Until this year, I had close to zero interest in giant monster movies. The more modern American ones I'd seen (Cloverfield, Pacific Rim, Peter Jackson's King Kong, Roland Emmerich's Godzilla) ran from "fine I guess" to "what the hell is this crap?" And though I'd caught pieces of the classic Japanese kaiju movies over the years, the guy-in-a-rubber-suit aesthetic was never intriguing enough for me to dive in wholesale. Until this year, anyway, when, desperate for an at-home substitute for big-screen popcorn entertainment and anticipating the arrival of Godzilla vs. Kong, I decided to marathon as many of these babies as I could.
I watched all three installments of the Warner Bros. MonsterVerse. I watched the original Godzilla and the original King Kong. I watched a bunch of classic, Shōwa-era Toho Godzillas, including Godzilla Raids Again, Mothra vs. Godzilla and Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla. And though not every film won me over, they did give me an appreciation for giant-monster movies as a whole. The rubber-suit thing is an easy joke, but these movies have occasionally been on the cutting edge of special effects (think King Kong '33's stop motion or Godzilla '54's miniature model work). Kaiju movies are weird in a way that isn't always successful on an individual basis and that also keeps them sort of mainstream adjacent. But the oddity of a world of huge monsters that endlessly battle us humans and each other ends up being pretty cool once you fully immerse yourself in it. Giant monster movies are a vibe, man. And that vibe is enjoyable chaos.
Of course, watching this many of these things in short succession has also turned me into a man of many opinions on them. I know what works for me in these movies and what doesn't. I despise Minilla (a.k.a. the son of Godzilla) with a fiery passion and can tell you that the quality of the human characters (which typically ranges from "eh, not too bad" to "please remove these people from my TV screen and get back to the monsters") can make or break a lot of these films. When it comes to the MonsterVerse, I hated Godzilla '14, adored Kong: Skull Island, and found Godzilla: King of the Monsters to be the best American imitation of the insanity of the Japanese series thus far. Had I watched Godzilla vs. Kong blind, I may have come out of it appeased. But as it stands, I went in with expectations, and I'm sad to report that those expectations were not met.
Godzilla vs. Kong takes place not long after King of the Monsters, during which the big lizard thwarted all evil titan challengers and seemed to usher in a period of peace between beasts and humans. Kong is still keeping to himself and chilling on Skull Island, although now Monarch, the monster-tracking organization that serves as the unifying narrative thread through the MonsterVerse, has turned the entire location into an elaborate research base. Meanwhile, Godzilla starts feeling frisky and attacks a secretive facility run by Apex Cybernetics, a new group to the series that may be up to no good. (The mere fact that they're a cybernetics company might tip off long-time fans to where this whole thing is going.) Apex's CEO, played by Demián Bichir, recruits maverick cartographer Nathan Lind (Alexander Skarsgård) and Monarch scientist Ilene Andrews (Rebecca Hall) to bring Kong on an expedition to Hollow Earth, the fabled center-of-the-planet birthplace of all of Earth's titans, where he hopes to discover an ultimate power source that might give humans a leg up on the monsters.
Kong is chained to the deck of an aircraft carrier when Godzilla gets wind that he's off island and suddenly IT IS ON. Godzilla is used to being the planet's alpha predator, and Kong just wants to get back home. Unfortunately, neither seems big on talking out their problems, and it's not long before they're punching each other at decibel levels that I'm sure would have been ear-shattering if only I felt comfortable going back to a movie theater. (Lucky for me, I've got a pretty dope surround-sound setup at home.) So, look, the fights in this movie are fun. Barring a few tweaks, Kong and Godzilla are basically carrying over their designs from the previous movies, and they still look great. The mid-ocean battle is solid, and the epic Hong Kong throwdown that ends this movie, with Godzilla, Kong and a surprise third party whaling on each other around and through tall neon skyscrapers, is everything you want from these movies. Director Adam Wingard (The Guest) swings the camera through the action like he's staging a theme-park ride, bringing viewers as close to the monsters as he can in a variety of dizzyingly effective ways. The fights you're here to see are likely satisfying enough to make watching this film worthwhile.
Unfortunately, almost every other aspect of this movie has been done better elsewhere. The fun characters that populate Kong: Skull Island? Don't expect to find anything similar here, as Godzilla vs. Kong has the worst group of human characters unleashed in the MonsterVerse thus far. Kyle Chandler and Millie Bobby Brown return from King of the Monsters, and they're even more useless here than they were in that movie. Chandler barely registers, hinting at massive post-shooting edits that radically pared this movie. (Another big hint: the great Lance Reddick shows up to deliver one line. One line!!) Meanwhile, Brown gets embroiled in a excruciatingly painful subplot involving Brian Tyree Henry as a monster-obsessed podcast host dedicated to uncovering Apex's secrets. I'm a big fan of Henry's TV show Atlanta and have seen him do great work elsewhere. But everything involving his character here, from conception to performance, is a disaster. Things fare a tiny bit better with Hall's human group. Though she's pretty much wasted (as she always is in big-budget franchise films) and Skarsgård is similarly banal, at least they get matched up with Jia (newcomer Kaylee Hottle), a young, deaf Skull Island orphan who has learned to communicate with Kong using sign language. Jia is the only human in this movie worth her screen time.
Meanwhile, while the action is effectively staged, the monsters, especially when they're outside of battle, feel more sterile and less primal than they have in the past. I miss King of the Monsters director Michael Dougherty's take on the big fellas, where he treated them almost like ancient Eldritch beings. There's a shot in that film where Ghidorah, the three-headed dragon menace, rises from an exploding volcano while a solemn cross stands in the foreground, and it is gobsmackingly awesome. Dougherty makes it very clear in his movie: Don't bother praying; these are your gods now. In Godzilla vs. Kong, Wingard treats them more like animatronic attractions. They're fun while you're watching them fight, but they don't leave much of an impression the second you get off the ride. This is never more true than at the end of the movie, when Godzilla simply slinks back into the sea in a quick shot while Kong gets only a few seconds more in his new home. Conceivably, this could be the last movie featuring these versions of the characters, and they deserved better than an abrupt wrap-up that gets you into the credits and out of the theater (or off your coach) as quickly as possible.
As for me? I'm still not a kaiju super fan, but I have developed enough of an appreciation for the genre to be eternally interested in checking out what these monsters are doing next. The light disappointment of Godzilla vs. Kong isn't likely to shake me off. And that's the great thing about these movies: There are a million of them already. So if you find one you don't like, there's always another waiting in the wings. I've got people telling me to check out 2016's Shin Godzilla from Japan. And I hear 2004's Godzilla: Final Wars is absolutely insane. I'll find some other ones that work better for me. In the meantime, I'm sure catching Godzilla vs. Kong in a theater would be the ideal way to watch it. But if you're waiting for a genuinely top-tier blockbuster to make your grand return to cinemas, this likely isn't it.
