Godzilla, as a character, doesn’t seem that complex. He’s a giant lizard with radioactive fire breath who stomps all over everything in his path, a force of nature who battles other giant monsters while showing humans how far down the food chain they actually are. So, why is that hard to replicate outside of Japan? The mid 90s American Godzilla showed a much more mortal monster that didn’t even look right. But in 2014, a newer American Godzilla seemed to get it about right. While it barely showed the title monster for long stretches, focusing instead on bland human characters, that’s what most Japanese Godzilla movies were like. As such, I enjoyed that one for what it was. Not so the sequel, Godzilla: King of the Monsters. That one kept Godzilla, Mothra, Rodan, and Ghidorah mostly far in the background while even more bland human characters mostly hung around inside various planes and subs, watching as everything unfurled. By contrast, the same cinematic universe’s Kong: Skull Island was just a ton of popcorn fun. The latter two films promised an eventual throw-down between Kong and Godzilla, and now, one year delayed by the pandemic, we finally have it with the aptly titled Godzilla vs Kong.
Can we get a movie that was more like Skull Island and less like King of the Monsters? We can only hope.
Godzilla, the undisputed “alpha titan,” has spent most of the previous two movies acting as a defender of the human race against other large, hostile monsters. Kong, for whatever reason, did not bow to Godzilla or even really appear aside from some small shots of him from the back in King of the Monsters, so where or how Kong fits into Godzilla’s world is still unknown. But then Godzilla does something uncharacteristic and attacks a human company, namely one APEX Cybernetics. Why would he do that? No one seems to know. There is, however, one possibility to preventing another attack: Kong. Kong has been kept under wraps as much as it is possible to keep a creature like Kong under wraps by the titan-monitoring agency Monarch out of fear that, should Kong somehow get out of there, Godzilla would head straight for him and the two “alpha titans” would clash in a violent manner while both have, thus far, been rather friendly creatures.
Now, these movies do thrive on their bland human characters when most viewers would probably care more about the kaiju. Here, that basically means going in three different directions. Seen sporadically is Kyle Chandler as the director of Monarch. Sure, the character has a name, but it doesn’t really matter. Returning as his daughter is Millie Bobby Brown, the one person who believes Godzilla is somehow innocent of whatever happened, and she managed to rope in her friend Josh (Julian Dennison) and conspiracy theorist podcaster Bernie (Brian Tyree Henry) to look into APEX and find out what was going on. Meanwhile, APEX CEO Walter Simmons (Demian Bichir) recruits Dr. Nathan Lind (Alexander Skarsgard) to look into a potential “Hollow Earth” to find a power source that may be able to defeat Godzilla, but he’ll need Kong to do it since this is the land where the titans may have come from, and Kong’s “genetic memory” may allow him to find the place through a cave in the Antarctic. That will require convincing Kong’s human minder Dr. Ilene Andrews (Rebecca Hall) whose adopted daughter, a deaf Skull Island native (Kaylee Hottle) has a special bond with the giant Kong, to go along with any plan. Somehow this all comes together in the end.
Look, no one in their right mind watches movies like this or anything in the Transformers franchise for anything involving the human characters who still make up most of the run time. People tune in to see the monsters, and the monsters are done well here. Kong, who easily gets more screentime, has more personality in his digital pinky than many of the human characters, and Godzilla’s destructive rampages are a thing of devastating beauty. When the two throw-down, there’s a distinctiveness to each’s battle style. Kong fights acrobatically, leaping around and even making use of tools. Godzilla is all claws and teeth, and that’s when he’s not just leading with his atomic breath. Arguably, this isn’t a fair fight in some respects, but the filmmakers do what they can to make it look like one.
That said, this one wasn’t really as much of a chore when the humans came on screen either as it was with King of the Monsters. True, much like that movie, it’s a lot of overqualified actors playing bland and forgettable characters, but the difference here is mostly due to Dennison and Tyree Henry as both of them are played for something King of the Monsters sorely needed: comic relief. It was small moments like that, along with Kong’s bond with the little girl, that made me think the problem with the Godzilla based movies isn’t that they bring in bad actors. Quite the contrary as these movies assemble rather impressive casts but then don’t give them much to do. It occurs to me the reason the human characters in Skull Island worked as well as they did is they were as much character actors as they were good ones. Sure, Tom Hiddleston and Brie Larson are basically stock male and female leads, but Samuel L. Jackson, John Goodman, and John C. Reilly bring a lot of personality to their work in general, and it shined through in Skull Island. It also helped that those characters had an actual character arc (Jackson wanting revenge on Kong, Goodman wanting proof of the titans, and Reilly just wanting to go home to America after being lost for decades), but given the first two movies to feature Godzilla and the best realized character was the one seen briefly in the first movie as played by Brian Cranston, it strikes me the problem of these movies’ human characters is as much what kind of actors are playing them as anything else.
Still, I actually had a lot of fun with this one. It’s not as good as Skull Island, but it was an enjoyable, mindless monster movie with a lot of questionable science, and if that’s your thing, this is that thing done largely well.
Grade: B+
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