Godzilla vs. Kong. (Warner Bros., Legendary Entertainment, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Over the last few days I’ve accumulated a backlog of movies I haven’t written about for the moviemagg blog yet, two of which my husband Charles and I watched last Tuesday (on his regularly scheduled day off) and two of which I watched late Sunday on Lifetime. The big feature was Godzilla vs. Kong, fourth and last in the “Monsterverse” cycle Warner Bros. and Legendary Entertainment have been making since 2014, when those two American companies licensed the character of Godzilla from Toho Studios in Japan (the films credit Toho with creating Godzilla, which of course is nonsense; intellectual content is created by people, not corporations, and the person who dreamed up Godzilla and directed quite a few of his films, including the first one, was Ishirô Honda, sometimes spelled Inoshiro Honda). According to a Wikipedia page called “Godzilla Franchise,” Warners’ and Legendary’s license from Toho to use the Godzilla character ended in 2021, which suggests this may be the last “Monsterverse” movie we get from them – as does the absence of the sort of post-credits tag sequence we got in the previous films Kong: Skull Island and Godzilla: King of the Monsters. (An imdb.com “Trivia” post says director Adam Wingard actually shot a post-credits sequence but ended up using it in the main part of the film instead.) I got into these movies when Charles attempted to rent Godzilla vs. Kong at a Redbox machine but couldn’t find one in working order, and I went on Amazon.com and found that the boxed set that also included Kong: Skull Island and Godzilla: King of the Monsters was actually about a dollar or so cheaper than Godzilla vs. Kong alone. So I bought the box with all three movies and decided to run them in order – which turned out to be a wise move because much of Godzilla vs. Kong would have been incomprehensible if we hadn’t seen the previous two.

The ending of Godzilla: King of the Monsters had left all the big creatures – variously referred to as “monsters” and “Titans” (after the original Greek myths in which the Titans were the precursors of the gods, who were their descendants until they staged a family rebellion, took over and ate the Titans) – more or less back under the control of MONARCH, the secretive government agency that had unearthed them in the first place – only a company called Apex Corporation is attempting to create their own mechanical version of Godzilla and, in these efforts, is creating sonic vibrations that rouse the original Godzilla from his sleep in the Atlantic Ocean (never mind that he got radioactive and blew up in a nuclear explosion at the end of Godzilla: King of the Monsters; apparently you can’t keep a good-bad mega-dinosaur down!) and turn him anti-social again. The newly awakened Godzilla wipes out much of Miami (making this film uncomfortably topical given the continuing story of the catastrophic collapse of a Miami Beach condo building from which, over a week later, they are still digging out both survivors and victims while over 100 people remain missing and unaccounted for. It also, as I noted at the end of my comments on Godzilla: King of the Monsters, begs the question of how all the damage the monsters have done to various cities is going to get repaired and who is going to pay for it.) With the media reporting that Godzilla, hailed as the savior of humanity from fellow titans led by the three-headed interplanetary monster Ghidorah (also known as “Monster Zero”), has once again turned against it, There are the usual clashing agendas of the human characters, including the woman who had been responsible for maintaining Kong’s quarantine enclosure on Skull Island, Ilene Andrews (Rebecca Hall) and her deaf-mute daughter Maia Simmons (Eiza González), who becomes Kong’s interlocutor after she teaches him sign language (recalling the efforts of real researchers to teach gorillas sign language; they reply, but the scientists haven’t been able to determine whether they’re actually communicating or merely imitating and repeating back the signs they’ve seen humans do).

An expedition from Apex led by Nathan Lind (Alexander Skarsgård, top-billed) crashes through the entrance to the hollow earth (these films assume that the earth is hollow, with a whole other ecosystem below its surface, including a sun-like source of light, heat and energy which, of course, the capitalist exploiters at Apex hope to tap as a salable commodity) in a specially designed craft that gives us some wild action that I wouldn’t be surprised to see pressed into service as a thrill-park ride the way the subway attack in the original 1933 King Kong has been. There are also a couple of comic-relief characters who end up trapped in one of Apex’s giant machines and transported halfway across the world to the site of the big monster battles, and while some of the characters from Godzilla: King of the Monsters return, notably scientist Mark Russell (Kyle Chandler) and his daughter Madison (Millie Bobby Brown), Madison, a character of rare agency and independence for a pre-teen in Godzilla: King of the Monsters, gets bounced down to a traditional damsel-in-distress in this one, a distressing fate for a first-rate child actress who’s been acclaimed for, among other things, her work on the TV series Stranger Things.

Of course we eventually get some of the titular battles between Godzilla and Kong – in this film Godzilla is depicted as 390 feet tall and Kong as 336 feet, quite a departure from the 1933 original, in which Kong was described as 50 feet tall in the dialogue but was shown as considerably shorter than that: 18 feet in the Skull Island sequences and 24 feet in the New York ones. As Orville “Goldie” Goldner (who actually worked as an effects technician on the 1933 King Kong) and George W. Turner wrote in their book The Making of King Kong, “His proportion was originally intended to provide an effective dramatic relationship between Kong and the players. That an inordinately big monster is as impersonal as a hurricane has been demonstrated by those dreadful Japanese films of the 1960’s featuring a 500-foot whatsit called ‘Godzilla.’ … It was [producer-director Merian C. Cooper’s] conception of the beast that he must always appear gigantic, but never so large as to destroy his interest in the human players.” Unfortunately, that’s one of Cooper’s good ideas that got ignored in this iteration of the Kong legend – just as Peter Jackson’s 2005 remake of the 1933 King Kong ran 187 minutes, as if Jackson, here as in his Lord of the Rings movies and his even more ludicrously inflated three-film cycle based on J. R. R. Tolkien’s prequel, The Hobbit (a normal-sized novel that got stretched into three nearly three-hour films), simply couldn’t bear to leave anything he’d shot on the cutting-room floor. By contrast, Goldner and Turner wrote, Merian Cooper ruthlessly edited the original King Kong from a 140-minute rough cut to the 100-minute final version, ticking off the effects people who lamented having put their hearts into creating elaborate sequences no audience member would ever see, but as Goldner and Turner wrote, “Cooper was right, of course. He set his jaw and cut his own ideas with a ruthlessness that must have given him nightmares. In doing this he delivered to the public a movie that holds the attention during every one of its scenes, each second of its 100 minutes. It is one of the few films that builds its suspense deliberately and then holds it until the last fade-out because there is no useless action, no waste of words, no side-plots to detract from the main stream of the story it tells – a show without fat or padding. Cooper’s skill as an editor is no less remarkable than any of his other achievements.” I lost all interest in seeing the Peter Jackson King Kong when I learned it ran over three hours – no one would ever accuse him of cutting his own ideas ruthlessly and creating a movie without fat or padding – and I must say to the credit of Adam Wingard, director of Godzilla vs. Kong, that he is much more like Merian Cooper than Peter Jackson in this regard.

Wingard, working from a script by the usual committee (Terry Rossio, Zach Shields and Godzilla: King of the Monsters auteur Michael Dougherty, story; Erik Pearson and Max Borenstein, screenplay), was determined to keep Godzilla vs. Kong’s running time under two hours, ticking off both studio executives who wanted a three-hour blockbuster and fans who thought a shorter running time would short-change them on monster action. (Wingard told an online interviewer that even if he’d made Godzilla vs. Kong three hours long, the extra hour wouldn’t have included any more monster action.) Though I personally liked Godzilla: King of the Monsters better, Godzilla vs. Kong was a well-done movie that delivered the goods (notably three big battle scenes between the title characters – though only sporadically did these filmmakers make the distinction Willis O’Brien did in the 1933 King Kong of having Kong act like a human prizefighter, blocking, feinting and punching, while the non-primate monsters he battled just charged like the wild beasts they were), and the big action scenes were at least a bit better lit than they were in Godzilla: King of the Monsters, which to my mind made them more fun. Overall, the “Monsterverse” cycle was a perfectly decent piece of modern filmmaking that, despite a few feints at social comment, basically delivered the goods people going to see movies with the “G”- and “K”-words in their titles would expect. At least that’s how I felt about it; one imdb.com reviewer put up this bizarre post that suggested the people who like these movies don't want to see human characters in them at all: “I guarantee 99% of viewers just wanted to see two titans go at it. Nobody cared about the humans in this movie. So why does WB keep trying to force humans down our throats in these movies? In an hour and 50-ish minutes we’re forced to watch people for 80 of those minutes. There’s way too much time trying to make a plot here that I don’t want to see.”