Review: Godzilla vs. Kong Is a Perfunctory Spectacle of Lizard-Brain Shock and Awe

Godzilla and Kong’s brawls have the ennui-inducing feel of a child arbitrarily smashing action figures together.

Godzilla vs. Kong
Photo: Warner Bros.

Can there be only one king of the monsters? Godzilla vs. Kong, the fourth feature in the ongoing MonsterVerse series, may leave you feeling like you don’t need to know the answer. The film is a far cry from Gareth Edwards’s evocative, thematically rich Godzilla from 2014, and about level with the two subpar sequels, Jordan Vogt-Roberts’s Kong: Skull Island and Michael Dougherty’s Godzilla: King of the Monsters, both of which privileged numbingly weightless wrecking-ball spectacle over anything genuinely resonant.

It’s true that, to some degree, kaiju movies are all about reveling in destructo-vision. But the best of them also allow for a deep-breath sense of awe at the concomitant wonders and horrors unleashed by the behemoths around which they revolve. Godzilla vs. Kong, directed by Adam Wingard, is all wheezy momentum, racing from location to location and plot point to plot point with the sort of strenuous indifference that becomes quickly exhausting.

The film begins with Kong wandering around a Truman Show-like enclosure on Skull Island, where he’s watched over by scientist Ilene Andrews (Rebecca Hall) and communicated with via sign language by a hearing-impaired little girl, Jia (Kaylee Hottle), the last surviving native human inhabitant of the island. Meanwhile, in Pensacola, Florida, Godzilla mysteriously attacks a facility, Apex, owned by Elon Musk-like Walter Simmons (Demián Bichir), while a conspiracy-minded podcaster, Bernie Hayes (Brian Tyree Henry, channeling Jurassic Park’s goofball rogue Dennis Nedry), steals company secrets for some whistleblowing leverage.

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Elsewhere, King of the Monsters’s teen heroine, Madison Russell (Millie Bobby Brown), reappears with an annoyingly quippy best friend (Julian Dennison) and a fervent determination to uncover Godzilla’s true motives. Her father, Mark (Kyle Chandler), still working for the monster-surveilling agency Monarch, pops up occasionally throughout, looking perpetually perturbed. And just when you think the film has completely rolled out all its cardboard characters, we’re introduced to Nathan Lind (Alexander Skarsgård), a fringe scientist who wrote a non-bestselling book on Hollow Earth theory, which strangely enough may be the key to uncovering Kong and Godzilla’s not-so-otherworldly origins.

But what you probably want to know is when, where, and how often do the seething, snarling, titular titans fight each other. Answer: In the first and last third of Godzilla vs. Kong, in the middle of the ocean and in Hong Kong, and twice total for about five minutes each. To say if there’s a winner would be a spoiler, but it’s safe to reveal that there’s a bit of a wrinkle—you might call it a “mecha-nical” one—that forces them to become a tag team. Does that sound awesome? It should be, and yet Godzilla and Kong’s brawls have the ennui-inducing feel of a child arbitrarily smashing action figures together, save for one giddy slow-motion shot of Kong leaping to avoid an explosion, a la Bruce Willis in Die Hard.

Wingard and cinematographer Ben Seresin (or, more likely, a computer-bound army of pre-viz and digital F/X technicians) produce a few other eye-catchers. The skyscrapers surrounding Kong and Godzilla during their climactic match-up are lit like glowsticks, while a journey to the literal center of the Earth conjures a fleeting sense of wonder, particularly when Kong finds gravity getting all topsy-turvy. (This is also the point at which Tom “Junkie XL” Holkenborg’s otherwise unexceptional score gets agreeably Tangerine Dreamy.) Apart from that, the copious world-unbuilding is stupefyingly perfunctory, as well as borderline offensive in its cynical disregard for human life. These callous qualities, unique to mega-budget blockbusters, are something that Edwards’s Godzilla film poetically eschewed and the sequels, with their profit-minded fixation on pleasing particular kinds of lizard-brains, regrettably embrace.

Score: 
 Cast: Alexander Skarsgård, Millie Bobby Brown, Rebecca Hall, Brian Tyree Henry, Shun Oguri, Eiza González, Julian Dennison, Kyle Chandler, Demián Bichir  Director: Adam Wingard  Screenwriter: Eric Pearson, Max Borenstein  Distributor: Warner Bros.  Running Time: 113 min  Rating: PG-13  Year: 2021  Buy: Video, Soundtrack

Keith Uhlich

Keith Uhlich's writing has been published in The Hollywood Reporter, BBC, and Reverse Shot, among other publications. He is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle.

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