Film So let's talk about Godzilla vs. Kong
Credit where credit is due: this movie does give us the matchup of Godzilla vs. Kong and it does give us a definitive winner. They didn't chicken out and for that I applaud it. In fact, for the most part the monster battles are pretty darn great (with one exception I'll discuss later on)... but the film really suffers when it comes to its human characters.
There's a lot of human characters in this film, and honestly a lot of them feel entirely unnecessary. The group travelling with Kong to the Hollow Earth? Great. Their relationship with Kong helps to humanize him. Godzilla, in contrast, is cast as the villain in the exchange since yeah, he's going around and trashing places and people "don't know why".
But the snag here is that everyone else trying to deal directly with the Godzilla program are entirely clueless and contribute nothing to the film. Early Edition Man could be taken out of things entirely, and his daughter and her cohorts in investigating things similarly just exist so the audience can have exposition dumped on us and let us know where Mechagodzilla comes from at the end and then do ONE MINOR THING that was completely unnecessary for the resolution of film.
The human antagonists really don't get fleshed out that much either. Some dude's just butthurt that humans aren't the apex creatures on the planet, and he's swiftly written out as soon as he's fulfilled his narrative purpose. Tywin Lannister in King of the Monsters at least had a bit more depth as a nature extremist, and Ghidorah also was present for more of the film than Mechagodzilla... whose appearance at the end feels not far off from just how Doomsday was in Batman vs. Superman.
It's fun for the monster fights, definitely. And I have to wonder how much COVID impacted the film's production so I'm not going to shit on it too hard. But yeah it was one of those movies that for me the pieces weren't fitting together as well as I would like but well enough I could see where you could try to knit things together.
Film Literally "Just Here For Godzilla" (Or Kong)
This film looks amazing, has fantastic fights and Kong has way more character development than you'd expect out of a giant primate.
And that is where the good stuff ends. Godzilla Vs. Kong proudly follows in the footsteps of previous monster verse entries by being a horrible film with really, really good fight scenes. The human characters exist. That's pretty much all they have going for them. The villains were never a threat to anyone and really that whole section of the plot was just to manufacture situations where Kong, Zilla and the spoiler character get to fight.
There are two teams of humans: Team Kong which are some scientists, a clearly evil relative of the villain (she even dresses in all black) and a deaf little girl who can sign with Kong. And Team Godzilla which is Madison from KOTM, Madison's friend from High School and some conspiracy theorist guy who may or may not be right about everything. Madison was already a bit character, so I question the logic of making her a main protagonist, also she's kinda mean in this one. Something I find very amusing is that these two groups of people have zero interaction with each other. Team Gojira only exists to bring spoiler character in on the action and Team Kong exists to give Kong a powerup. MONARCH is there too, but their role appears to just be celebrity cameos and literally watching the chaos unfold impotently.
My two major problems are 1. Godzilla is an asshole and despite causing the whole plot everyone still treats him as the godlike hero of the film. and 2. The villains don't feel particularly villainous until the story forces them to make boneheaded decisions out of evil. For example: in the Third Act evil lady, who hasn't really done anything bad at this point, starts to harvest some of the weird Hollow Earth energy which was the sole purpose of the expedition. This is presented as bad for some reason and then a stand off occurs between the heroes who kidnapped Kong and brought him to Antartica and the corporate goons. Predictably they all die for, y'know, doing their jobs and the heroes escape in the knick of time. The funny thing is that Kong, and likely the audience, would not even care if the bad guys didn't start pointing guns at everybody with no prompting.
After that, Godzilla and Kong meet up and fight for a while before spoiler character, also a harebrained villain scheme, shows up and takes center stage. Then the music goes all Man of Steel. While the fights are cool, they still try and shoehorn the humans in to complete their paltry character arcs. Then the movie ends. So I'd give it a 6/10.
Film Human characters spoil the giant monster movie
Well, I saw this alleged movie last night at the drive-in, playing second billing to Tom & Jerry. That's a comedy and despite some cringeworthy moments actually functions as a comedy because I laughed at the jokes.
In Godzilla vs. Kong, the movie is a joke. I've seen Kong: Skull Island but not King of the Monsters, so evidently there's some continuity going on with Monarch and this hollow world thing. Maybe I would have connected with the recurring characters more if I'd seen them before, but as lifeless as they are in this movie I can't really see that happening.
The dialog is so epochally bad — so clichéd and full of nonsensical exposition — that I find it hard to believe someone was paid actual money to write it. Maybe they were working undercover for MST3K and deliberately tried to make it as easy to mock as possible. I laughed out loud in almost every scene with human characters and my wife, who was watching with us, kept up a running commentary that was way better than the actual dialog.
I found myself distracted from the giant monster fights — the actual purpose of the movie — because I couldn't get the terrible lines out of my head. It doesn't help that the fight scenes keep cutting to these people, whom we are allegedly supposed to care about but have enough plot armor to survive the Chicxulub meteor impact head-on. Look, movie, you're getting your boring, mentally and emotionally crippled characters in the way of the monsters, who have way better emotional presence than any of them.
Speaking of monsters, the CG is excellent, but I wish we could have seen more of the fight scenes. Literally. The first time Godzilla fights Kong, it's half in and half out of the water and obscured by "action" camera angles. The second time, in Hong Kong, it's dark and buildings are collapsing like LEGO brand bricks. Is it too much to ask that I can tell what's going on or where the characters are with respect to each other? Is it too much to ask that you stop cutting away from the action so these boring drones can emote at the camera, or are we supposed to be so spellbound when the monke punches the lizard that the ushers have to mop our drool off of the floor?
Also, nice try with the girl. I see what you did there, writers. The little deaf child is the only one who can communicate with the giant ape. There's not enough CG in the world to mask out the puppet strings you're trying to attach to my heart. The only way to make it any more cliché would have been to give her cancer and put her in mortal danger a bunch of times. It worked a bit: she is the only character I gave the slightest crap about besides the monsters. Wait, she somehow knows and taught Kong the sign for "Godzilla"... aaand I'm out again.
In summary, why did they have to put a bunch of unlikable idiots in my giant monster movie when the monsters are the only redeemable part of this confused, boring mess? 1.5 of 5 stars.
Oh, wait, I forgot. It's got a very diverse cast. 5 out of 5.