgeously put together by director Adam Wingard, previously having brought You’re Next and The Guest to my screen, and I bloody love them both. The fact that it’s suggested he’ll be going to touch ThunderCats next is sort of exciting (understatement of the century) and Godzilla Vs Kong is capable of showing that Wingard knows how to play with such characters and worlds…all without ensuring that they know how to fit in with the “real” world.

So yeah: I don’t need to see my teenage characters magically travelling underground from the USA to Hong Kong; I don’t need to see the deaf pre-teen being brought on what looks like a military mission to the earth’s core, in a fashion that doesn’t make any damned sense at all.

Just let me see the big guys fighting; after all, the clue is in the name.

Godzilla Vs Kong does that fighting thing damned well without needing rhyme, reason not pesky humans.