Film / Godzilla Vs Kong A To M

A-M | N-Z

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A

• Acid-Trip Dimension: When the HEAVs pass through the barrier between the surface world and the Hollow Earth, they face a bizarre and mesmerizing void of colour straight out of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
• Adaptational Badass:
  • Kong is now fully grown and just as big as Godzilla, making him the largest version of the character in cinematic history. Not only that, but the final battle in Hong Kong shows he's every bit as fast and cunning as any other version of the character, making him a serious threat to even Godzilla - the world's undisputed Alpha Titan, who got there by incinerating the nigh-unstoppable Ghidorah.
  • Mechagodzilla, though still possessing a powerful arsenal to aid him in defeating Godzilla, trades a lot of the flashy weapons of previous incarnations for increased durability to up-close-and-personal attacks, and he furthermore has a much more powerful Proton Scream and is much larger than any of the previous live-action incarnations.
• Adaptational Dumbass:
  • Mark Russell and Director Guillerman have a moment of this in the film's novelization, where they both wonder aloud whether they should be rooting for Godzilla or Mechagodzilla just after the Mecha's emergence has confirmed to them that Apex are indeed responsible for provoking Godzilla's rampage entirely and just after they've watched the Mecha raze a good chunk of Hong Kong to nothing For the Evulz.
  • Furthermore, the novelization outright confirms several aspects of Mark's parenting style since gaining custody of Madison which are somewhat lacking, all of which were only implied in the finished film. His treatment of Madison like she's Just a Kid and like she's far stupider and more helpless than she is is not something that solely started with Godzilla's present attack causing Mark to doubt the latter; it's a result of Mark wilfully forgetting that Madison performed some of the gutsiest acts of heroism in the previous movie in favor of lying to himself that she's a fragile, naïve and obedient offspring whom he'd much rather have to deal with, despite all blatant evidence that Madison is anything but those things. The novel shows that Mark wants to mend his relationship with Madison after being absent for years, yet he's oblivious to the fact that treating a teenager like Madison in such a way as this is completely counter-productive to those aims and is likely to drive her away from him again. It's furthermore confirmed that Mark enrolling Madison in a public school without thinking this course through has made Madison a social pariah in her new educational setting (one of the most challenging settings that a kid will ever face in their upbringing no less), yet Mark obstinately refuses to listen to Madison's complaints that run counter to his own wants and refuses to acknowledge that he's creating more problems than solutions for her.
• Adaptational Expansion: Similar to prior entries in the Monsterverse, there is a novelization which has more content than the film, although less than before. Most notably, there are many prologue scenes setting up the main story which are completely absent in the movie, and there are more internal monologues and longer dialogue scenes between the human characters.
  • In the film, there's absolutely no mention of Alan Jonah's fate nor how the skull of Ghidorah's surviving head that Jonah obtained has wound up in the possession of Apex Cybernetics. The novelization features a prologue scene where a man who's all but stated to be Jonah meets with Walter Simmons after contacting him and sells him two of Ghidorah's skulls, although Jonah's reasons for doing so (when Apex's agenda is diametrically opposed to his) remain uncertain.
  • In the film, there's just a freaky Cool Gate in the Vile Vortex leading to the Hollow Earth that had no foreshadowing or explanation beyond the characters' exposition about the Hollow Earth's gravity inversion. The novelization describes the Cool Gate as an electrostatic-gravitational membrane in the Earth's mantle that essentially separates the Earth's surface world and the Hollow World.
  • One plot-point this film and Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) have never addressed is how passages to the Hollow Earth can remain solid and fixed with the plastic-like molten state of the Earth's mantle. A reporter asks Nathan about this in the novel before David Lind's fateful mission, and Nathan replies that it has to do with the electrostatic-gravitational membrane.
  • A prologue scene shows how and when Kong saved Jia's life during Skull Island's destruction.
  • In the film, it's unexplained why Jia was out and unsupervised inside Kong's bio-dome and able to approach him, especially considering that Dr. Andrews is wary of her getting too close to Kong on her own on the Navy carrier later in the film. The novelization reveals Jia basically snuck out while Andrews was still asleep.
  • The film implies that Kong learned sign language from Jia, but the novelization states that he picked up on American Sign Language from Andrews spending years trying (seemingly without success) to teach it to him.
  • The novelization explains that jets didn't move to try and deter Godzilla during his attack on Pensacola until he'd already made destructive landfall because Monarch were tracking him but were skeptical that he'd come ashore (let alone rampage through a population center with no other Titan in sight) until it was quite late.
  • The novelization makes Mark Russell's assumption that Godzilla has made a Face–Heel Turn seem a lot less purely-biased and idiotic. He's been grimly wondering since the events of King of the Monsters if Godzilla, true to his status as a guardian of the Earth's natural balance if not the individuals on it, will one day start attacking humanity, who have been reverting to their old exploitative ways since the Titans returned to hibernation.
  • In the film, Andrews seems just as uncaring as Nathan about the question of why Godzilla is uncharacteristically attacking now when she joins the mission to bring Kong to the Hollow Earth. In the novelization, she assumes that Godzilla's new apparent hostility is caused by him sensing Kong as a new rival to his dominance.
  • It seems odd in the film that Mark doesn't notice sooner that Madison has left home and gone missing for what's implied to be at least 24 hours. The novelization explains it's partly because he was called away by Director Guillerman to assist him in dealing with Godzilla's rampage and investigating Apex.
  • The novelization provides some explanation of why Muggles Do It Better has started creeping in and everything seems more hi-tech than before. In the previous films, humans were overconfident that they could contain the Titans if they tried and they underestimated the Titans' Adaptive Ability in the face of their anti-Titan measures, but the events of King of the Monsters were humbling for the whole world in those respects.
  • The novel explains the science of how Monarch knock out Kong so they can transport him off Skull Island, and it reveals that Packard's success at briefly downing Kong with napalm in Kong: Skull Island was the foundation of this discovery. It also confirms that Monarch used this to knock Kong out before the events of the film, in order to get him inside the bio-dome when they were building it around him.
  • It's noted in the film that the Navy fleet transporting Kong have been steering clear of all of Godzilla's charted territorial routes, but he's found them anyway. The novelization indicates that the cause of Godzilla's rampage has aggravated and distressed Godzilla to the point that he's changed his routes.
  • The novelization briefly addresses the question of how the Skullcrawlers can ever find time to reproduce when they're essentially just eating machines driven by Horror Hunger. Apparently, there have been some studies which indicate it often ends up being Conceive and Kill for the copulating male.
  • Nathan provides a complex explanation of why they have to find a specific focal point in the Hollow Earth's energy mineral (which turns out to be in the temple made by Kong's ancestors) to harvest and analyze it successfully, and they can't just use any of the deposits that are visible on the mountain earlier in the film.
  • While the film confirms that Godzilla is rampaging because he's aware of Mechagodzilla and, more specifically, he's implicitly aware of the still partly-alive remains of Ghidorah being incorporated into it, it's never quite explained how he knows considering the state that Ghidorah's remains are in. The novelization confirms that every time Mechagodzilla or its parts are activated, the Ghidorah remains send out a corrupted version of Ghidorah's bio-acoustics which Godzilla picks up on.
  • The novelization also goes into more detail on what's controlling Mechagodzilla (even if it remains a bit murky). Rather than the active sentience of Ghidorah, it seems to be a Fusion Dance; Ghidorah's instinctual rage and hate for everything coming together with Ren Serizawa's desire for supremacy over Godzilla and Titankind through the Mecha's AI to create an entirely new consciousness.
• Adaptational Mundanity: It's more subtle, but Apex Cybernetics seem to continue Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019)'s tradition of adapting the old Godzilla continuities' Human Aliens who attempt to control the Kaiju (including their own creation Mechagodzilla and/or Ghidorah) so that they're humans trying to control forces they don't understand and often suffering the consequences.
• Adaptational Villainy:
  • Played With in regards to Mechagodzilla.
    • Previous incarnations of the character varied from alien superweapons meant for taking over Earth to a more genuinely good-intentioned, manmade effort to defend the world against Godzilla. This film's version of Mechagodzilla is built by an evil corporation led by a Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist, with the aim of murdering a fairly heroic iteration of Godzilla and ushering in a corporate dystopia.
    • Almost every Mechagodzilla iteration except for Kiryu was, on its own, a mindless piece of technology that was only as evil as its pilot – even Kiryu, which was possessed by the original Godzilla's soul, acted heroically in the end. This film's version, which is possessed by Ghidorah's consciousness, is completely sadistic, genocidal, and an unrepentant threat to the world all the way to its destruction.
  • Downplayed in the official novelization, with its expansion confirming many vile things about Walter Simmons which the film only implied or hinted at. It's made explicit here that Simmons picked Hong Kong, one of the most densely-populated cities on Earth, as the site of his plan's fruition because he wants Godzilla to level such a city; just to make Simmons look good once he tries to kill Godzilla. Simmons is also constantly testing and pushing Maia to make sure that she's worthy to inherit his corporate empire, and Bernie believes that Simmons arranged the suspiciously-timed car collision which killed Bernie's wife a few days after she got dangerously close to finding out about Apex's true agenda.
• Adaptation Amalgamation: Mechagodzilla takes from the various versions of a few characters throughout the eras: like the Showa version it's evil and alien (thanks to being built from the remains of Ghidorah), like the Heisei version Ghidorah plays a crucial role in its construction (the Heisei version was essentially reverse-engineered from Mecha-King Ghidorah, this version requires Ghidorah's neural network and telepathy to function), like the Millennium version it's built on the remains of another kaiju (the original Godzilla there, Ghidorah here) which causes its builders to lose control of it, and like the Heisei and Millennium versions it's built by humanity to protect themselves from Godzilla.
• Adaptation-Induced Plot Hole: In the film, only one Ghidorah skull is shown or explicitly referenced onscreen, presumably that of San/Kevin's decapitated head from The Stinger of the previous film. The only reference to a second skull is when Bernie speculates while expositing that "there's one here and another inside of [Mechagodzilla]" to act as Mechagodzilla's Electronic Telepathy receiver. The novelization however explicitly states that there was a second Ghidorah skull inside Mechagodzilla rather than just another piece of San/Kevin's DNA, and Walter Simmons' reaction to being offered the two skulls by Jonah in the novel implies there was supposed to be three intact Ghidorah skulls in the world. Which seems like an especially glaring Continuity Snarl when considering how Godzilla vaporized all three of Ghidorah's non-severed heads in both the previous film and its novelization. While it's not impossible to explain the second Ghidorah skull's existence away via speculation and fan theory, the novelization nevertheless doesn't provide so much as a hint of an explanation for the inconsistency.
• Advertised Extra:
  • A giant Skullcrawler resembling Ramarak but with distinct red coloration was featured quite prominently in promotional material and even got an action figure — said Skullcrawler gets about 30 seconds of screentime as cannon fodder for Mechagodzilla.
  • Mark Russell and Ren Serizawa both respectively got attention drawn to them in the trailers implying they would both at least be relevant supporting characters, but Ren's role is essentially an Elite Mook and Mark has only a few scenes and minimal relevance in the film proper.
• Aesop Amnesia:
  • In the novelization, at least. In the previous movie, it was hinted that Monarch's withholding much of their information on the Titans was part of what made the public and government so distrustful of them before the Oxygen Destroyer was launched, and at the movie's end after the Titans' global rampage, Monarch have decided to open their secret files to the public. It's hinted in this movie, and outright confirmed in its official novelization, that Monarch have been keeping their discovery of the Hollow Earth in the previous movie secret from the public, which presents a Series Continuity Error for the film version due to a public article in the previous movie's Creative Closing Credits discussing the Titans and Hollow Earth as if it's now public knowledge that the latter is real.
  • Speaking of the above, the novelization also hints that civilization at large is being hit with this in the five years since the ending of Godzilla: King of the Monsters. The previous movie's Creative Closing Credits indicated that humanity was now on its way to finding peaceful and more eco-friendly ways to thrive off of the Titans' presence; but in this story, humanity have apparently been resetting back to their old, ecologically-damaging and unsustainable ways after the Titans have returned to hibernation. Nevermind how Godzilla is Easily Condemned by the world following his Pensacola attack, despite the heroic reputation his actions in the previous film earned him.
  • It's also shown in this movie that although Mark Russell no longer wants the Titans killed over his son's death, his Break the Haughty in the previous movie otherwise didn't last and he didn't internalize any of his other lessons (or if he did internalize them, he did so in the worst way): he's still just as obstinate, argumentative, over-emotional and prone to wallowing in sorrow for himself over sparing a serious thought for his loved ones' feelings as he's ever been. Mark's Character Development from the previous movie even seems to backtrack in response to Godzilla's Pensacola attack, as he jumps to a ridiculously-contrived assumption that Godzilla has gone bad for no reason which is based purely on Mark's own projection of Emma's betrayal.
• Alien Blood: The blood of the Warbats and Skullcrawlers is a sludgy-looking yellow-green. Mechagodzilla also bleeds a black, oil-like Machine Blood as Kong hacks off his limbs with his supercharged axe.
• Alien Sky: The Hollow Earth, being what it is, is essentially two rocky floors/ceilings which are far apart except in places with high mountainous terrain (where the shifting gravity can allow the inhabitants to switch from walking on one floor/ceiling to another) and which act as skies to one-another. On low-terrain, it looks like there's a distant rocky "ceiling" above the clouds, giving the Hollow Earth quite an Acid-Trip Dimension feeling.
• All There in the Manual: Some side material answers questions. One of the big ones is what happened to all the Titans that woke up in King of the Monsters. Godzilla had them go back into hibernation shortly after the events of King of the Monsters.
• Ambiguous Situation:
  • Precisely how much of Ghidorah's consciousness there is left in the skull when it hijacks the psionic uplink to make Mechagodzilla begin to Kill All Humans independently of a human pilot, and whether or not it's solely San/Kevin's consciousness in the severed skull. See Alternative Character Interpretation for details.
  • Also, it's ambiguous whether Ghidorah's consciousness was only awoken when Mechagodzilla was empowered with the untested Hollow Earth energy, or was active the entire time and waiting for its new body to fully come to life. On one hand, he only goes rogue at the end after the Hollow Earth energy is sent into Mechagodzilla, on the other rather than Godzilla just being able to sense Mechagodzilla whenever it's active, both times he senses it is preceded by Mechagodzilla's eye actively emitting an ORCA like tone, implying it's actively signaling him without any input from Apex, with both times being when Mechagodzilla should be inactive (the novelization also reveals this signal is a mechanical recreation of Ghidorah's Alpha Call). The novelization provides hints to support both possibilities.
  • It's unclear if Godzilla actually intended to attack Kong after the carrier fight (which the humans intentionally made look like Kong and them had surrendered) or if he just attacked the source of the energy he sensed which just happened to be Kong. Adding to the latter possibility, when Kong climbs up, Godzilla was simply heading off to continue his pursuit of Ghidorah and Kong was the one who challenged him.
• American Kirby Is Hardcore: The official Japanese poster for the film always portray Godzilla and Kong engaging each other while the American poster will have Kong and Godzilla stare each other down.
• Ammo-Using Melee Weapon: Kong's axe needs to charged up with nuclear energy in order to function at full strength (signified by how much it glows). Without a charge, it's only able to dent Mechagodzilla a little, but once infused with Godzilla's atomic breath, it chops through the robot like a knife through warm butter.
• Ancestral Weapon: Kong's battle-axe is a relic from an ancient war between his species and Godzilla's, and was recovered in a mountain-fortress deep within the Hollow Earth, lodged in the neck of a truly titanic skeleton of Godzilla’s species.
• Apocalypse Not: Big time. The previous film saw over a dozen Titans wreck cities and cause a Natural Disaster Cascade worldwide before Godzilla got them to calm down, with at least two major American cities thoroughly annihilated by King Ghidorah, and the film clearly portrayed the conclusion of these events as Nothing Is the Same Anymore / the Dawn of an Era for a new world. Come this film, and very few of the previous film's events seem to have had any lasting impact: the awakened Titans went back into hibernation inbetween films instead of cohabiting the Earth with humanity, and we don't see or hear much of anything of the socio-political, territorial and environmental ramifications of the Titans' global rampage except that America looks like it's fully recovered in just five years. The novelization makes it explicit that for better or worse, things have just gone back to the way they were after the Titans returned to hibernation. If you expected this film to be the MonsterVerse's Jurassic World Dominion on the creature front, prepare to be disappointed.
• Arbitrary Skepticism:
  • For some reason, Lind's theory that Titans originate from the Hollow Earth is seen as fanciful in-universe despite the fact the existence of the Hollow Earth was already seen firsthand in the last film.
  • The novelization states that Mark is still unconvinced that Ghidorah is really an alien, despite the fact he lives in a world where there's a giant pterosaur with literal magma for blood who can sleep comfortably inside active volcanoes' magma chambers.
• An Arm and a Leg: How Kong finishes off Mechagodzilla, after Godzilla supercharges Kong's axe with his atomic breath, allowing him to slice Mechagodzilla apart piece by piece.
• Artifact of Doom:
  • Apex Cybernetics, with their hubris and conceit in their beliefs that their technology can do anything, never should have messed with the organic component of their Secret Weapon's piloting system in the way that they did. Although Ghidorah's remaining decapitated head has decomposed to just a motionless skull, it still retains some of Ghidorah's cognitive functions. Apex, having obtained the skull from Alan Jonah (the novelization reveals Jonah voluntarily sold it to them), harness the skull's lingering telepathy to form a Brain/Computer Interface for controlling Mechagodzilla; but once the Green Rocks are infused into Mechagodzilla, Ghidorah's lingering consciousness in the skull overtakes the system and merges with the Mecha's A.I. to turn it into an autonomous Robotic Psychopath. Furthermore, it's ambiguous how aware the consciousness in the skull is of what's happening around it before it possesses Mechagodzilla, but both versions of the story drop some hints that it might have been cognizant the entire time, and the novelization hints that it might have been messing with Ren's brain when he connected with it in such a way that spurred Ren on to empower Mechagodzilla and unwittingly give Ghidorah a new reincarnation.
  • Zig-Zagged with the Hollow Earth's Green Rocks. On one hand, the mineral acts as the Hollow Earth's sun, nourishing the proliferation of life there, and it's apparently also the source of Godzilla's atomic powers. On the other hand, when Apex mine and synthesize the mineral so they can use it as an energy source for their tech, Dr. Andrews protests that they can't just strip it like that (the novelization notes this is because she fears they underestimated what they were planning to tamper with), and she's proven right, as the consequences of Apex's actions are horrifying. Apex using the synthesized mineral as a power source without first conducting any testing in order to power Mechagodzilla, which is connected to Ghidorah's telepathic skull, leads to Ghidorah's subconsciousness jumping into the fully-charged machine and merging with its A.I.; resulting in an autonomous and completely-malevolent Godzilla-level Robotic Psychopath.
• Artificial Outdoors Display: The gigantic bio-dome containing Kong and a chunk of Skull Island's ecosystem has a fake sky screened across its entire inner-surface which consists of a hive of screens. When we see it, it's projecting a peaceful, sunlit sky which stands in stark contrast to the mighty Perpetual Storm that's engulfed the island outside the dome. Kong isn't fooled by the AOD in the slightest, in fact he makes his Domed Hometown frustrations known by hurling tree-made spears at the artificial sky and breaking holes in it.
• Artistic License – Military:
  • We see a ship that looks like a Ticonderoga-class cruiser. It's got the hull number 85, which doesn't exist, but that's more acceptable than later when we see the surface combat ships engage Godzilla. The cruiser looks like it has three-gun turrets styled after World War 2 Iowa-class battleships, particularly when Godzilla bulldozes it in half with the overhead shot showing two superfiring turrets. In reality, Ticonderogas have single-gun turrets, one forward and one aft. The opening credits in a Freeze-Frame Bonus moment have a line saying the military increased its spending to deal with Titans, although that's still highly questionable. It also shows RAM launchers firing rapidly, much more than they're capable of.
  • It's also highly unlikely those two cruisers would pull up alongside the carrier and start unloading, given the risk to the crew still aboard the carrier.
  • On closer inspection, the warships with the battleship styled turrets have the distinct superstructure of the Arleigh Burke class guided missile destroyer, while the hull heavily resembles the far more older Iowa class battleship, all of which were decommissioned throughout the 1990's.
  • In a sort of blink-and-you-miss-it moment, an Oliver Hazard Perry class frigate can be seen as part of the fleet transporting Kong to Antartica, and was one of the two ships that was cut in half by Godzilla's tail. These ships served with the US Navy from the late 1970s up until 2015 in our own reality, however considering the fact that the existence of Titans was revealed to the Monsterverse's Earth in 2014 during the MUTO attacks, it would have made sense that the US Navy decided to keep older ships in active service in face of the new Titan threat.
• Artistic License – Physics:
  • The opening credits give us numbers for Godzilla: he's 393 feet tall and weighs 164,000 tons. A Nimitz-class carrier weighs at most 117,000 tons. Godzilla alone outweighs the carrier. The carrier should have immediately capsized the moment Godzilla tried to climb on to fight Kong.
  • In general, the effect of the monsters on terrain or buildings is what the choreography demands.
  • Averted in at least one instance. According to Admiral Jamie Foggo III (retired), an American aircraft carrier displacing 90,000-117,000 tons is perfectly capable of supporting the weight of Kong, who weights around 50,000 tons.
• Ascended Fridge Horror: The end of the previous movie left a lot of viewers speculating that Ghidorah's leftover decapitated head was still alive and the hydra wasn't done with the world, since Ghidorah demonstrated during that movie that its body can rapidly regrow lost heads from the neck stumps entirely. This movie confirms that the severed head is still partly alive and capable of cognition, and that it can enable Ghidorah to come back in some form, though not in the way that most viewers thought it would.
• Ascended Meme: Fans took to calling the way Godzilla killed the Female Muto in Godzilla — forcing her mouth open and firing his Atomic Breath down her throat — the "Kiss of Death". The opening credits use that exact term when covering Godzilla's various victories.
• Asian Speekee Engrish: Bernie Hayes tries this when Madison Russell and Josh Valentine visit his home, putting on an awful attempt at an Asian accent and saying that he's seen their faces and will contact the authorities. Madison points out that he doesn't trust the authorities, then gives her name, knowing he'll recognize it and let them in.
• Attack the Mouth: Kong's primary strategy during both his fights with Godzilla, both on the boat and in Hong Kong so as to avoid a blast of blue plasma. On the boat, Kong's first move was punching Godzilla right in the face. In Hong Kong, Kong puts Godzilla in a headlock and shoves his axe into his mouth.
• Attack the Injury: Pinned by Godzilla's foot on his chest, Kong punches Godzilla in the axe wound on his leg. It hurts Godzilla but also prompts the Big G into stomping on Kong's chest even harder in retaliation.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Apex has made Mechagodzilla, a mechanical Titan stronger than Godzilla... and there doesn't exist a conventional power source that can run it. At best, Mechagodzilla can only be active for around a minute before shutting down, and that's when operating at only 40%. Thus Apex's entire reason for getting Kong off Skull Island is to find something that can actually power it. And all this is before it turns out the kaiju they chose to act as the operating system is still in there and the moment they do have the necessary power source, King Ghidorah takes over.
• Awesome Moment of Crowning: In the Hollow Earth, Kong sitting a massive stone structure resembling a throne, his new axe held like a regal scepter (or barbarian king's weapon) is framed to evoke this trope, as Kong claims the right to be called King Kong.

B

• Back from the Dead: Played With. It's revealed that Ghidorah's skull (which is acting as the central hub for Mechagodzilla's neural pathways) isn't completely dead and retains something of King Ghidorah's consciousness. This becomes a clear problem when Mechagodzilla being fully charged enables Ghidorah's influence to take over the Mecha, making it kill its creators and actively begin to seek the deaths of Godzilla and all humans in sight.
• Badass and Child Duo: Kong has taken in the last, orphaned Iwi Jia under his personal guard since the rest of her tribe perished amid Skull Island's destruction. The gigantic King of the Primates (who has also now lost his homeland just as much as Jia has lost her people) is fiercely and directly protective of Jia, and he can mutually communicate with her through sign language, though he at first actively hides the latter from other humans out of distrust. Jia meanwhile is a young girl who trusts and believes in Kong unconditionally, and accompanies him wherever he goes throughout the film. A well-meaning Nathan thinks Jia can manipulate Kong to Team Kong's agenda once the extent of her bond with the primate is revealed.
• Bat Out of Hell: The Hellhawks, which resemble a cross between a bird-of-prey and a bat. Averted with the Warbats, who despite their name are actually flying snakes.
• Bash Brothers: Godzilla and Kong when they finally work together to fight Mechagodzilla, after Jia convinces Kong that Godzilla is not the enemy. Godzilla seems to realize the alliance as well: empowering Kong's axe to allow him to defeat Mechagodzilla, and having no further animosity with him afterwards and departing peacefully.
• Beam Spam: Godzilla is much more willing to use his atomic breath than previously, firing it multiple times in each fight. This ends up working against him, however, because overusing his energy with his breath tires him out and allows Kong to get many advantages in their fight by using his axe to absorb his breath and redirect.
• Beam-O-War: One happens in the climax between Godzilla and Mechagodzilla, between their respective blue and red atomic beams. It's Mechagodzilla's beam who ends up overpowering his opponent's breath.
• Beard of Evil: Both the male Apex conspirators (billionaire Corrupt Corporate Executive Walter Simmons and the Serizawa lineage's Black Sheep Ren) have trimmed goatees, and underneath their pretensions that they want to help Monarch save the world, they're really the Big Bad Wannabe and his Dragon respectively whom in any lifelike setting would be charged with crimes against humanity once their actions were exposed.
• The Beautiful Elite: Walter Simmons and his daughter Maia are a billionaire CEO and heiress respectively, and both are definite cases of Evil Is Sexy with the trendy attire to complete it (justified in Simmons' case by the fact he's a boundless narcissist). However, only the elder Simmons displays the proper sophistication of this trope, whereas Maia is a smug Rich Bitch with the bare minimum in any kind of charisma.
• Be Careful What You Wish For:
  • It's hinted in the movie and confirmed by the novelization that Madison is miserable in public school, and would much rather return to being mentored among Monarch if her father would stop being unmovingly stubborn and put her viewpoint before his own. Ironically, Godzilla: King of the Monsters supplementary material indicates that when she was in her mother's custody, she just wanted to be a normal kid.
  • Ren Serizawa gets this in the novelization. Here, he's portrayed as wanting to find a permanent power source for Mechagodzilla so that he can feel like a god through the uplink to the Mecha indefinitely — he only gets his wish through his consciousness getting absorbed into the machine and suffering a Mind-Reformat Death.
• Behemoth Battle: Just look at the title. The two clash on both water (as Godzilla ambushes the fleet transporting Kong) and land, absolutely wrecking Hong Kong. Kong also battles two Warbats, flying snake-like Titans in the Hollow Earth. And then there's the two of them tag-teaming Mechagodzilla.
• Beneath the Earth: We finally see the Hollow Earth — a subterranean ecosystem where the Titans have been capable of thriving, and which has previously been discussed in Kong: Skull Island and briefly glimpsed in Godzilla: King of the Monsters. It's an incredible, gravity-defying ecosystem for the Titans, capped with the temple of the Kongs. After the defeat of Mechagodzilla, Kong becomes its king.
• Beware My Stinger Tail: Mechagodzilla has a tail-blade that rotates like a drill and is used against Kong.
• Big Bad: While Godzilla appears to be the main threat after going rogue, Mechagodzilla (which is Ghidorah in spirit) turns out to be the true antagonist with the entire plot revolving around it in some way on all sides.
• Big Bad Wannabe: Walter thinks he's the one in charge, Mechagodzilla is his tool to retake the world from the Titans, and he will usher in a new era for humanity...unfortunately, he used King Ghidorah to build Mechagodzilla, who disposes of him the nanosecond Mechagodzilla is completed. While ambiguous, both times Mechagodzilla gets Godzilla's attention, it's independent of Apex and shown with Mechagodzilla's eye glowing on its own with the same sound, implying Ghidorah may have been the one pulling the strings from the beginning. The novelization takes it a step further: Walter is Ren's Unwitting Pawn, as Ren intends to essentially become an artificial god through Mechagodzilla and had every intent to kill him once he had, making Ren closer to the Big Bad than Walter is. Both just lose out to Ghidorah in the end.
• Big Damn Heroes: In the final battle, Mechagodzilla is inches away from delivering an ironic Kiss of Death to finish off Godzilla... but at the last moment Kong jumps in, yanking Mechagodzilla head upward and redirecting his beam into the sky.
• Big Red Button: In the novelization, the HEAV's ignition button is one. And Nathan humorously needs help to find it. Despite it saying "Ignition".
• Bitch Slap: Downplayed. After Kong punches him in the face, Godzilla, while staggered, recovers and gives the ape a taste of his own medicine in the form of a giant swipe that sends Kong tumbling backwards during their fight on the aircraft carrier.^note Godzilla is a lot heavier and his tail allows him to maintain balance, and their shared weight causes the carrier to go up and down, much to Kong's detriment. Mechagodzilla gives an even stronger one to Godzilla by hitting his gills, throwing Godzilla around like a ragdoll with each hit.
• Bizarre Alien Locomotion: The Warbats are giant cobra-like snakes that can fly by using their oversized hoods as wings.
• Black and Nerdy: The Brian Tyree Henry-portrayed Bernie is a zany, exposition-spouting conspiracy theorist podcaster who seems like a loon at first glance, isn't very popular with other people besides Team Godzilla, and is smart enough to get closer than anyone else to discovering Apex's secret before he hooks up with Madison and Josh. Early in the movie, Dr. Andrews talks to a black, spectacles-wearing Monarch operative named Ben who is smart enough to observe that the bio-dome can't house Kong for much longer.
• Black Box: For all of Apex Cybernetics' boastings about human superiority over the Titans, their secret project is actually extremely reliant on seizing outside resources which are eldritch in nature as key materials to make the thing work at all; and Apex intend to use both resources with only a surface understanding of their capabilities and no true understanding of their inner-workings. Apex have converted Ghidorah's skull into a Wetware CPU for Mechagodzilla based on their discovery that Ghidorah's remains retain a telepathic connection to each-other, and Apex are planning to use the Green Rocks in the Hollow Earth as a power source for their superweapon based on their remote satellite discovery that it has high energy readings. Mixing these two things into a Humongous Mecha without an in-depth understanding of either of them ultimately leads to Ghidorah's subconsciousness from the skull taking control of a fully-charged, super-destructive Mechagodzilla for itself. "Monkey see monkey do" indeed.
• The Blade Always Lands Pointy End In: When Kong's axe is sent revolving through the air amidst the Hong Kong battle, it comes to a stop upon getting embedded blade-first in the side of a skyscraper mid-revolution. In the penultimate scene, when the axe falls as Kong literally buries the hatchet, it lands blade-first and the blade seems to lodge in the ground, keeping the handle somewhat upright. The only exception where the trope doesn't come into effect with the axe seems to be when it's seen lying on its side amid the rubble of Hong Kong, after it and its wielder were sent flying amid a previous battle.
• Blade Brake: Kong uses his axe to carefully descend down (or up?) the hole Godzilla made using his Atomic Breath from Hong Kong to Hollow Earth to confront Godzilla.
• Blood Knight: Godzilla shows that he's unambiguously enjoying fighting Kong when he sports a clear Slasher Smile during their brawl in Hong Kong – in fact, word from the filmmakers is that Godzilla was toying with Kong the entire time they fought, until Kong's use of his ancestors' axe against Godzilla prompted the latter to treat him as a serious opponent, at which point Godzilla swiftly mauls Kong to near-death without contest. Mechagodzilla, which has gained sentience from being possessed by Ghidorah's subconsciousness, certainly takes its time throwing around Godzilla (the foe it was built to defeat and who killed its consciouness's past incarnation) and beating him up, long past the point where it's clear Godzilla has been worn down too much to put up much more of a fight against the Mecha on his own.
• Blood-Splattered Warrior: When Kong starts chopping pieces off of Mechagodzilla, the robot's black oil spews all over, coating Kong head to toe.
• Book Ends: Godzilla leaves the same way he did at the end of Godzilla (2014). After all the fighting is said and done, Godzilla simply swims off into the water and out of sight.
  • The film opens with Kong waking up in the morning. It ends with a researcher saying Kong is going on "his morning stroll".
• Boring Yet Practical:
  • Godzilla ends the first fight against with Kong by simply grabbing him with his tail and dragging him under the sea, almost drowning him.
  • After his atomic breath backfired due to Kong's axe, Godzilla simply beats up the smaller Titan, almost killing him.
  • Mechagodzilla foregoes the shows of dominance that it used as Ghidorah and instead opts to go straight to beating up Godzilla with a much simpler arsenal of abilities compared to his outlandish wing beams, lightning and weather control and flight... And yet that's all he needs to beat down an exhausted Godzilla into the ground without letting his opponent land any meaningful hit on him.
• Both Sides Have a Point: When Kong initially doesn't enter Hollow Earth, Nathan suggests that Jia should tell him that there are others of his kind down there. Ilene rightly points out that they don't know that for sure, clearly taking into account how cruel it would be to dangle that carrot in front of him with the potential of being wrong. Nathan doesn't contest it, but also says that there's no way to get him back to Skull Island since they lost the fleet, and he won't survive in Antarctica. Ilene settles on the half-truth that there could be more of Kong's species in Hollow Earth.
• Brainy Brunette:
  • Madison Russell returns for this movie, and for extra points, she's the only person sensible enough to seriously focus on working out why Godzilla is rampaging first and foremost, and she's smart enough to almost single-handedly track down Bernie so she can get his help.
  • One of Madison's teammates, Josh, though a Cowardly Lion, has people skills which make him sharp in his own right, and whilst his digital pirating skills are useless for stopping Mechagodzilla, he does get the idea to cut the knot just in time to save Kong.
  • Almost every human member of Team Kong is a brunette and is pretty intelligent in some way.
    • Nathan Lind is a Monarch operative who's published a book on Hollow Earth theory, is familiar with Titan Genetic Memory, was part of the first effort to access the Hollow Earth, and was smart enough to land a college tutor job after being ousted from the scientific community as a quack.
    • Ilene Andrews is a linguist who's fluent in sign language and is in charge of monitoring Kong.
    • And Jia makes up for lacking in scholary intelligence with an emotional and instinctive intelligence, as she understands Kong far better than the others.
  • Among Apex, this trope is averted by Maia Simmons, a dark-haired woman who can fluidly spout details about her father's company's tech, but is infamously harebrained throughout the movie's released cut. Played Straight by Ren Serizawa, Apex's chief technology officer who has engineered Mechagodzilla and is training to pilot it.
• Breaking the Bonds: Subverted for the first time in Kong history. They finally made chains that not even the biggest incarnation could break with all his might.
• Break the Haughty:
  • Subverted by Maia Simmons – she starts out as a stuck-up, obnoxious Rich Bitch, but she seems to mellow a little after Godzilla's attack on the naval fleet makes her realize just how out of her depth she is. Yet this doesn't dissuade her from aiding her father's monstrous plan, nor from betraying the rest of Team Kong and leaving them to die, nor from having a continuously dim opinion of Kong (who ultimately kills her).
  • In the novelization, it's revealed that Mark Russell has become an oppressively insensitive and helicoptering parent to Madison since the previous movie's events left him with custody of her, expecting her to trust and obey him absolutely whilst giving her no trust or confidence in turn and making no attempt to understand her beyond what he wishes she was instead. He has a downplayed version of this trope when he realizes that Madison has gone off on her own to stop Apex, admitting to himself that this happened because he didn't communicate with her and treated her unfairly, and noting that he'll have to at least talk with Madison about this when the crisis is over.
• Breath Weapon: Godzilla's blue atomic breath returns, of course. Mechagodzilla has one too called the Proton Scream, but colored a crimson red.
• Bring It: Right before their second big fight, Godzilla and Kong both exchange challenging and defiant gestures: Godzilla threateningly slams his tail at the ground beside him, and Kong then parallels the gesture by furiously pounding the ground in front of himself with his axe and his fists. Then they charge.
• Broad Strokes: Despite being set in the aftermath of the events of Godzilla: King of the Monsters, this movie ignores many of the preceding movie's details, especially in regards to the previous movie's ending.
  • Despite that the previous movie saw over a dozen Titans awakening and actively destroying cities worldwide under King Ghidorah's command, you wouldn't think it at all when watching this movie and seeing how normally all parts of the world that the human leads visit seem to be functioning: no references to the many cities that were previously destroyed (which included the capital of the United States and several other countries' capitals), no references to all the people that must have died, no signs that the U.S. military's staff and resources were left severely diminished after all four branches' costly stand against Ghidorah and the Titan army, and absolutely no sign of the other Titans Ghidorah awakened, with Word of God and the Godzilla vs. Kong supplementary materials claiming (in contradiction to King of the Monsters' emphasis on the Titans' awakening and the ending being the Dawn of an Era) that all the Titans unceremoniously returned to their hibernations inbetween movies by Godzilla's command. This is in stark contrast to the lasting fallout of G-Day in the 2014 movie, which almost all of the MonsterVerse instalments set after 2014 have placed emphasis on.
    • Hell, even the recurring remark about how Apex's HEAVs' "can light up Las Vegas for a week" seem out-of-place in this movie, when Las Vegas was trashed by Femuto in the 2014 movie and Godzilla: King of the Monsters shows five years later that the city was subsequently abandoned.
  • The Hollow Earth theory is also treated in this movie by the public like it's still a quack theory as in Real Life, even though newspaper articles in the previous movie's ending outright stated that the public now know it to definitively be real, and that Monarch have been making a point of being more transparent with the public about their knowledge to boot. Monarch operative Nathan Lind even claims in the start of this movie that humans have never managed to access the Hollow Earth before, when that's exactly what Monarch's top brass did in the previous movie.
  • In Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Monarch successfully entered (and exited) the Hollow Earth without getting ripped to shreds via an underwater entrance which took them to a gigantic underground pocket. In Godzilla vs. Kong, the Hollow Earth is explicitly walled off from the surface world by a gravity-inverting electro-static "membrane" lining the inside of the Earth, which annihilates anything short of a Titan or a specialized hi-tech Hollow Earth Aerial Vehicle that attempts to cross into the Hollow Earth; and the Hollow Earth itself is an ultraterrestrial Acid-Trip Dimension with mixed gravity which is implied to be very near, and possibly right on top of, the Earth's core.
  • The Godzilla: King of the Monsters ending hinted that multiple Titans were converging on Skull Island, but in this movie's supplementary materials, only one Titan from the outside world, Camazotz, does so.
  • A newspaper in the Godzilla: King of the Monsters Creative Closing Credits hinted that Mechagodzilla was being tested on Skull Island. Whilst Mechagodzilla does appear in the MonsterVerse proper in this movie, it's instead being constructed in the middle of Hong Kong with no connection to Skull Island.
  • Even Ghidorah's post-mortem remains get some broad strokes.
    • For one thing, Ghidorah's severed head was seized at the end of the previous movie by an ultra-misanthropic Eco-Terrorist, but by the time of this movie, it's fallen into the hands of a Research, Inc. whom have a warped "humanist" ideology of opposing the Titans (a.k.a. the ideological polar opposite of everything that the misanthropic terrorists stood for, bringing up the question of how the skull changed hands or why if the terrorists willingly gave it up).
    • For another, this movie's novelization states that there are two Ghidorah skulls instead of just one, which raises a lot more questions that it can answer since all of Ghidorah except for a single previously-severed head was thoroughly disintegrated and vaporized in the previous movie. Fortunately, this anomaly is somewhat amended by how in the finished movie version, only one Ghidorah skull is ever seen and the existence of a second skull is mere speculation by a highly questionable source.
• Brought Down to Badass: During the final battle against Mechagodzilla, both Godzilla and Kong are tired and injured but still manage to give a good account of themselves.
• Bus Crash: A line from Ilene indicates that this happened to the entire Iwi culture at some point prior to this film, saying that Jia was saved by Kong, and is now the Last of Her Kind. Strangely, this was not because of any of the super-predators roaming the island, but apparently because the perpetual storm system surrounding the island closed in around it, and the Iwi were killed off by the sudden severe weather.

C

• Call-Back:
  • In the trailer, Godzilla's attack on the aircraft carrier convoy is accompanied by the eerie vocalizations of György Ligeti's Requiem, just like the HALO jump scene from the 2014 Godzilla movie.
  • The trailer features a scene resembling one from the 2014 Godzilla movie, with Godzilla making a beeline towards a battleship. Unlike in the 2014 movie, where Godzilla dove under it at the last moment, the trailer shows him ripping it to shreds with his dorsal plates.
  • Kong's old enemies the Skullcrawlers make an appearance where it quickly suffers a Worf Effect courtesy of Mechagodzilla.
  • Kong decapitating one of the Warbats... and curiously taking a bite of the carcass, much like how he ends up eating the Mire Squid in Kong: Skull Island.
  • Mechagodzilla forcing Godzilla's jaws open and charging up his Proton Scream implies that he was attempting to kill Godzilla with the same finishing move that Godzilla himself did to the female Muto in the first film.
  • Upon short-circuiting, Mechagodzilla makes some unmistakable Ghidorah cackles recognizable from KOTM hinting at his true identity.
  • As in KOTM, Madison has a serious Oh, Crap! moment as Ghidorah stares through a window at her - there Ghidorah himself, here the Ghidorah-controlled Mechagodzilla.
  • Just as in King of The Monsters, the first thing Ghidorah does upon "awakening" is go out of his way to kill some humans, in this case the two responsible for trying to control him followed by a large number in Hong Kong.
• Came Back Strong: Played With and Zigzagged. When Ghidorah's remains override Mechagodzilla's programming, the mech has none of Ghidorah's world-ending abilities, with the lack of a Healing Factor making it much easier to put down once it's taken enough damage. But what Mechagodzilla does have is an extremely specialized Anti-Kaiju body and a limitless power source, which combined with a frightening intellect in the Final Battle, allows him to dominate both Godzilla and Kong (at least when exhausted) with frightening efficiency that keeps both on the ropes until his weakness is exploited.
• Camera Abuse: When Kong rips off Mechagodzilla’s head, oil splashes on the screen.
• Caught Monologuing: Simmons is killed by Mechagodzilla while he is in the middle of Evil Gloating to Bernie, Madison, and Josh, and turns around only just in time to see his creation, having gained malicious self-awareness, turn on him. Bernie's response?
  Bernie: It's unfair... I really wanted to hear the rest of that speech.
• Challenging the Chief: The first trailer and one of the teasers establishes that with Godzilla — the reigning Alpha Titan and King of the Monsters — having gone berserk, Monarch is bringing in Kong — a rival Alpha Titan — to dethrone him. Inverted in the film itself — Monarch wants to transport Kong for largely unrelated reasons, but the main fear is that if Godzilla discovers Kong has left Skull Island, Godzilla will come for him, since Godzilla cannot abide the presence of a potential rival. Ultimately, Kong has no interest in usurping Godzilla, and only challenges him to their climactic fight for completely personal reasons.
  Ilene Andrews: Godzilla will come for him. There can't be two Alpha Titans.
  Admiral Wilcox: Who bows to who?
  Ilene Andrews: Kong bows to no one.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • The HEAVs were said to have enough power to light up Las Vegas for a week. This makes it a good defibrillator to restart Kong's slowing heart when he's incapacitated by Godzilla in the climax.
  • Bernie Hayes keeps a flask of alcohol as a Tragic Keepsake from his wife's death, which ends up turning the tide of the final battle when Josh uses it to short circuit a control panel for Mechagodzilla's satellite uplink, stalling him briefly and allowing Godzilla and Kong one last-ditch effort to destroy him for good.
• Childish Villain, Mature Hero:
  • The main heroic humans on Team Godzilla and Team Kong are largely mature, intelligent and responsible people: especially Madison (a teenaged, Wise Beyond Her Years veteran of the war against King Ghidorah who takes it upon herself to resolve Godzilla’s mysterious rampage when she realizes no-one else will act effectively); and Jia (who is calm, dignified, intelligent, and more perceptive than even her adult peers despite her being barely into the double-digits). The only really immature hero is Bernie Hayes, and even this gets somewhat amended in the novelization, where he has very deep and personal reasons for wanting to bring the bad guys to justice.
  • The grown villains on Apex Cybernetics, for all their corporate power, are very petulant and childish on the other hand. The late-middle-aged Walter Simmons is a self-absorbed, delusional, disaster-engineering Psychopathic Manchild who sees the fate of the world as nothing more than a glory contest, cackling like an excited child or throwing sulky moods depending on his temperament. Ren Serizawa’s motives for being one of the bad guys, according to the novelization, are unresolved daddy issues which drive him to scream for his neglectful father’s attention in horrific ways long past the latter’s death. And Maia Simmons is a "Well Done, Daughter!" Girl who has all the manners of an entitled seven-year-old and half the brains to go with it.
• Combat Pragmatist: Neither Godzilla or Kong hesitate to take advantage of any chance given to them.
  • Godzilla doesn't think twice about using his atomic breath in close range, knowing Kong has almost no defense against it. In their first fight at sea, since Godzilla can breathe underwater and Kong can't, he makes a point of forcing Kong into the water and trying to drown him.
  • After seeing Godzilla is too strong fight head to head, Kong uses his greater speed and agility to move around Hong Kong's skyscrapers before moving in to strike with his axe. After Godzilla is seemingly beat by a blow from the axe, Kong doesn't assume he's down for the count and waits on a skyscraper, throws a crane to distract him, then leaps onto Godzilla's back to attack him.
  • The duo completely avert Mook Chivalry against Mechagodzilla, attacking him together and when his back is turned.
• Comic-Book Time: While five years have passed in-universe between the events of Godzilla: King of the Monsters and Godzilla vs. Kong, Madison Russell doesn't appear to be any older at 17 than she did as a 12-year-old due to only one year passing between the filming of both movies (and Millie Bobby Brown already being way older than 12 when filming King of the Monsters).
• Combination Attack: Mechagodzilla is destroyed when Godzilla charges Kong's axe up with his atomic breath then Kong uses it to destroy the villainous cyborg.
• Contrasting Sequel Antagonist:
  • The kaiju antagonists of the previous movies were all ancient, biological creatures (most from a prehistoric Earth, except for the Big Bad Ghidorah who was an alien), whereas Mechagodzilla in this film is a manmade Cyborg that's only been created by Apex very recently.
  • On the human side. The Eco-Terrorists led by Alan Jonah and Emma Russell in the previous film were an international paramilitary force led by a harsh, unpleasant Misanthrope Supreme, and their goal was being Gaia's Avenger and killing many human lives while championing the Titans' reclamation of the Earth from humans. By contrast, Apex Cybernetics in this movie are a fantastical hi-tech, mega-rich Evil, Inc. with seemingly good publicity, led by a charismatic Bitch in Sheep's Clothing, and their goal is killing Godzilla and exterminating or enslaving the other Titans using their bionic creation while championing humanity's reclamation of the Earth from Titans.
    • For a more specific case, Apex Cybernetics' Ren Serizawa contrasts the eco-terrorists' Emma Russell, as the Big Bad Wannabe's number two who was driven over to their side by rage and grief over losing a family member and blaming the group that big bad wannabe is opposing for their loss. They differ in that Ren isn't an Evil All Along mole like Emma was and he's clearly aligned with Apex from the start; and whereas Emma became a Defector from Decadence after Jonah refused to heed her warnings about his actions going too far for their own good and she died making a Heroic Sacrifice, Ren still obeyed Simmons despite his reservations, and he paid for that with his life and died without having a Heel Realization.
• Contrasting Sequel Main Character: See here.
• Cool Gate: There's a freaky wormhole-like effect inside the Vile Vortex to the Hollow Earth which apparently marks the gravity inversion point (explained in the novelization to be a gravitational-electrostatic membrane). Once Kong and Team Kong enter it, they're spat straight out into the Hollow Earth's sky, cutting the distance from the Earth's crust all the way to the inner-world.
• Cool vs. Awesome: The atomic, fire-breathing King of the Monsters squares off against the iconic giant gorilla and Eighth Wonder of the World and then they both team up to fight off a Ghidorah-powered Mechagodzilla! Grab some popcorn and place your bets, everyone!
• Cosmic Horror Story: Downplayed compared to previous entries but still present: Godzilla has seemingly turned on humanity, leaving them at the mercy of the most powerful creature on the planet...but in reality, humans have once more tampered where they shouldn't by using the corpse of a Draconic Abomination to build their own weapon, angering him. In the end, all humanity's efforts have done is reincarnate Ghidorah in a new form, giving him another chance to resume his destruction of everything. Played up in the novelization, where Ren's death has him helpless to do anything as Ghidorah's remaining consciousness takes over and devours his mind — makes you wonder where the hell Ghidorah came from before arriving on Earth and how such an entity capable of doing that came into being.
• "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot: As it turns out, the reason Godzilla seemingly turns feral is actually because Apex Cybernetics was trying to create Mechagodzilla to replace him as the new Alpha. Worse, they use one of the heads of Godzilla's archnemesis King Ghidorah to do it. Madison even calls Walter Simmons out on this later in the movie, saying that Godzilla was on neutral terms with humanity until Apex tried to give him a challenger. The entire conflict, and indeed even Godzilla's feud with Kong, could have been avoided if Mechagodzilla was never created.
• Cowardly Lion: Josh is the Token Cowardly Lion on Team Godzilla, and Dr. Nathan Lind on Team Kong. They're both the most timid out of either team, but prove their true colors when either team is in a tight spot.
• Crazy Enough to Work:
  • Briefly discussed by Nathan Lind and Walter Simmons. When Lind first has the idea to try and have Kong lead the Monarch-Apex collaboration to the Hollow Earth's energy source, Nathan cautions Simmons before speaking his idea that it's a crazy one – which only makes Simmons all the more eager to hear it.
  • Subverted spectacularly with Apex Cybernetics. Walter Simmons firmly believes that fortune favors the bold and that man's reach should always exceed his grasp, so much so that he (A) actually thought achieving his dreams of toppling Godzilla was worth hooking Ghidorah's still-partly-alive skull up to a 460-foot Titan-class Humongous Mecha as the machine's brain, despite how malevolent and uncontrollable Ghidorah proved to be to the whole world in the previous movie; and (B) Simmons practically invokes the Unfinished, Untested, Used Anyway trope on Mechagodzilla whilst foregoing Ren Serizawa's more pragmatic suggestions. Instead of ensuring that Apex's plan works out fine for them and they come out with everything they wanted; these two acts of brash arrogance only lead to a Ghidorah-possessed Mechagodzilla killing Simmons and doing exactly what Apex claimed their weapon would prevent, most likely reducing Apex's plans for Muggle Power to tatters.
• Creative Closing Credits: Inverted. In the same style as the previous two Godzilla movies, the opening title sequences features Freeze-Frame Bonus redacted text around the credits.
• Crowd Panic: In Godzilla's first scene during his rampage on Pensacola, we get treated to shots of people running and screaming as Godzilla's Atomic Breath sends jets falling and crashing very close to them – likewise, we get some ground-based shots of people running and screaming when Godzilla's arrival in Hong Kong and later Kong's fight with Godzilla trash the place. B-roll footage shows that Madison and Josh would have originally been part of the first scene.
• Cryptic Background Reference: In the movie version, it's apparent that Godzilla and Kong's ancestors had a primeval Great Offscreen War, and Kong's ancestors originally lived in the Hollow Earth where they built a vast temple (which in the present day is abandoned, with the skeleton of a Godzilla-like Titan lying inside with an axe wedged in its bones); yet despite the movie's trailer setting up some grand revelation about how the war occurred, there's no elaboration beyond the above hints, leaving it unknown how and when the war started and ended, or also why Titanus Kong moved from the Hollow Earth to Skull Island. The novelization provides more clarification via an Iwi legend that Jia tells Andrews: it indicates that Godzilla or one of his kind fired the first shot in the war (assuming that the tale isn't biased in the favor of the Iwi's Titanus Kong deities), and Godzilla ultimately drove both the Kong species and the Iwis out of their original shared home in the Hollow Earth, forcing them to Skull Island on the surface. Godzilla's P.O.V. in the novelization also reveals that his rivalry with Kong's kind pre-dates Ghidorah's arrival on Earth. It's also revealed in Godzilla: Dominion that another member of Kong's kind once succeeded in driving the individual Godzilla out of his past territory when Godzilla was much younger.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla is less of an epic monster face-off and more of a playground beatdown. The only time the former even comes close to landing an actual hit is when he pushes the cyborg somewhat, and even then it's a two-way shove. Even after the two titular kaiju tag-team Mecha-G, the latter manages to stay on top until a bottle of alcohol out of all things makes him vulnerable. Word of God has confirmed that the fight would've been much closer if Big G wasn't exhausted from fighting Kong.
• Curb Stomp Cushion:
  • Kong's first bout with Godzilla. Despite fighting underwater, Kong manages to push Godzilla away and get back on the ship before retreating to the aircraft carrier. As Godzilla gets on the carrier, Kong hits him the face, prompting Godzilla to slap him onto his back and attempt to use his atomic breath, only be stopped by a jet fighter shooting him, giving Kong the chance to push him off the ship. This prompts Godzilla to destroy the carrier and force Kong into the water. Once again, Kong manages to get a couple hits in before Godzilla nearly drowns him. Both the carrier and fighting underwater put Kong at a disadvantage ^note Godzilla is bigger and stronger than him, so fighting on the carrier meant Kong couldn't take advantage of his greater mobility, and he can also breathe underwater, but he still managed to offer a surprising amount of resistance.
  • At the end of the fight in Hong Kong, Kong attempts to finish off a weakened Godzilla by leaping on his back when he's distracted. All his attack does is enrage Godzilla who throws Kong off and beats him within an inch of his life. After Godzilla pins him under foot, however, Kong punches him in the wound he left with his axe earlier, which causes Godzilla pain but isn't enough to stop him. However, even despite losing he still left Godzilla worked up enough that Mechagodzilla is able to soundly trounce the King of the Monsters with little effort on his part.
• Cutting the Knot:
  • Josh and Bernie are unable to hack into Mechagodzilla's control board, and Bernie gets ready to chug the flask of whisky he keeps for his darkest hour, giving Josh the idea to just dump the alcohol into the control panel to short-circuit it.
  • Godzilla exploits this against Kong in their first encounter. Seeing that Kong is chained to a ship, rather than getting on the ship to face him, Godzilla flips the ship over.
• Cyborg: Mechagodzilla counts, being primarily mechanical but controlled by Ghidorah's brain.

D

• Darker and Edgier: To the original King Kong vs. Godzilla. The original film was a Lighter and Softer take where both monsters were portrayed in a humorous light (King Kong Can't Hold His Liquor while Godzilla in general became less of a symbol of nuclear weapons and more of a Jerkass). This film however, Godzilla is attacking humans intentionally, attacking APEX facilities to seek out Mechagodzilla. Unlike to original film where both monsters clash due to human intervention, Godzilla was seeking out Kong while the humans are trying to avoid him in order to make Kong submit to him. Unlike the original where King Kong is the "protagonist" monster and Godzilla was still the villain, this film is a case of Good vs. Good since Godzilla is being portrayed as the Hero Antagonist to Kong's The Hero.
• Darkest Hour: Seemingly nothing can stop Mechagodzilla from killing Godzilla, and Kong is down for the count.
• Dark Reprise: The soundtrack version. The film reverts Godzilla's Triumphant Reprise from Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) into a darker, slower, more foreboding theme similar to the original version, reflecting Godzilla's more hostile and antagonistic-seeming role in this film compared to how the previous film made him out to be a heroic, deity-like being.
• David Versus Goliath: Kong is the David to Godzilla's Goliath. Both monsters are giants, but Kong is the smaller, faster one. Godzilla is bigger, stronger, tougher, and has his atomic breath. Their first fight highlights how the odds are stacked against Kong as Godzilla would have beaten him on the aircraft carrier without the humans intervening. In the rematch in Hong Kong, the numerous buildings let Kong take advantage of his greater agility, on top of having the axe. But Godzilla still proves too powerful and nearly kills him.
• Death by Irony:
  • Both Walter Simmons and Ren Serizawa are killed by their own machine.
  • Having overpowered Godzilla, Mechagodzilla tries to force open Godzilla's jaws and charges up his Proton Scream: presumably to finish off Godzilla the same way Godzilla finished off the Female Muto in 2014. Thankfully and narrowly averted as Kong steps in to save the day.
• Death by Origin Story: Nathan Lind's brother David was killed years ago by the gravity inversion when they attempted a manned expedition into the Hollow Earth, and after being approached by Apex, he's trying to enter the Hollow Earth again in this film without the same mistake ensuing. It's also revealed in the novelization that Bernie's wife's death was one for him as it set him on infiltrating and bringing down Apex.
• Death Glare:
  • Ren Serizawa is introduced during Godzilla's first attack in Pensacola, glaring outward at the approaching Titan with a look of both anger and pain and has to be beckoned away by Simmons calling to him.
  • Godzilla levels a couple of them at Kong:
    • First, after their ocean battle, Godzilla levels such a look at Kong when the fleet are playing dead, and the King of the Primates lying across the deck of a ship returns the look in kind.
    • The second is after ruthlessly mauling the ape in Hong Kong.
  • As he approaches Apex's Hong Kong base and sees Mechagodzilla's beam slicing through it, Godzilla glares with clear murderous intent.
  • Mechagodzilla seems to level one at Godzilla in turn. After it's finished razing half of Hong Kong with its Proton Scream, it then turns its gaze on Godzilla and lets out a series of clacking noises almost as if the Ghidorah-derived consciousness now controlling it is trying to form a taunting Evil Laugh.
• Death World: The Hollow Earth filled with all sorts of giant aggressive monsters, with the main threat being the colossal flying snakes, Warbats/Nozuki. The only reason the humans weren't killed in minutes is because they have Kong to defend them, and even he had a hard time.
• Decapitation Presentation: At the end, Kong tears off Mechagodzilla's head and mechanical "spine", fountains of black oil still spewing and lights still flicking and roars triumphantly to the sky with it to proclaim his final victory.
• Decoy Protagonist: Nathan Lind is set up as the main protagonist for Kong's storyline, but he doesn't do that much. If anything, the protagonist is Kong himself, who gets a good bit of Character Development and focus.
• Deer in the Headlights: A bit of a blink-and-you'll-miss-it, but Madison at first reacts this way when Skullcrawler Number 10 is being released, and the novelization suggests it's due to her being a Shell-Shocked Veteran after the events of King of the Monsters. The novelization also notes that Nathan initially has one when Godzilla is attacking Team Kong's fleet, but he gets over it.
• Defiant to the End:
  • In their second confrontation, Kong roars defiantly in Godzilla's face when Godzilla roars at him after thrashing him in their fight, refusing to submit to the King of the Monsters. Godzilla leaves him to die in peace, instead of brutally finishing him off like he did with Ghidorah.
  • Mechagodzilla still tries to attack Kong with an atomic beam despite losing both arms and a leg. Having Ghidorah's influence controlling him may contribute.
• Detrimental Determination:
  • Godzilla is (rightly) lazer-focused on hunting the source of his provocation (Mechagodzilla's signal) around the world, ruthlessly pinpointing the specific manmade structure where the provocation is emanating from and destroying it – however, this course of action leads the rest of humanity, whom have no idea about why Godzilla is attacking these places, to assume that Godzilla has gone bad and they turn against him. More than that, Godzilla with his instincts is intolerant of any other Alpha Titan encroaching on his global territory; to a point where beyond his hunt for Mechagodzilla so he can destroy it, Godzilla goes out of his way to antagonize and battle Kong once he senses the latter has left Skull Island despite Kong's comparative benignity, and he has an even more extreme reaction to Kong tapping the very power source which Kong's ancestors once used against Godzilla and Godzilla-like Titans. This ultimately leads Godzilla to expend much of his reserved strength subduing Kong, which in turn leaves Godzilla at a deadly disadvantage once Mechagodzilla emerges to kill him with Godzilla's strength expended and with a near-death Kong initially unable to do anything to help.
  • In the novelization, Mark Russell is extremely pig-headed in his assertions that Madison is somehow just a normal, ineffectual little girl who can't be trusted to know her own thoughts and feelings or to provide any valuable insights. He's shown to repeatedly hand-wave Madison's complaints about her being miserable in the public school he's forced her to attend, and it's implied that this has been going on between them for some time. Mark not only ignores everything Madison thinks about Godzilla's Pensacola attack out of hand (even when she's making far more sense compared to Mark's over-emotional and ridiculously-contrived assumptions), Mark also resorts to helicoptering methods to try and keep Madison away from the investigation into Godzilla's attacks. What really makes this determination detrimental is that Mark makes it clear in the novel that he's acting this way partly because he doesn't want to lose Madison the way he's already lost the rest of their immediate family one-by-one, and implicitly also partly as a way of compensating for the years he was absent from Madison's life (swinging from one parental extreme to the other): but he's too bullheaded and too self-focused on his own feelings while ignoring everyone else's to realize that this kind of parenting, directed at a blatant rebellious spirit like his daughter, will surely push Madison to do the opposite of what he wants, and could potentially even alienate her from him all over again instead of mending the rift between them. It takes the realization that his last refusal to listen to Madison in the wake of Godzilla's attack has led to Madison sneaking out and heading into the very danger that Mark tried to shield her from for Mark to even take a single, fricking hint and admit to himself that he was wrong to treat her the way he has.
  • Walter Simmons has been trying to find a way to kill Godzilla and achieve his dream of human supremacy since 2014, and he's more or less ignored how the events of Godzilla: King of the Monsters proved that humans and Titans can coexist in mutually-beneficial symbiosis if humans stop trying to tamper and overrule nature. It's furthermore revealed in the Godzilla vs. Kong novelization that the military's Oxygen Destroyer (which went horribly wrong via directly almost enabling King Ghidorah to exterminate all multicellular life on Earth) was apparently a previous attempt by Apex to kill Godzilla, yet this catastrophe didn't stop Simmons. Come 2024, Simmons, dead-set on turning the world against Godzilla and getting all the glory that successfully replacing the Alpha Titans would entail; doesn't think that essentially reanimating the aforementioned, "living extinction event which threatens every non-microbial lifeform on this planet" Ghidorah's surviving neurology is not worth the risks, nevermind his planning to use a newly-discovered otherworldly energy source as a second Black Box on top of that. Simmons' last attempt to usurp Godzilla turns out to be one time too many, as mixing Ghidorah's undead remains with the Hollow Earth energy and Apex's Titan-killing Mecha leads to a Ghidorah-possessed Mechagodzilla killing Simmons and destroying everything he's worked towards in less than an hour; nevermind the very real possibility that the rogue Mechagodzilla, if it had won, would have filled King Ghidorah's old shoes and finished what the three-headed dragon started.
  • Subverted by Mechagodzilla. It appears to be specifically focused on killing Godzilla above all, and when Kong gets involved in their fight in Godzilla's defence, Mechagodzilla's initial strategy is to just repeatedly throw Kong off without making sure to finish him off before it turns its focus back to pummeling Godzilla ASAP, which in turn enables Kong to get back up and blindside the Mecha repeatedly before the Mecha can finish Godzilla off. However, after Kong brings the (un-charged and ineffectual) Titanus Gojira-fin axe into the fight and he successfully throws Mechagodzilla on its back, the Mecha decides there and then to give Kong its full attention and immediately tries to kill him.
• Didn't Think This Through: It's hinted in the film, and shown in the novelization, that Nathan has a tendency to "go very far out on very thin limbs", hyper-focusing on the destination and not testing or foolproofing his strategy for how to make the journey go smoothly. All of Apex's overwhelming conceit aside when it came to thinking they could fully control both Ghidorah's skull and the Hollow Earth element; if concept artist Jared Krichevsky is to be believed, then if Mechagodzilla had remained under Apex's control and they began using it against the other Titans per their plan, the Mecha would have been hilariously and promptly defeated if it so much as approached the Queen MUTO as a target.
• Digging to China: Madison's crew gets to Apex's Hong Kong headquarters by way of a hemisphere spanning hyperloop train connected to their Florida facility. Later, Godzilla uses his atomic breath in Hong Kong to drill into the Hollow Earth to allow Kong to come up to the surface for their final fight.
• Disc-One Final Boss: Interestingly, the titular Titans are this to each other. Godzilla's ultimate goal is to find and destroy Mechagodzilla, while Kong is merely an obstacle in his way. Their climactic battle in Hong Kong is ultimately a prelude to Mechagodzilla, the True Final Boss of the film.
• Disney Death: Kong is defeated by Godzilla fair and square: essentially, making Godzilla the clear winner. The accumulate injuries from their fight cause Kong to go into cardiac arrest. Then Mechagodzilla attacks and overpowers Godzilla, so the humans manage to resuscitate Kong and bring him back to the fight to even the odds.
• Don't Make Me Destroy You: After Godzilla has soundly thrashed Kong in their fight, he roars mightily in Kong's face, clearly sending this message. When Kong roars back defiantly, Godzilla decides to leave the beaten but unbowed Kong to die of his wounds.
• Domed Hometown: In the decades since the Skull Island expedition, the storm surrounding the island closed in and rendered the conditions inhospitable. Kong is shown to live in an immense high-tech containment dome around Skull Island's interior, with the inner walls projecting an artificial sky, in order to hide him from Godzilla and preserve a chunk of Skull Island's ecosystem. Kong isn't fooled one bit though, and spends some of his time smashing through this fake sky with makeshift tree javelins.
• Don't You Dare Pity Me!:
  • Downplayed, but the novelization shows that Madison doesn't appreciate being treated like she's Just a Kid, and she refuses to be a victim no matter what she's been through.
  • In the novelization, Ren Serizawa has hidden the true extent of his negative feelings towards his late father from associates, lovers and even from his mother his entire life, because he equates being pitied with being mocked.
• Double Meaning: Outwardly, Apex Cybernetics call themselves such because they're a company which specializes in developing leading hi-tech and pride themselves on pioneering new advances. The hidden second meaning of the name is that they intend to usurp the Alpha Titans, with a particular focus on getting rid of Godzilla (thereby becoming the new King of the Monsters, essentially the "Apex" lifeform on Earth), with "Cybernetics" being the means they plan to use to achieve this aim. It's also hinted in the movie (and more heavily implied in the novelization and the movie art book One Will Fall), that Apex head Walter Simmons' comment to Ren Serizawa about making humanity "the apex species" has a double meaning of its own – it refers to Apex's Muggle Power justification for their plans, but also refers to how Simmons intends for the Apex company to essentially rule all of humanity once they've turned the world into their own corporate dystopia.
• Downer Beginning: The movie's pre-credits intro establishes that Kong and a chunk of Skull Island's ecosystem have been fenced off inside a Domed Hometown because the rest of the island outside the dome has been overtaken by an inhospitable Perpetual Storm, and Kong is none too happy about this. Then the post-credits intro ends with the same Godzilla who fought alongside humanity to save the world a movie prior violently making landfall and wreaking destruction on a coastal city for no immediately-obvious reason.
• Dramatic Dislocation: After Kong wakes up before the final battle against Mechagodzilla, he pops his shoulder back into place by ramming it into a building before joining the battle.
• The Dreaded: The novelization reveals Madison is still traumatized from her encounter with Ghidorah to the point of having PTSD. The entire reason Godzilla is on the warpath is he knows Ghidorah is still alive and is frantically trying to find and end him. The only people not afraid of Ghidorah is Apex...until Ghidorah possesses MechaGodzilla, giving them just enough time to react in horror before their deaths.
  • Godzilla himself turns into this after his attack on Apex. The world is now terrified of him. Even putting that aside, Illene is still afraid of the possiblity Godzilla will come after Kong. Her fears proves well founded as Godzilla nearly kills Kong in both encounters.

E

• Earn Your Happy Ending: Kong had his parents killed before his very eyes as a child, the Iwi natives he worked to protect almost completely wiped out by factors outside his control, ends up stuck in a cage by Monarch, fights numerous vicious predators on a semi-regular basis, and twice ends up beaten to near death by Godzilla. But after saving Godzilla's life by destroying Mechagodzilla, he ends up getting to live a relatively peaceful life in his ancestral home within the Hollow Earth as its new king.
• Eiffel Tower Effect: The Bank of China Tower can be prominently seen in the trailer, during a battle set in Hong Kong.
• Eldritch Location: The Hollow Earth is a landscape reminiscent of an alternate dimension and it serves as the Titans' original home. To top it all off, it's surrounded by an anti-gravitational field.
• Electronic Telepathy: Apex Cybernetics achieve this with Ren as the pilot in order to pilot Mechagodzilla; using the telepathic neural tissue of Ghidorah's skull as the cockpit transmitter and another sample of Ghidorah inside the actual Mecha as the receiver. Unfortunately, Ghidorah's consciousness in its neural pathways isn't completely dead and uses the Brain/Computer Interface to hijack the Telepathy.
• Energy Absorption: The battle axe Kong wields is able to block and absorb energy, particularly that of Godzilla's Atomic Breath. This not only makes it an effective defense against Godzilla's primary weapon, but empowers and strengthens the blade, giving it Absurd Cutting Power that can cut through Godzilla's hide and Mechagodzilla's hard armor that even Godzilla himself could not harm.
• Energy Donation: Godzilla lends Kong his power in the finale by supercharging Kong's axe with his atomic breath until it glows blue, allowing him to slash Mechagodzilla into pieces and destroy him for good.
• Enemy Mine: Godzilla and Kong end up double-teaming against Mechagodzilla, as while Mechagodzilla ends up having an upper hand over Godzilla, it's Kong who turns the tides.
• Enemy Rising Behind: While Simmons is giving Maddie and her accomplices a lecture about the need for Mechagodzilla, the monster itself activates in its giant chamber behind him, turns to look at him and slowly approaches the control room. Simmons is too invested in his monologue to notice until he opens his eyes and sees everyone backing away, at which point he turns around and has just enough time to say "Oh, shit" before being swiped by MechaGodzilla's claw.
• Engineered Heroics: In the wake of Godzilla's unexplained hostility, Apex claim to the world that they're going to put a permanent stop to him. It's ultimately revealed that Apex are directly and knowingly responsible for provoking Godzilla's attacks in the first place, because Godzilla can sense the part-Ghidorah Mecha they're building as a rival to his dominance whenever its signal activates, and Apex are taking advantage of Godzilla's reactions to turn a confused human race against him and to justify Mechagodzilla's construction as an anti-Godzilla weapon – basically, Apex are making it look like the chicken (an aggressor Godzilla) came before the egg (Mechagodzilla) when it's actually the other way round. What's worse, it's implied in the movie (and all but confirmed in the novelization) that Apex are intentionally ensuring Mechagodzilla's signal draws Godzilla to densely-populated urban areas including Hong Kong^note One of the most densely-populated cities on the planet, with a population numbering eight million so as to maximize the carnage and further make Godzilla look bad. The novelization also confirms that Apex genuinely didn't know until after Godzilla's first attack that the Mecha's signal was going to provoke Godzilla, but Simmons was nevertheless all too happy to exploit it.
• Environmental Symbolism:
  • Every scene of Kong not in the Hollow Earth has him desperately fighting for his life, not there by his own will, in peril from the elements he is not prepared for and just not having a good time overall. All of this hammers that his home is in the Hollow Earth and there is nothing for him elsewhere.
  • Godzilla and Kong's battle in Hong Kong showcase skyscrapers lit top to bottom in neon lights. Compared to the dreary, smoke filled wreckage in the last two Godzilla movies it comes across looking much more like a primetime wrestling match than a desperate battle for the fate of the planet. When Godzilla really lays into Kong most of the skyscrapers have powered down in the destruction. And when Mechagodzilla rears its head it's daytime and all the neon is gone, going back to dreary battles for the planet. On top of that the mech is never seen outside its creation laboratory or a city, bringing in how artificial the creation is.
• Establishing Character Moment:
  • Josh's Cowardly Lion personality, loyalty to Madison, and cautiousness are established in his first scene in the film. He's babbling nervousness and fears getting into trouble with his Disappointing Older Sibling (who's unlikely to notice a thing) and questions why he and Madison have to get involved. When Madison asks if he's coming or not, Josh says without hesitation or doubt that he's most certainly coming with her, then he bungles his attempt to open the van's side-door in a badass-seeming way.
  • As soon as Mechagodzilla gains a life on its own via King Ghidorah, it instantly kills the ones that dared try to control it, levels half of Hong Kong as soon as it sees the city purely because it can, and then give Godzilla as close to a Slasher Smile as a robot can and begins trying to beat him to death.
• Evasive Fight-Thread Episode: Much of the fights between Godzilla and Kong leave it up in the air who would win; largely depending on what environment they're in. Godzilla is able to effortlessly beat Kong when he has the advantage of being in the ocean, thanks to being semi-aquatic. When Kong is given an area to fight Godzilla in with a lot of high-rise terrain to jump and hide behind (such as a city), he's able to get one over on the King. Then it gets subverted when Godzilla starts getting the upper hand, dislocates Kong's shoulder, and very thoroughly defeats the Eighth Wonder.
• Everything Is an iPod in the Future: Ren's pocket-sized handheld holographic projector which gives a bright-blue 3D map of the Hollow Earth qualifies.
• Eviler than Thou:
  • Apex Cybernetics are on the lower end of this trope from the movie's Kaiju Big Bad, Ghidorah. Under Walter Simmons' direction, Apex think they're going to be the ones to kill Godzilla after they've provoked him into threatening millions of people via Engineered Heroics, take back sole dominance of the planet from the Titans, and ultimately establish a mega-corporate dystopia, using Ghidorah's undead skull as a telepathic control system for their Humongous Mecha. However, just like in the previous movie, Ghidorah in this continuity is nobody's puppet: the moment Apex get their machine fully charged, their obscene hubris and their ignorance of Serizawa's famous words about the arrogance of man bite them in the ass and they get supplanted by Ghidorah: the system goes haywire as Ghidorah's remaining consciousness from the skull possesses Mechagodzilla for itself, and it makes the machine turn against its creators, directly leading to Simmons and Ren's deaths (the novelization's wording even hints that the Mecha killed Simmons specifically as revenge for him trying to control it). Mechagodzilla then promptly goes on a rampage, killing all humans it encounters and trying to kill Godzilla and Kong, with the implication that the Ghidorah-possessed Mecha will pick right up where Ghidorah left off if it wins.
  • Another instance is implied in the novelization's prologue scene, with Walter Simmons once again on the losing end. When Simmons meets with The Most Wanted man whom he ultimately buys Ghidorah's skulls from, a man who's all but stated to be Alan Jonah (whose Eco-Terrorist and Misanthrope Supreme goals are the polar opposite of Simmons' bids for Muggle Power); the meeting starts with the two men on equal footing, and it ends with Simmons practically pleading for the wanted man to stay longer to further discuss the deal. Contextually, the scene hints that everything Apex did with their Mechagodzilla plan which led to theirs and many other people's deaths was quite probably a Batman Gambit by Jonah.
• Evil Is Not a Toy: Apex decided to use King Ghidorah's remaining head for Mechagodzilla's control system. This results in Ghidorah hijacking their mech and instantly using it to kill them, and there's implications he'd been active the entire time and intentionally signaling Godzilla as part of his plans.
• Evil Knockoff: Apex Cybernetics created a robotic version of Godzilla, which is superior to Godzilla, to act as the true defender of the world and put humanity back on top as the true Alpha species of the Earth.
• Evil Wears Black: Ren is the biggest offender with his pitch-black overcoat and pitch-black casual shirt, but both of the Simmons family also favor wearing at least one black or partly-black garment during almost all of their screentime. And boy, are they villainous, what with them deliberately engineering Godzilla's rampage and planning to murder him practically unprovoked for Muggle Power and selfish motivations.
• Exact Words: Marketing media states that "One will fall". This could either refer to Kong, who is beaten by Godzilla in their final bout (note that the wording is "fall" not "die") but could also be talking about Mechagodzilla (and, by extension, Ghidorah himself). Even Godzilla "falls" in his battle with Mechagodzilla, winded for the finale of the fight where it's all up to Kong, with Godzilla only assisting via empowering Kong's axe with his Atomic Breath.
• Exploring the Evil Lair: The majority of Team Godzilla's screentime and arc throughout the movie until the Final Battle involves them sneaking around Apex Cybernetics' secret facilities while looking for answers about what Apex are hiding and how it influenced Godzilla's Pensacola attack. The group find a cross-continental underground maglev network transporting Skullcrawler eggs, a testing arena which holds Mechagodzilla, and Ghidorah's wired-up skull, before they're finally caught by Apex's Swiss-Cheese Security and brought before Walter Simmons.
• Eye Awaken: Kong has a dramatic one after being airlifted over Antarctica once the pulleys that were airlifting him snap after he's lowered to the ground. And Mechagodzilla has the Glowing Mechanical Eyes version when activating.
• Eye Lights Out: Mechagodzilla after his beheading by Kong, whose eyes slowly flicker and fade away as Kong brandishes his severed head.

F

• Face–Heel Turn:
  • At the film's start, Godzilla is apparently attacking humanity for some unexplained reason, leading many to assume he's turned against them. Madison maintains that something has caused Godzilla to turn on humanity. It's completely subverted when it's revealed Godzilla is chasing after and targeting Apex Cybernetics' facilities specifically, because he can sense King Ghidorah's partly-alive telepathic neurons at their bases which are being incorporated into Mechagodzilla. It just happens to seem like he's the Big Bad due to misunderstandings and deliberate smokescreen from Apex, with Ghidorah's remains emitting a distorted version of his bio-acoustics signal which Godzilla can hear every time Mechagodzilla is activated.
  • A prologue scene in the novelization reveals that one of the oil rig-based black marketeers who captured Na Kika in Godzilla Dominion is a former Monarch operative who scarcely survived Na Kika/Kraken's escape during the previous story's events.
• Failed a Spot Check: Everybody (even Mark) is quick to assume that Godzilla has turned rogue when he starts attacking cities. Yet they fail to see a pattern: in every one of those cities, Apex Cybernetics was there, and it was mostly Apex that was destroyed by Godzilla. Indeed the one time we are shown a death toll ^*8 dead, 40 injured, 12 missing., it is surprisingly low considering what Godzilla is capable of, indicating it is not humanity Godzilla is trying to attack.
• Family of Choice: Team Kong. Kong and Jia formed a tight bond prior to the events of the film after Kong saved Jia's life from the storm that wiped out her people, Ilene unofficially adopted Jia after the aforementioned event and has been studying Kong for years (leading to her being rather protective of him), and Nathan is an old colleague of Ilene who similarly becomes fond of Kong and Jia over the course of the short time they spend together. The final scene reveals that the four have formed a family unit together, with the three humans choosing to move with Kong to his new home of Hollow Earth.
• Family-Unfriendly Violence: Wouldn’t be a MonsterVerse film otherwise.
  • First, Kong tearing off a Warbat’s head and slurping its brains out
  • Mechagodzilla sawing the skullcrawler in half (followed by its guts splattering on a window no less)
  • During round 3, Godzilla pins Kong down and rips huge chunks of flesh out of his chest. And after that he stomps on his chest, and the sounds made and Kong’s screams of pain imply that he broke a few ribs.
  • Mechagodzilla, being a robot, naturally gets the worst of this. After Godzilla charges his axe, Kong cleaves off both of his arms, one of his legs, and part of his tail before tearing out his head and spine
• Fatal Flaw: For Nathan Lind, it's noted in the novelization that he frequently tends to be a Didn't Think This Through guy who thinks more about the end destination than about how he's realistically going to make a safe journey getting there. For Walter Simmons, it's hubris, as he's so confident that he can topple the Titans and so cognitively incapable of comprehending the mere notion that his Evil Plan might go wrong, it never occurs to him that using Ghidorah's skull as the central component for Mechagodzilla's brain might just be asking for his own doom. It's also shown that although Mark Russell has gotten over his grudge against Godzilla in the previous film, he's still as emotionally biased and judgmental as ever and he still has a tendency to get his head too stuck in the past to clearly focus on the present.
• Feeling Oppressed by Their Existence: Mr. Simmons feels this way towards the Titans, and his entire motivation for creating Mechagodzilla is so that he can put humanity back on top of the food chain, despite how beneficial they've been to the world and all that Godzilla has done for humanity.
• Five-Second Foreshadowing: You can visibly see Kong reacting to Ilene signing to Jia that they want to help him, right before it's revealed that he understands sign language.
• Force and Finesse: Godzilla is the Force to Kong's Finesse. Godzilla is the bigger and stronger Titan, relying on his greater strength, Breath Weapon, and claws. Kong is the comparatively smaller one, who relies on his greater mobility and avoids Godzilla head on.
• Foreshadowing:
  • In the opening sequence, Godzilla's Monarch profile briefly plays a Stock Footage clip of him delivering the Kiss of Death upon Femuto. At the climax of the film, this is how Mechagodzilla almost kills Godzilla before Kong interrupts the effort with a Big Damn Heroes.
  • In the opening title sequence, when Godzilla and Kong's stats are being compared, the only Titan defeated by Kong that gets a 3D-image profile highlighted to the audience is the Skullcrawlers whereas both Femuto and Ghidorah who were defeated by Godzilla respectively get their 3D profiles highlighted. Besides basically being a Previously on… which sums up the previous MonsterVerse films' Big Bads, this foreshadows a few things in the film.
    • Two of those Big Bads make a surprise return in the film: the Skullcrawlers when Team Godzilla unexpectedly happen across Skullcrawler eggs in Apex Cybernetics' possession and later encounter a Ramarak-sized adult, and Ghidorah when whatever's left of its mind in its skull awakens and takes over MechaGodzilla's programming, essentially making Ghidorah the main threat again.
    • It basically points out that Godzilla has had more experience defeating other Titans in the previous films, and one of them was a rival Alpha Titan whereas Kong has never fought another Alpha before now; foreshadowing that Godzilla has more extensive combat experience and that he's the ultimate winner of the title conflict once he gets serious.
  • Their very first exchange of blows on the aircraft carrier hints at how the battle will ultimately go: Kong's punch staggers Godzilla a little, while Godzilla's retaliatory blow knocks Kong to the deck and leaves him wide open to be finished off by Godzilla's ray (only being saved by some jets opening fire on Godzilla and distracting him). Strong and tenacious as Kong is, Godzilla's far the more powerful creature.
  • "I love crazy ideas!" It comes as no surprise that Walter Simmons is the main human Big Bad Wannabe of this film, but a lot of viewers were probably still shocked by just how crazy one of the ideas Simmons and Ren have implemented really is: namely, exploiting Ghidorah's not-entirely-dead neural networks and hooking them up to MechaGodzilla, much to Heyes and Madison's horror.
  • When Madison is driving the van, you can briefly hear Bernie's radio transmission mention that psionic link technology is real. This ends up being critical in the climax.
  • "Robotics. The human mind. Artificial intelligence." And what does it turn out Apex Cybernetics is secretly building? A Humongous Mecha, which we next learn is using an organic mind (specifically Ghidorah's neural tissue) to locomote, and then the Mecha becomes autonomous of the humans and does that thing that Artificial Intelligences are known for doing.
  • Two times Mechagodzilla is supposed to be inactive, its eye glows and emits a sound non-unlike the ORCA which seems to signal Godzilla. Ren also kills the test Skull Crawler the same way Ghidorah beat Rodan. It turns out Ghidorah is still very much alive in there and he possesses Mechagodzilla once it's complete. The novelization adds another layer to this, as the signal is revealed to be an artificial version of Ghidorah's Alpha Call.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus:
  • In the first trailer, play the first five seconds at the slowest speed. Why, hello there, Mechagodzilla.
  • As with the other films, the opening credits show names, as well as text attached to the names which contain information relevant to the plot or the world.
• Freudian Excuse:
  • Implied for Maia Simmons. She was raised from birth by a corporate tycoon to think like him and does most of what she does to earn her father's approval. Considering said father is also a complete sociopath, it's not a surprise in hindsight that she ended up the way she did.
  • The novelization goes into why Ren Serizawa has become the way he is. He felt severely neglected when growing up due to his father sacrificing time with his family in favor of devoting himself to his Monarch work, barely acknowledging Ren when he was around. A major turning point in the rift between father and son was when Ren had to organize his own mother's funeral at age eighteen, while his father was away on field work until two days after the ceremony. What fully drove Ren over to the dark side was Ishirō's untimely death by Heroic Sacrifice when saving Godzilla (a creature Ren feels has been robbing him of his father his entire life), permanently robbing Ren of any chance at reconciliation.
  • Notably averted in Walter Simmons' case. Whereas Packard, Jonah, Emma and Ren all have fairly human reasons in their backstories for turning to villainy in the ways that they did, Simmons is given no such backstory, and he's shown to be a self-centered sociopath who's motivated to commit his heinous actions solely because of egomania and ambition. The novelization even slightly lampshades this when Mark Russell wonders if Simmons is acting out of grief at losing a loved one in a past Titan attack, a contrast to the explicit reality of the man.
• Fusion Dance: According to both Word of God and the novelization's expansion, Mechagodzilla's sentient consciousness once it forms is a result of this rather than being Ghidorah's intact mind directly becoming a Man in the Machine. The Mecha gains sentience due to Ghidorah's subconsciousness in its skull mixing with the Mecha's artificial intelligence to create a new personality. The novelization hints in addition to this that Ren Serizawa's mind (who receives a Dies Differently in Adaptation where his mind is devoured by the formation of the Mecha's mind) ends up getting digested to form a lesser part of the Mecha's mind and is likely what influences Mechagodzilla's fixation on killing Godzilla specifically.

G

• Gambit Pileup: Mechagodzilla is essentially this according to the novelization: Walter wants to use it to make humanity the apex species of life on Earth again, Ren wants to use it to become an artificial god and kill Godzilla, and King Ghidorah's remains may potentially be using its ability to signal Godzilla to manipulate him and ultimately hijacks Mechagodzilla, something supported by the novelization, where it's explained to explicitly be an artificial version of Ghidorah's Alpha Call. In the end Ren outplayed Walter, as he would've been in perfect position to kill him had things gone as planned, but Ghidorah outplayed Ren.
• Game-Breaking Injury: The final fight between Godzilla and Kong goes decisively in Godzilla's favor when Kong's shoulder gets dislocated, leaving him unable to defend himself effectively and letting Godzilla brutally overpower him.
• Genre Throwback: In many ways, the film fully embraces the Showa Era silliness Godzilla movies came to be known for, with impossibly elaborate and expensive constructions (like Kong's containment dome, Apex's antigrav tech and enormous underground transportation system, Mechagodzilla itself), and stranger things like what amounts to a wormhole to the Hollow Earth and the impossible power source there simply existing with no explanation even attempted. Renowned actors are cast as the purely functional characters with only as much personality as necessary to move the plot forward, and the plot serves primarily to justify the monster fights, and those monster fights are lovingly rendered in top-notch CGI. All-in-all, it's a perfect example of an insane-yet-awesome 60s Godzilla flick given a modern, big-budget blockbuster reskin.
• The Gloves Come Off: Close to the end of the movie Godzilla decides he's had enough. He begins flashing his intimidation display to show he's started taking this seriously and unleashes his full savagery on Kong, overwhelming and nearly killing him in short order.
• Godzilla Threshold: Played a few different ways. Apex believes the mere existence of Godzilla justifies making Mechagodzilla, using King Ghidorah's parts to do so, so that humanity will have a weapon to defend themselves. In turn, Godzilla himself feels this plan is so stupid he directly attacks humans for the first time this series. Apex needs access to the Hollow Earth to analyze the power source down there to get their Mechagodzilla fully operational, the only way to get there is by sharing their top secret proprietary technology with Monarch. And taking Kong off Skull Island, which will paint a giant target on Kong's back as Godzilla won't abide the presence of a rival. Finally, the threat of Mechagodzilla with Ghidorah in full control is so bad Kong and Godzilla team up to put him down and agree to stay out of each others' way from here on out.
  Simmons: Are you sure the monkey's going to survive this?
  Lind: Oh, he'll be fine. It's us I'd worry about.
• Gone Horribly Right: Apex built Mechagodzilla to be the Ultimate Robeast which can defeat any Titan on the planet, including alphas like Godzilla or Kong. Uploading Ghidorah's consciousness into the robot's AI was not a good idea, as not only did it drive Godzilla mad, but once Ghidorah hijacks the controls, the mecha goes on a rampage. Ultimately, uploading the mind of a destructive Titan into an anti-Titan weapon deconstructs man's desire to surpass nature and build the ultimate anti-Titan weapon. You wanted the ultimate anti-Titan weapon, humankind... you got the ultimate anti-Titan weapon.
• Good All Along: It turns out that Godzilla didn't turn on humanity when he attacked the Apex facility. Apex was expirementing with Ghidorah's severed head to control Mechagodzilla. He certainly wasn't nice about it but he was trying to stop a menace to all life on the planet.
• Good Colors, Evil Colors: Godzilla has blue atomic breath, Mechagodzilla has red.
• Good Is Not Nice: Godzilla turns to be Good All Along but he was still the biggest jerkass he's ever been in the series. His efforts to stop Apex's expirements with Ghidorah's head killed dozens of people, and when the US navy shoots him when he comes for Kong he destroys multiple ships. Even though he spares Kong, he still almost kills him, twice.
• Good Lips, Evil Jaws: Played Straight after Godzilla is revealed to be more or less Good All Along. Whereas Godzilla and Kong both have expressive faces with lipped jaws, the Warbats and Mechagodzilla have lipless jaws that show off unpleasant-looking teeth.
• Grand Theft Me: The novelization hints that the Ghidorah skull does this to Ren Serizawa once Mechagodzilla becomes sentient. In the novel, Ren's mind is trapped inside the Mecha's as the skull's Ghidorah consciousness takes control, but the invading consciousness also filters into Ren in a feedback loop before his mind is disintegrated, and later in the novel it's simply stated of Ren's fate (with no further elaboration), "She [Madison] found no sign of the pilot" inside the now-destroyed and rubble-strewn control room.
• Gravity Screw: The Hollow Earth has strange gravitational anomalies which allows life to exist both on the inner surface of the mantle and the outer surface of the inner core (and a layer of floating asteroid-like rocks in the middle where the gravity on both sides are equal), as well as making it impossible for humans to enter on foot. Nathan mentions his brother tried to enter the Hollow Earth and was met with a gruesome death when a planet's worth of gravity instantly reversed on him. Titans can come through it unscathed since the mere fact they can live and move at all means they are strong and durable enough to laugh at the normal effects of gravity.
• Greater-Scope Villain:
  • In turns out Mechagodzilla is being piloted by Apex using the lingering telepathy in the skull of Ghidorah's severed head, which enables whatever's left of Ghidorah's consciousness to reincarnate into Mechagodzilla and essentially return as the Big Bad.
  • The novelization reveals that Apex Cybernetics are responsible for building the Oxygen Destroyer prototype which was fired by the military in the previous film, making them indirectly responsible for King Ghidorah's entire Near-Villain Victory when he gained control of the other Titans during the second half of the film, and for the massive loss of life around the world that occurred during the Titans' rampage.
  • In the film, nothing is mentioned of Alan Jonah or of how the skull of the severed Ghidorah head he obtained has made its way into Apex Cybernetics' possession (especially considering that Apex's Muggle Power agenda is diametric to Jonah's Misanthrope Supreme endgame). The novelization however depicts a man who's heavily implied to be Jonah selling two of Ghidorah's skulls (don't ask us where the hell the second skull came from) to Walter Simmons, which would make Jonah indirectly responsible for the entire plot of the movie.
• Great Offscreen War: Throughout the film, an ancient global war between Kong's and Godzilla's ancestors is repeated alluded to, although the details beyond that are left very vague (including why it happened or what the outcome was beyond the implication it contributed to the decline of both species).
• The Great Serpent: As a deliberate Mythology Gag, Kong again defends the humans from a serpent monster (known as Warbat), except now there are two of them and they can fly.
• Green Rocks: The Tesseract-colored, crystalline Unobtainium in the Hollow Earth can perform several different functions. It acts as the underworld's equivalent to a sun enabling ultraterrestrial life (including some if not all of the Earth-native Titans) to evolve and thrive there, it's apparently the source of Godzilla's bio-atomic powers, and Apex believe that this substance can fully charge their Secret Weapon Mechagodzilla (a feat which literally no manmade power source is powerful enough to do). It certainly does the latter, but it also has unexpected side-effects, enabling the remaining consciousness in Ghidorah's haunted skull which is hooked up to Mechagodzilla to take over Mechagodzilla for itself, thereby leading to Mechagodzilla supplanting Apex and setting up the film's Final Battle.

H

• Half the Man He Used to Be: Happens to an unfortunate Skullcrawler courtesy of Mechagodzilla at the Apex base, which is sliced in half lengthwise by the robot's mouth beam.
• Happy Ending Override: The film does this for Kong: Skull Island. Fifty years later, all of Kong's efforts to hold back the Skullcrawler horde and maintain his kingdom's natural balance have more or less come to naught, as the island's Perpetual Storm barrier has since completely enveloped it and rendered the conditions so hostile that the Iwi people were wiped out save for Jia. Monarch needed to construct a protective dome around Kong to keep him alive.
• Headbutting Heroes: Despite both Godzilla and Kong being portrayed as heroes in the series so far, this film shows them at each other's throats. There are three major reasons. 1. Their species have a longstanding rivalry. 2. As they are both Apex Predators they instinctively fight to make the other submit. And 3. Godzilla is filled with murderous rage because Mechagodzilla is partially powered by the mind of King Ghidorah whose presence drives him nuts.
• Hero Antagonist: Godzilla’s true role in the film. His rampages are more akin to an angry bee line to Apex bases. The motive is hunting down the film’s true villain.
• Held Gaze: Kong and Jia have a tendency to personally lock eyes with each-other when Kong leans down to look at her. The novelization states this is Kong's way of telling her that he, as gigantic as he is, can see her and is glad of her presence.
• Hidden Agenda Villain:
  • Probably the most poorly-received cut made to the film before its release is the decision to cut out Ren Serizawa's characterization to the point where the Serizawa Black Sheep is just an Elite Mook with a special name, leaving it ambiguous in the finished film what led Ren to join Apex Cybernetics' corporate conspiracy and betray every single value that his late father and grandfather stood for. The novelization's expansion amends this with an exploration of Ren's past and motives.
  • Ren isn't the only one either: the novelization all but states that Alan Jonah from the previous movie voluntarily sold Ghidorah's remains to Walter Simmons, but considering that Apex's warped ideals of corporate world domination and Muggle Power over the Titans would be complete anathema to Jonah as a Misanthrope Supreme with delusions of eco-terrorism, Jonah's reasons for allowing Apex to get their hands on such a thing are ambiguous.
• Hidden in Plain Sight: When Kong runs through the Hollow Earth towards his ancestral homeland, he passes through what seems to be a barren lava field. However, it turns out much of the rocky ground were actually the carapaces of Arachno-Claws which scatter as he passes by (and one of which gets eaten by a Foetodon).
• High-Voltage Death: Once Ghidorah's consciousness takes complete control of Mechagodzilla, Ren gets fried by electricity within the robot's control room.
• Hijacked by Ganon: King Ghidorah returns as the Big Bad, both in influence and in actual presence as the Mechagodzilla. His influence causing Godzilla to go on a rampage to try and stop him due to his continued existence (even reduced to a brain) meaning that Godzilla is still being contested as the Alpha thus not allowing him to gain the dominance needed to protect the world, necessitating Godzilla to seek out and destroy it. As for his presence, he takes over Mechagodzilla's programming, all but returning Back from the Dead in full as the Final Boss of the film.
• Hijacking Cthulhu: Subverted. It turns out Apex are using the skull of Ghidorah's surviving severed head as the telepathic control mechanism for piloting Mechagodzilla. If you thought this was a stupid idea for a Muggle Power organization, then you'd be right, since not only does the skull actively signal Godzilla to attack whenever Mechagodzilla is activated (with the novelization confirming Apex have no control of this), but once the Mecha is empowered with the Hollow Earth energy formula, Ghidorah's Soul Fragment hijacks the Mecha for itself and makes it turn on Apex and attack humanity and Godzilla.
• Hoist by Their Own Petard: Both Walter and Ren end up getting killed by Mechagodzilla.
• Hollow World: The Hollow Earth. This concept features two terrestrial environments, one on the outside of the mantle facing inwards towards the core, and one on the outside of the core, including a belt of stones where the gravity between the two environments are equalized. The Hollow Earth is said to be where the Titans originate; an ecosystem humans never could have found where evolution took a different approach. The core leaks radiation in spots, which glows blue similar to Godzilla's spines and breath and allows Kong to empower his axe.
• Hollywood Hacking: Subverted in the climax Josh's only computer experience is with coding and randomly typing in pass codes just locks them out of the system. Instead a simple flask of whiskey solves the problem.
• Homefield Advantage:
  • Godzilla and Kong's first fight leans heavily in the former's favor due to Kong being in transit over the ocean at the time, where Godzilla can move freely through the water while Kong has only the ships around him to stand on. Once Godzilla forces him into the water by blowing up the aircraft carrier Kong was on, he easily subdues Kong underwater. If it wasn't for the humans using high explosive depth charges to disorient Godzilla and release Kong from his grasp, Kong would have been drowned.
  • In their second fight in Hong Kong, Kong has a slight advantage due to all the buildings around him that he can climb on to evade Godzilla's Atomic Breath attacks and get close enough to use his newfound axe on Godzilla directly. This allows him to knock Godzilla down for the first time. Unfortunately for him, Godzilla decides to stop playing around after that and attacks Kong ferociously and rapidly, giving Kong no breathing room to escape and use the buildings as cover. It ends with Godzilla being the definitive winner of the fight.
• Honor Before Reason: A non-human example with Godzilla and Kong. Their feud ultimately serves to distract from the actual problem at hand, namely the creation and rise of Mechagodzilla (and the inadvertent resurrection of Ghidorah), but they still pursue it due to a combination of Godzilla's inability to tolerate any potential challengers to his dominance and Kong's refusal to submit to anyone.
• Hope Spot: When the Hollow Earth Energy is replicated and used to activate Mechagodzilla, the control board flashes a "SYSTEMS UNSTABLE" alert and Ren's controls are disconnected from the mech, raising the possibility that the eldritch energy source may have fried the circuits. Then the mecha's head starts moving...
• Horrible Judge of Character:
  • Dr. Nathan Lind, who is Apex Cybernetics' Unwitting Pawn through whom Apex are able to manipulate Monarch into helping them enter the Hollow Earth, shows no signs of even suspecting that Apex might be untrustworthy and have ulterior motives. Whilst Nathan is anything but the only person who falls for Apex's deceit, the novelization shows that most of Monarch, including those willing to collaborate with Apex, have at least some suspicions based on the company's shady past with the Oxygen Destroyer's development: Nathan is not one of those people, trusting Walter Simmons almost-unconditionally based on the latter's corporate celebrity status and renown.
  • In the movie version, Mark Russell appears to Easily Condemn Godzilla after his first attack without any rational evidence that Godzilla has truly gone bad, even though it's established knowledge, which Mark should know better than most people do, that Godzilla only ever attacks something when he's provoked by a threat. Mark gets extra points in the novelization, where he's so wrapped up in his Secretly Selfish delusions that Madison is Just a Kid who can't handle herself and doesn't know anything; that he actually thinks bossing her around and trying to helicopter her to keep her away from Titan business won't blow up in his face, even though she's a known headstrong borderline Rebellious Spirit.
• Humans Are Morons: Besides Apex Cybernetics' obscenely Too Dumb to Live use of Ghidorah's head; none of the human cast except for the three-man Team Godzilla bother to ask why Godzilla is acting hostile now or why he only attacked the Apex facility, even though asking those questions would only amount to basic common sense and is absolutely critical to working out why the crisis is occurring so it can be properly resolved. Worse, absolutely no-one except for Team Godzilla casts any suspicion on Apex until it's too late, even though it was their facility that Godzilla focused his destruction on while largely sparing the surroundings. Instead, Team Kong jump straight into the "shoot first and ask questions later" mindset in regards to neutralizing Godzilla, and they take it the extra mile by working with Apex of all people on that objective and suspecting almost nothing of their corporate benefactor's ulterior motives.
• Human Hammer-Throw:
  • Once he gets to the Hollow Earth, Kong fights two giant serpent kaiju, known as Warbats, and swings one of them by its tail to attack the other.
  • Godzilla finds himself on the receiving end of this courtesy of Mechagodzilla during the final battle.
• Humongous Mecha: A Freeze-Frame Bonus at the beginning of the first trailer shows Mechagodzilla rampaging through a city. He features in the finale as the final Big Bad, being a weapon created by APEX with the goal of killing all the Titans, but in the upload of Hollow Earth energy accidentally reawakens Ghidorah's mind.
• Hypocrite:
  • Mark Russell asks (more like commands) that Madison blindly trust in him and put faith in him, without giving her either of those things in return. This is even more prominent in the novelization than it is in the movie's final cut.
  • The novelization gives Ren Serizawa a few cases of this:
    • Ren considers Godzilla a monster who's undeserving of his heroic reputation because of the thousands of collateral deaths that have occurred in his fights against other Titans, and he thinks it's appalling that his father would advocate "let[ting] them fight" because of the collateral damage the Titans' battles cause. Yet Ren himself never once spares a thought for the millions of innocent people whom he and Simmons are knowingly putting in Godzilla's warpath in Hong Kong, and he doesn't seem to comprehend that even if Apex's Mechagodzilla project had been a success, it would've caused just as much collateral as Godzilla since it's designed to fight off Titans the same way Godzilla already does.
    • Ren dismisses the notion that the Titans are gods and insists they're nothing more than animals meant to be mastered, but he positively relishes in feeling like a god when he's in control of Mechagodzilla to the point of feeling he can only be "what he was meant to be" if he's able to use it indefinitely. This is furthermore hypocritical to his beliefs that humanity's figures of prominence and their empires are fleeting whilst the human race always continues advancing past their deaths.
    • While Ren thinks derisively of Simmons' egotism because Ren doesn't particularly care if his name is remembered for his contributions to human advancement, again, he seems to be oblivious to the fact he's incredibly arrogant himself: he has the hubris to think he's a mental god trapped in a mortal's body when he's linked to Mechagodzilla, and that's not even going into what he as Apex's chief technology officer did with Ghidorah's skull.

I

• If I Wanted You Dead...: At the end of their fight, Godzilla has Kong dead-to-rights, and makes it clear that if he wanted to, he could easily kill him; however, since Kong (unlike Ghidorah) is a part of the natural order, Godzilla more desires his submission than his death, made clear when he roars in a prone Kong's face. In spite of this, Kong just roars back. Godzilla simply leaves him to die.
• Ignored Expert:
  • Ren Serizawa ends up being a villainous case of this. When Apex get the Hollow Earth energy formula, Simmons impulsively orders it be uploaded to Mechagodzilla immediately, over Ren's protests that they have no idea what unexpected side-effects it might have on the technology if they rush through things without even the most basic of testing. The result is that, whether due to the energy source directly awakening him or due to his new body now being complete, Ghidorah's remnant consciousness in the skull hijacks the Mecha for itself and destroys Apex.
  • In the novelization only, Mark Russell ends up being this when he realizes before Godzilla's first attack that the Titan is about to make landfall at a population center — he tries to raise the alarm, but his Monarch colleagues don't listen until it's too late due to Godzilla's heroic reputation.
• I Got Bigger: Back in 1973 Kong was basically a teenager, so by the present he's now an adult, with the trailers showing that he's become just as tall as Godzilla.
• Implacable Man: Mechagodzilla turns out to be this. He's completely unfazed by Godzilla or Kong, able to power through all of their attacks, even together, and wipes the floor with both of them at once without missing a beat. It's only thanks to a brief malfunction due to its remote control panel being sabotaged that any pause is given long enough for Godzilla give Kong the means to kill it for good.
• Impossibly Graceful Giant: Mechagodzilla is decked out with not only rocket-powered punches but has jets on its back to allow it to have incredible ramming power. As a by-product, it is able to almost quite literally run circles around Godzilla. It takes Kong and Godzilla working together to pin it down, and later having its control panel short-circuited, for them to really land any good blows on it. Kong and Godzilla also move even faster and more agilely than in prior films, which already amped up the fighting speed.
• Improbable Infant Survival: The main cast includes two teenagers (Madison and Josh) and a little girl (Jia). Though they are put through perilous situations throughout the film, all three of them make it out okay in the end.
• Inconsistent Spelling: "Mechagodzilla" (as the movie's subtitles and novelization spell it), or "MechaGodzilla" (as a screen in Apex's HQ and the film's toy merchandise spell it)? Also, in the novelization, Ishirō Serizawa's first name is mispelled "Ichiro".
• In My Language, That Sounds Like...: For the record, the "Kong" in "King Kong" and "Hong Kong" are false friends: King Kong's "Kong" is inspired by Congo, which ultimately traces its etymology to the Kongo language, meaning "to gather". Hong Kong's "Kong" is a Cantonese-English romanisation, meaning "harbour" (the same one seen in the background of the battle).
• Insecure Protagonist, Arrogant Antagonist: On the heroes' side: Nathan Lind of Team Kong is initially plagued by guilt, and he's wracked with doubt about the mission to access the Hollow Earth, because of his spectacular failure the previous time he attempted it which led to his brother's death; and he's easily manipulated to boot. Madison Russell of Team Godzilla has issues with a father who has no faith in her and refuses to listen to her (even more so in the novelization than in the movie), and she's determined to prove him and everyone else wrong about Godzilla's alleged Face–Heel Turn, as she's one of the only people convinced that Godzilla is acting out for a good reason. On the villains' side: Apex Cybernetics are among the most supremely arrogant, hubristic and self-destructive antagonists that the MonsterVerse has seen yet (especially their hammy leader, Walter Simmons, who is practically a pure personification of modernist hubris); but beyond being technologically-skilled, Apex are repeatedly put in a good position to achieve their goals, thanks to their reliance on subterfuge coupled with this movie's application of the Humans Are Morons trope to humanity all round. Ultimately, it's solely Apex's own actions that cause their downfall.
• Intimidation Demonstration:
  • Godzilla flashing light from his dorsal spines as an intimidation display — something he only does when he's up against an extremely dangerous foe like with Ghidorah in the previous movie — when he attacks Apex Pensacola clues Madison in that he hasn't just turned on humanity and that something big which nobody has noticed is provoking him.
  • Upon breaking out of Victoria Peak, Mechagodzilla just before it confronts Godzilla razes down half of Hong Kong Central with its Proton Scream inside of a few seconds, all within Godzilla's direct line of sight.
• Ironic Echo: Of a sort; When Godzilla nicks Kong in the Hong Kong battle, we're given an up-close front-facing shot of Godzilla chuckling to himself in satisfaction. When Mechagodzilla fully frees himself from the Apex base and torches several buildings worth of humans, Ghidora gives off a similar chuckle with the same camera angle.
• It Can Think:
  • As is the norm, both titular monsters come across as far more intelligent than their appearances suggest with both showing adaptive and reasoning skills.
  • The Monarch crew express incredulity when they witness Kong communicating with Jia using sign language.
  • After the humans lose control of Mechagodzilla, it develops a mind of its own courtesy of Ghidorah's brain having been integrated into it and begins attacking autonomously. One scene in particular shows he may have been in control much earlier: when Ren and Walter are discussing the Hollow Earth energy source to fix Mechagodzilla's power issues (with Ren still hooked up to Ghidorah's brain and in his skull), the eye of the seemingly deactivated Mechagodzilla starts up again and begins emitting an ORCA-like tone, and only then does Godzilla sense the robot.
• It's All About Me:
  • Walter Simmons, and also Ren Serizawa in the novelization, are guilty of this. Simmons is a Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist who uses Muggle Power as justification for building Mechagodzilla and seeking to usurp Godzilla, but really his Evil Plan boils down solely to feeding his own ego and specifically putting himself at the top of the food chain rather than actually helping anybody. Ren's motivations are largely unexplained in the film, but the novelization reveals he joined Apex's Evil Plan (which sacrifices millions of innocent lives) and personally wants Godzilla dead, all because he blames the 300-foot lizard for his Parental Neglect issues with his father.
  • Mark Russell may have gotten over his hatred of Godzilla after the previous film, but he's still an egocentric prick. This shows in how he jumps to a conclusion about Godzilla's first attack based solely on what he went through with Emma's betrayal without any objective real evidence that the same thing is currently happening with Godzilla, not hesitating to use pity for himself to guilt-trip Madison into shutting up when he doesn't want to hear something; and even moreso in the novelization, with how Mark's parenting style since gaining custody of Madison amounts to "if it's what I want, then it must be what you want too, and I don't care how much you say it's not what you want and it's making you miserable, I want you to keep trying".
• It's a Small World, After All: Kong's "palace" and the source of the Hollow Earth energy just so happens to be directly below Hong Kong, relative to Godzilla at least (he burrows in through the palace floor), where Godzilla is at the moment they discover it. Justified to an extent, as Godzilla could reach them from almost anywhere on Earth given their proximity to the core. Hong Kong still provides a convenient angle, though.
• It's Personal:
  • For most of the film, Kong is uninterested in fighting Godzilla for dominance. However, Kong reaches his Rage Breaking Point in the climax when Godzilla blasts his atomic breath through the ground into Hollow Earth, destroying Kong's ancestral home and finally driving the ape to fight Godzilla all-out.
  • Implied with Mechagodzilla once it becomes sentient with Ghidorah's consciousness remnants. Once more, Godzilla and King Ghidorah are shown to utterly despise one another. Godzilla's entire rampage is due to sensing Ghidorah's not entirely dead yet. The nanosecond Ghidorah's remains hijack Mechagodzilla, it nigh instantly tries to brutally beat Godzilla to death and prioritizes him over Kong.
  • It's revealed in the novelization that Ren Serizawa does indeed want to kill Godzilla largely due to Misplaced Retribution over his father's death in the previous film, and moreso because Ren blames Godzilla for a lifetime of neglect by his father (who committed his life and most of his time to studying Godzilla) and for his father's Heroic Sacrifice to revive Godzilla in the previous film permanently dashing Ren's hopes of reconciling with his father.
  • The novelization also reveals that Bernie Hayes has a very personal beef with Apex Cybernetics during his efforts to expose their true colors. He believes that the death of his wife Sara was a deliberate hit by Apex disguised as a mundane traffic accident, because she stumbled upon Apex's secret plans to help the U.S. military build the Oxygen Destroyer; so Bernie has every intention of finishing what Sara started and pegging Walter Simmons for the evil bastard he really is.

J

• Jerkass:
  • Godzilla nearly kills Kong, and doesn't care about killing humans who stand between him and his target. But after Kong saves him from Mechagodzilla, the old Titan buries the hatchet, nevermind the fact that the revelation of WHY Godzilla was attacking makes the extremes he went to borderline-justifiable.
  • Despite getting over his initial anger and grief in Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Mark Russell is still just as Hot-Blooded, self-righteous, and prone to feeling sorry for himself foremost as he's ever been, on top of being at least as bull-headed as before. Although Mark still loves Madison; during one of their only two direct interactions in the film (and yet another time in the movie's B-roll footage), Mark acts like he knows better than her whilst refusing to give her a single ounce of the respect that she's earned after her heroism in the previous movie, and he also quickly uses pity for himself to guilt-trip Madison into shutting up when she persist in calling him out and trying to talk sense into him.
    • It's worse in the novelization's expansion. Here, Mark has not only refused to acknowledge his daughter as anything more than the naïve, normal kid that he wishes she was — despite his reaction to her running off establishing that he does know better deep down but he just chooses to ignore it, meaning not even Horrible Judge of Character can excuse his behavior towards her — but he's actually stupid enough to resort to bossing Madison around or outright helicoptering her without making any effort to treat her like an equal when he can't get his own way with her, as if this will accomplish anything except pushing her to do exactly what he's trying to avert. Madison observes in the novel that Mark is really being Secretly Selfish, because he just wants a daughter he can better control and coddle instead of acknowledging what his daughter actually is, showing how Mark only thinks about his loved ones' feelings insofar that they affect his own and he doesn't think about how his unhealthy choices and actions are hurting them.
  • Maia Simmons is the Jerk with a Heart of Jerk version. From her introduction, she acts like a snooty, aloof and obnoxious Rich Bitch to the rest of Team Kong, and she doesn't care much at all for Kong himself, but she has a Pet the Dog moment where she runs to Jia's aid, and her attitude seems to mellow after she's shaken by her first-hand experience of Godzilla's attack on the naval fleet. However, Maia still betrays the rest of Team Kong in the Hollow Earth to further her father's plan, coldly threatens them with guns, and doesn't hesitate to leave them all to near-certain and horrible deaths once she no longer needs them.
• The Juggernaut: Mechagodzilla shows off his nearly unstoppable mechanical strength once more, giving Godzilla probably his worst beating ever. Even when Kong is revived to even the odds, Mechagodzilla is still able to overpower the two Alpha Titans together. Only after the humans momentarily short-circuit Mechagodzilla's psionic connection to the Ghidorah brain are the pair just barely able to triumph.
  • Godzilla himself. When he attacks the fleet carrying Kong it is made very clear by the end that there was no chance of beating him. The ships and aircraft didn't have any weapons that could do more than annoy him, and when Kong was forced to fight Godzilla up close, he was overpowered and only made it through because the humans intervened. When the two square off again they're more evenly matched, but Godzilla's greater experience in Titan fights means Kong is still decisively defeated.
• Just Eat Gilligan: If Mark Russell and the rest of Monarch had exhibited the common sense to take Mad Truth and Madison's pointers that Godzilla is attacking Apex Cybernetics facilities seriously, Monarch would've probably caught onto Apex sooner, and they would've been able to either launch a full investigation before Mechagodzilla came online or get more people evacuated from Hong Kong — they might've even contacted Dr. Lind and Dr. Andrews and warned them to call off the HEAV expedition to the Hollow Earth due to Apex being suspect.

K

• Karmic Death: Walter and Ren get their just desserts courtesy of Mechagodzilla and Ghidorah's skull respectively; the monster that they created and the monster that they enabled to essentially come Back from the Dead through sheer Lethally Stupid. Maia gets killed by Kong just moments after she betrays Team Kong, and as a direct result of shooting at Kong.
• Killer Gorilla: Played with for Kong: he's normally a Gentle Giant, but he can be incredibly brutal in dispatching his foes, most notably Mechagodzilla whom he dismembers and decapitates with his axe.
• Knight of Cerebus: King Ghidorah, again. The first time his presence is brought up, all comedy drains out of the scene. When he finally hijacks Mechagodzilla and takes over his role as the main villain, the stakes go from 'find Kong a new home and a territorial dispute between him and Godzilla' to 'stop Ghidorah from killing them both and resuming his destruction of the planet.'
• Knight Templar: Walter Simmons and Ren Serizawa^note The latter was confirmed by the novelization and Word of Sain Paul think they're acting in mankind's best interests, because their Corporate Conspiracy involves perfecting a strictly human-controlled, Titan-combating Humongous Mecha with which humans would no longer need to rely on or wait for Godzilla and/or Kong to come and save them when a hostile Titan attacks; then installing this Mecha as the new global Alpha Titan that the other Titans would be more liable to defer to. Not a bad idea in principle, especially when considering how overwhelmingly outmatched humanity is relative to the Titans, but:
  1. Simmons and Ren want Mechagodzilla to foremost murder and supplant one of the few Titans whose continued supremacy has actually been in human civilization's best interests (and who also saved mankind and the Earth from certain extinction one movie ago), so as to eliminate the competition (Simmons) and satiate a petty personal vendetta (Ren). And it's furthermore hinted that Simmons and/or Ren would've afterwards gone on to murder Kong (a Titan who's even more explicitly on humanity's side) just because he has the potential to challenge Mechagodzilla.
  2. It's indicated in the novelization that Apex's corporate conspiracy have committed outright murder solely to keep a past company scandal buried.
  3. Simmons and Ren instigated the entire conflict of the movie in the first place. The only reason Godzilla is active and attacking cities containing Apex facilities is because he can sense Apex's experiments are creating a mechanical rival to his dominance that has Ghidorah's consciousness inside it, five years after Godzilla and humanity fought side-by-side to thwart Ghidorah's active global efforts to destroy all life in the world as we know it. Simmons and Ren are aware that their experiments are provoking Godzilla's rampage, and they're deliberately continuing them while putting as many people as possible in Godzilla's warpath for the sake of turning the usurpation plot into Engineered Heroics.
  4. Simmons is a sociopathic narcissist who is motivated to usurp Alpha Titans that are on humanity's side, and he knowingly gets millions of people needlessly hurt and killed, solely to feed his own ego rather than out of any genuine concern for his fellow man. Hell, Simmons doesn't even bother all that much to justify himself once Madison rips his "defending humanity" excuse to shreds. Ren isn't much better, being a Psychopathic Manchild with a grudge over an absent father. And one or both of these two people will be in control of the new all-powerful king of all life on Earth, potentially including the worldwide kaiju of mass destruction, if their plans for Mechagodzilla succeed.
  5. It's hinted in the movie and novelization, and explicitly confirmed by the art book, that what Simmons really wants in the long term after using Mechagodzilla to effectively make his company the new King of the Monsters is to usher in a new age of corporate dystopia, with no-one else in the world able to challenge Apex due to them being able to use Mechagodzilla to cow and threaten anyone they want.
  6. It really can't be overstated how self-destructively conceited Apex are. Thinking that it was a good idea to take the whole Earth back from the Titans for humanity by using what's left of Ghidorah's brain as their artificial Alpha Titan's own brain, without installing overwhelming emergency safeguards, was stupid enough; but Simmons insisting that they infuse Mechagodzilla with the Green Rocks without conducting even basic testing on the rocks beforehand, just because Simmons is over-excited to see his dream come true, was just begging to become the InGen or BioSyn of this movie.
  7. Humans and Titans were effectively living in a complete peacetime with each-other before Apex set their plan in motion, and that peacetime would still be around in full force if Apex had never acted, meaning that Apex's plan was completely unnecessary to humanity's well-being in the current climate.
  8. As the last three MonsterVerse movies have shown, Humans Are Morons who caused all of the hostile Titans' world-threatening emergences in the first place, and they often then made the situation even worse than it already was before they helped Godzilla and/or Kong to make it any better. So it's not really a stretch to say that maybe humans in the MonsterVerse demonstrably don't deserve to be the planet's dominant species again, after throwing the balances maintained by Godzilla and Kong out of whack through stupidity and arrogance over and over again with both humanity and entire ecosystems like Skull Island (which has been obliterated as an indirect consequence of the previous movie's events) paying the price.

L

• Lack of Empathy: Walter Simmons, and also Ren Serizawa in the novelization: for all their respective delusions and posturing about putting humanity back on the top of the food chain over all the Titans, they both display zero emotional regard for the thousands to millions of people whom their actions have directly put in harm's way, with them provoking and exploiting Godzilla's rampage to create Engineered Heroics with the Mechagodzilla project. Downplayed with a Monarch operative named Ben, who doesn't understand Kong's frustrations at being forced to live inside a bio-dome's cramped environment.
• Laser-Guided Karma: Godzilla spends most of the movie roughing up Kong for not good reason. He later ends up on the receiving end of this from Mecha Godzilla and has to be saved BY Kong.
• Last of Their Kind: Besides Godzilla and Kong, Jia is the last of the Iwi tribe after the tribe were wiped out by the Perpetual Storm barrier overtaking Skull Island. This gets a little Played for Drama with Kong when he enters the Hollow Earth hoping to find others of his kind.
• Let's You and Him Fight: This film is pretty much the poster child for the trope, as the two titans come to blows for their own respective reasons but end up on the same side due to Mechagodzilla aka Ghidorah.
• Lighter and Softer: It's really saying something when the movie opens with Kong yawning and scratching his butt. In contrast to the previous dramatic and serious Monsterverse installments, the general vibe of GVK is pure fun, enthusiasm and lightheartedness. As an example, Kong has grown downright adorable in personality and even appearance from the rather intimidating and grouchy adolescent he was back in 1973. Mechagodzilla as an antagonist, while a destructive threat, carries more of an exciting and impressive air than the grim and hard-hitting one Ghidorah does. And that's not even mentioning the ending, which, unlike the bittersweet ones in the previous films, is flat-out sweet and cheerful.
• Light Feminine and Dark Feminine: Amongst Team Kong, Dr. Ilene Andrews is the Light Feminine and Maia Simmons is the Dark Feminine, although they're both brunettes. Andrews is a casually-dressed and maternal figure who is Jia's Parental Substitute and is concerned for Kong's well-being, and she's the second most grounded and cautious member of the team when it comes to manipulating Kong and meddling with the Hollow Earth's energy. Maia on the other hand is played by the stunning Eiza González and always wears something that fits nicely around her form throughout her screentime; and she's confident (at first), but she's also rude, aloof, and all she cares about is completing the mission her father gave her, betraying the rest of the team once they get in her way.
• Like Father, Unlike Son:
  • Ren Serizawa very much. His demeanor in his early scenes is a reminder of his late father, but it becomes clear as the film progresses that the only trait he shares with his late father beyond appearances is a genius-level intellect. Apart from that, Ren could not be more different from Ishirō Serizawa, having joined Apex's hubris-filled and stunningly reckless and Too Dumb to Live plan to usurp Godzilla in the name of Muggle Power which callously sacrifices thousands of innocent lives.
  • Madison is also presented this way compared to Mark in the novelization. Whereas Mark has only rejoined Monarch out of a sense of duty and would love to have a normal life where he never has to deal with Titans again, Madison is more Jumped at the Call, and it's a source of strain in their relationship due to Mark being a My Beloved Smother and Fantasy-Forbidding Father.
• Logical Weakness:
  • Being an ape means Kong isn't an adept swimmer. When Godzilla drags him into the ocean, Kong would have drowned without the humans intervening. Like real apes he's also not adapted to survive in the cold so bringing him to Antartica would kill him if he didn't get to the warmer environments in the Hollow Earth.
  • Likewise, Mechagodzilla has a couple. Due to it being a machine possessed by Ghidorah's subconsciousness, it lacks its previous identity's ability to regenerate or absorb energy, and thus once a way to deal serious damage to it is found, any mutilations done to its metal body are permanent. It's also due to how Apex built it still reliant on its satellite link to function even after Ghidorah's subconsciousness hijacks it (or so it seems, with disrupting the satellite link only making the Mecha fizzle out momentarily).
• Look on My Works, Ye Mighty, and Despair:
  • Implied to have happened with Kong's ancestors. They originally dwelled in the Hollow Earth alongside the Iwis' ancestors, where they formed a civilization which made ingenious and grand things, including Titan-sized axes which used Titanus Gojira dorsal fins to harness the latter species' bio-atomic powers, a full-fledged temple vast enough to fit more than a dozen grown Titans in, and sculptures and statues of Titanus Kong; exhibiting human levels of intellect and architectural ingenuity. Kong's ancestors went to war against Godzilla and/or his species at some point^note note that the movie demonstrates in the present day with the titular two endlings of those species that Godzilla physically far outclasses and easily overwhelms Kong once the former stops playing around, even when Kong is armed with one of his ancestors' T. Gojira axes – "what is a king to a god" indeed; Titanus Kong afterwards disappeared from the Hollow Earth entirely, and all that remained of their species was located on Skull Island, where we know they were whittled down by the Skullcrawlers until just one young endling remained. The novelization specifies that Titanus Kong were actually driven out of the Hollow Earth to Skull Island after losing the conflict they waged with Godzilla. In the present day, all that's left of Titanus Kong is the named Last of His Kind, whose knowledge of his ancestors begins and ends with biologically-ingrained homing instincts; and all that's left of the Kong species' once-impressive civilization are the now-desolate relics and monuments they left behind in the Hollow Earth, many of which get destroyed during this movie thanks to Godzilla and Apex's actions.
  • Apex Cybernetics are a powerful multi-national tech corporation with ties to Monarch who have recently engineered amazing, cutting-edge technology that looks like it wouldn't be around in Real Life for at least another decade from 2023, and they're made of this trope. Apex have recently developed cross-continental magnetic levitation train pod tunnels, and the HEAVs for entering the Hollow Earth. But above all, Apex's crowning ambition is to create a Titan-killing cybernetic copy of Godzilla so they can use it to kill and usurp the King of the Monsters himself, take over or exterminate the other Titans, and then take over the world; and they've invested trillions of dollars, a massive Corporate Conspiracy, and Engineered Heroics the likes of which would see them dragged in front of the International Court of Justice and tried for crimes against humanity in any remotely just world if they were ever found out. However, Apex using unrefined Green Rocks and using a malicious, undead but still cognitively-active Draconic Abomination in Mechagodzilla's systems both at the same time results in the machine going rogue under the undead Ghidorah' s influence, and it wastes no time massacring Mechagodzilla's former masters, posing an existential threat to humanity while doing exactly what Apex claimed the Mecha would stop the Titans from doing first.

M

• Macross Missile Massacre:
  • Apex's HEAVs mount pretty sizable racks of missiles that can damage even large Hollow Earth monsters.
  • It just wouldn't be Mechagodzilla without mounting more missiles than a regiment of BattleMechs. Mecha G opens with a salvo that even Godzilla can't just shrug off, and concept artist Jared Krichevsky confirmed on Reddit that Mechagodzilla has another rocket launcher hidden in his chest.
• Magical Defibrillator: When Kong begins suffering heart failure from the injuries he received in his fight against Godzilla, the human heroes rig the HEAV (which is said to to have enough energy to power Las Vegas for a week) to overload on his chest. The shock is enough to bring Kong back to his feet and, after he forces his dislocated arm back into socket, ready to fight Mechagodzilla. That said, the trope is downplayed because Kong's heart was slowing at the time rather than stopped.
• Makes Us Even: After Mechagodzilla is dealt with, Godzilla returns and Kong is expecting another brawl, although he's wounded and doesn't seem to want one. Godzilla leaves him be when Kong drops his axe.
• Mass "Oh, Crap!":
  • Team Godzilla have one when the three of them discover the skull of Ghidorah's decapitated left head in Apex's headquarters, wired up and being used as the hub of MechaGodzilla's neural pathways.
  • Everyone has one in quick succession when Ghidorah possesses Mechagodzilla and goes on the rampage.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane:
  • Jia and Kong's relationship has aspects of this: while Kong understands sign language and it's largely how Jia talks to him, Jia seems to know what Kong is feeling and thinking at all times. Whether it's just her knowing him that well or some mystical/telepathic connection (something the credits of the last movie alluded to) is unclear. Adding to it, the novelization sees Kong notice Jia in need of help directly after she says a silent Iwi prayer to him. Whether it was a coincidence or her prayer somehow summoned him is unclear.
  • The Hollow Earth in general. While largely talked about in scientific terms, it's an Eldritch Location where gravity doesn't work the same as it does anywhere else. The Hollow Earth energy source is also unclear as to what it is, but seemingly has magical properties. While the Titans metabolize radiation into it, this only raises further questions, as it is what causes their healing effect on the environment. Apex is able to replicate it, but it's made clear they don't actually understand it.
  • There's some ambiguity as to whether Ghidorah's consciousness surviving is due to his alien biology or his soul literally possessing his mechanical shell. Ren notes in the novelization that it shouldn't be possible for Ghidorah's mental processes to persist in his bones and Madison flat out suggests Ghidorah's soul has possessed Mechagodzilla. Ghidorah is also revealed to be flat out telepathic. It's also noted destroying his satellite uplink is supposed to shut him down, but Mechagodzilla is only stunned for a few moments before starting up again, implying Ghidorah is more directly controlling it than just through the uplink.
  • Nathan Lind's figurine which is a memento of his late brother gets this treatment in a prologue scene in the novelization. His brother David always kept it as a good luck charm, but he gave it away to Nathan right before his disastrous mission into Skull Island's Vile Vortex which caused his death.
• Meaningful Name:
  • Apex Cybernetics. The Apex part refers to how their true goal is to make humanity the apex species again by killing off or enslaving all the Titans, and the Cybernetics part refers to the means they intend to use to accomplish this.
  • In the novelization, it's revealed that the real name which the Iwi knew the Skullcrawlers by is Halakrah, meaning "persistent enemy" (which fits with the Skullcrawlers' Super-Persistent Predator tendencies caused by their Horror Hunger).
• Mecha-Enabling Phlebotinum:
  • This version of Mechagodzilla is hit with a dose of reality, in that the Humongous Mecha's systems and weapons use so much power that there literally isn't any power source in mankind's possession that can give the Mecha more than a couple minutes of runtime before being sucked dry (and even then, the Mecha's Proton Scream only works at 40% power during this time). Apex successfully get around this by infusing it with a synthesized copy of the Hollow Earth's Green Rocks, which enables Mechagodzilla to operate at full power seemingly indefinitely, albeit with some unexpected side effects.
  • Furthermore, Jared Krichevsky has said that some of the alloys Mechagodzilla is made out of are fictional and fantastical, whilst these official stats describe Mechagodzilla's composition as "T-1 nanometal".
• Mech vs. Beast: After the climactic duel between the title monsters is said and done, the real Final Battle begins when Mechagodzilla awakens, giving Godzilla and Kong a reason to work together.
• The Meddling Kids Are Useless: Team Godzilla (Madison, Josh and Bernie) spend their side of the story investigating Godzilla's rampage and learning what Apex Cybernetics are really up to, but they end up functioning like a First-Person Peripheral Narrator: the audience gradually uncovers Apex's plans through the trio's eyes, and then once we've gotten all the answers, Team Godzilla get caught by the bad guys after making a brief, failed attempt to stop them. Downplayed/Subverted entirely in the climax, when Josh and Bernie being in the right place at the right time thanks to Madison bringing them into her investigation leads to Josh using Bernie's flask of alcohol to short the Apex computer, disrupting Mechagodzilla's satellite link at a pivotal moment. If the disruption hadn't caused Mechagodzilla to stall when it did (as it was seconds away from driving its drill weapon into Kong's skull whilst Godzilla was too exhausted to effectively fight), then Mechagodzilla would have most likely killed Kong, then a prone Godzilla, and then the Ghidorah-possessed Robotic Psychopath would have gone on to do whatever it wanted.
• Metronomic Man Mashing: Kong does this to the second Warbat several times before tearing off its head.
• Mix-and-Match Critters: The Warbats resemble giant snakes, with fin-like wings resembling those of the classic Toho versions of King Ghidorah and Shinomura; whilst the Hellhawks have leathery bat-like wings and scaly skin, but beaks and talons resembling those of a bird of prey.
• More than Mind Control: In the novelization, it's strongly hinted that Ren's personality has been corrupted by repeated exposure to the Ghidorah skull's subconsciousness during Mechagodzilla's test runs by the time the story starts, but he's too arrogant and too enjoying of his creation's power to care.
• Morton's Fork: With most of Skull Island destroyed by the Perpetual Storm, Monarch is faced with a difficult situation in dealing with Kong. The bio-dome they've constructed can't contain him much longer, both because it doesn't have enough food in its limited space and because Kong's grown wise to his containment and doesn't like it, but if they move him to a more suitable, off-site habitat they risk the wrath of Godzilla, who won't stand for another Alpha Titan in his territory. Eventually they decide to risk the latter option by taking Kong to Hollow Earth, but, sure enough, during the journey, Godzilla comes for Kong, and the ape barely survives their encounter.
• The Mountains of Illinois: One of the places the film is set in Pensacola, Florida, but does it REALLY look anything like it?
  • When we get to see a shot of Pensacola, we see some big mountains in the distance. Anyone who's ever been to Pensacola would tell you that there are no mountains in Pensacola. Or basically anywhere else in Florida, for that matter.
  • Another thing about Pensacola is that it looks more like it's set in a mid-northern part of the world, with rocky beaches and mountains, rather than setting in a tropical southern part of Florida.
• Muggles Do It Better: Mechagodzilla is a creation of humanity in this continuity, and easily the most powerful of the Mechagodzilla's created so far. While it does use Ghidorah's head as a supercomputer of sorts, Mechagodzilla is incredibly mobile and decked out to the teeth with anti-Kaiju weaponry. It was able to completely manhandle both Godzilla and Kong with little effort, even when the two started to work together. And the main reason it loses is because a separate group of humans managed to sabotage its control panel, with it looking highly likely Mechagodzilla would've won if not for them. Granted the mecha had King Ghidorah in the driver's seat rather than its intended pilot Ren and was near unusable without the Hollow Earth energy solving its power issues, meaning without the energy beyond human understanding it's Awesome, but Impractical.
• My Greatest Failure:
  • For Nathan Lind, it's getting several people including his own brother killed during his previous, disastrous effort to launch a manned expedition into the Hollow Earth. He's been in a Heroic BSoD for years since, until the movie's start, and he shows subtle signs of still being haunted by his failure amidst his attempts to repeat the original mission's objective without repeating history.
  • The novelization touches on Mark Russell's regrets from Godzilla: King of the Monsters about not being there for Madison in the years following Andrew's death. Mark sees him being left as Madison's guardian after Emma's death as his chance to make up for his long absence, but he's been severely overcompensating by being an ignorant, self-centered hardass of a parent who has zero respect for his daughter's metal or her proven accomplishments.
• My Significance Sense Is Tingling: Godzilla can sense the Hollow Earth energy source being tampered with and immediately uses his atomic breath to burrow a hole directly to that location.
• My Skull Runneth Over: Of a sort. According to Jared Krichevsky, Mechagodzilla is normally too much for a human brain to control on its own, which is why Apex decided to use Ghidorah's skull's natural telepathy as a control system and a crutch for the pilot, and he implies that the High-Voltage Death which Ren suffers when Mechagodzilla becomes fully-charged and sentient is what happens when someone is connected to the Mecha and the crutch isn't enough.
• Mysterious Antarctica: Antarctica is the location of a known Vile Vortex to the Hollow Earth. In-Universe, it's not so mysterious anymore, as Monarch have long since built a gigantic facility into the ice around the tunnel's mouth. The novelization specifically says it's no more than a meagre few miles from the site where Ghidorah was originally frozen, and the characters speculate over whether Ghidorah was approaching the Vile Vortex or had just emerged when he was frozen in ancient times.
• Mythology Gag: See here.