Godzilla vs. Kong

Don't know quite what to say about this one other than this is one big mess of a movie.

It's part of Legendary Pictures Monsterverse series, which began in 2014 with an American remake of Godzilla and was followed by 2017's Kong: Skull Island and 2019's Godzilla: King of the Monsters. Legendary's goal was to create the monster equivilent of Marvel's Cinematic Universe -- creating a bunch of standalone movies featuring different monsters and then bring them all together in one big confrontation movie. Despite their grand plans, all they ended up with is 2 Godzilla movies and a Kong picture, which isn't all that much of a universe. The first Godzilla movie was okay if strangely remote and unexciting. The second one was a confusing mess and the Kong movie was dreadful. So Legendary's batting average hasn't been so great. But despite a rather indifferent reception at the box office and creating no sense of excitement or anticipation in the general audience (apart from the movies not being so hot, there has been an average of four years between each, which has been a real momentum killer), they have insisted on pushing on. And so here we are at what is being touted as the series' climactic film.

Conceptually, this movie is all over the map.

In recent years, studios have take to creating "writers rooms" for their franchise pictures. They hire a bunch of highly paid screenwriters to get together and brainstorm ideas for the individual movies and for the overall series. And this movie feels exactly like a movie written by a room full of people -- there are a million ideas in the piece, none of which are ever developed in any significant way. The result feel like a grab bag of "cool" notions that never gel into anything resembling a coherent narrative.

One of these ideas is brilliant and could have been turned into the core of a really good Kong movie -- Kong is taught sign language by a little deaf girl who becomes the one person on Earth who can communicate with him. If something interesting had been done with this is could have provided the heart and soul every good Kong movie requires. But alas nothing interesting is done with it.

Some of the other ideas are really bizarre -- such as one that suggests that Kong is part of an ancient race that could apparently think in complex, multi-dimensional ways and once build advanced, complex technology and had a rigid, monarchical social system, which feels like something more out of Edgar Rice Burroughs than the Kong legend. In addition, there's a giant robot Godzilla built by the movie's villain for no reason that is ever made clear and that (I think) becomes sentient and evil, also for no reason that is ever made clear. Also Kong and Godzilla's first encounter occurs on the decks of a fleet of Navy ships -- with each beast leaping from ship to ship and sinking or capsizing them as they go -- is an idea that may have seemed cool in the writer's room but is ludicrous in execution.

The movie's concepts feel like a collection of every franchise movie made in the last 15 years. It's got Kong and Godzilla. There's a secret underground world that looks just like the land in Avatar. There's a giant robot just like in Transformers. There's a lot of Matrix-like stuff, stuff from Pacific Rim, Total Recall, Conan The Barbarian, Jurassic Park, Lord of the Rings, The Core, and whatever else strikes your fancy. It's an IP cornucopia, I guess. The problem is that it gives the whole piece a very tired, "I've seen this all before" feel.

The movie also wastes a lot of time talking about and explaining the machinations of Monarch, a secret, monster-hunting organization that Legendary has been using as the element that ties together their Monsterverse. The thing about Monarch is that each film wastes inordinate amounts of time talking about it without ever making it clear exactly what Monarch is or what it is trying to achieve. In some of the movies, it' seems to be a government organization. In some it seems to be a private group. In some of the movies it's a force for good and in others seems to be an evil cabal. There's also a lot of nonsense about "Hollow Earth theory" that is never made clear. In this film, it posits that there's a magical land that exists in the core of the earth from which all kaiju originate. It is said to be impossible to get to and that Monarch needs Kong to get them there, although we quickly learn that Monarach has already built a tunnel that goes there and that they don't need Kong to lead them there at all. The whole movie has this sort of illogical logic.

As a character, Kong gets a lot of attention; Godzilla gets considerably less so. Godzilla was portrayed as a basically benign and heroic character in the other Legendary films. Here he initially a villain -- he's suddenly running around attacking people and installations. Some lip service is given to the idea that something's gone wrong that has turned Godzilla evil, but the explanation is never made clear. Anyway, he barely registers. The human characters get no attention -- they're just a bunch of exposition machines and we never care about any of them for even a minute. The little deaf girl is cute enough, I guess. She certainly gives the film's best performance.

Ultimately, the thing that matters the most about a Kong vs. Godzilla movie is does it deliver the two-giant-monsters-bashing-the-hell-out-of-one-another-and-miniature- cities fun we want from a movie like this? And the answer there, sadly, is no. The main culprit in this case is CGI. When the two giant monsters are guys in suits stomping around on obviously miniature sets, it's fun. But here, the creatures are CGI and the cities are CGI and so there's a photrealism to the destruction that feels too real to be fun and yet there's also the unreality and weightlessness to the action that all CGI has that feels less real than guys in suits and so what is fun in live action is just grim and ponderous here. Also, there isn't a single live action location in the movie -- everything is computer-generated. It looks more like an animated movie than something set in the real world. And so any sense of jeopardy immediately evaporates.

The fight itself is unmotivated. There are a few lines dropped here and there stating that Godzilla and Kong are ancient enemies, although the nature of the enmity is never made claear (although Kong uses a battle axe made out of a Godzilla fin that suggests a pretty deep-seated animosity. So we're never quite sure why they're faighting with one another. And there are no stakes to the fight -- they beat up on one another but it's never stated just what good or bad thing will happen if one of the other triumphs (or is defeated). Also, this is a modern CGI fx movie, which means it is jam-packed with an overkill of enormously complex, pre-vizzed-to-death, action shots and sequences that have been edited together at such a fast and furious pace that none of it registers after a while. It's just endless swirling cameras and mayhem that all blends together on one massive, uninteresting blob. There was a time when the kid in me would find this sort of thing to be terribly exciting, but at this point all I feel is bludgeoned and numb.

This is "A Film by Adam Wingard." I don't know who Adam Wingard is, but it doesn't seem he directed this movie so much as he supervised the pre-viz teams, hopefully in a calm and pleasant manner. He evidences no ability to work with actors, because everyone here is in their own separate movie and the amount of mugging on display is at times embarrassing. The movie seems to have been edited in a cuisinart -- the pacing is relentless but you have so much stuff being thrown at you constantly that it's never really clear what's going on. Not that it matters. There are a ton of big name additional editors buried in the credits. I suspect this means that this was once a much longer film that was hacked down to under two hours, losing much of it's clarity along the way.

The best thing I can say about this film is that it irritated me less than its predecessor -- the pretentious, pointless, visually incoherent KONG: SKULL ISLAND, which for me is the worst King Kong movie ever made. Which makes this one is the second worst -- $300 million worth of meh.