A little something for the weekend?

 

“King Kong doesn’t stand a chance,” the Kid said. “Godzilla is a gigantic, primordial, atomic fire-breathing monster. King Kong is just a big gorilla. Realistically, Godzilla—”

Wait. Stop right there. “Realistically” and “Godzilla” don’t belong in the same sentence. They barely belong in the same universe. If you’re going to think realistically about anything involving Godzilla, you’re wasting your time. On the descending scale of scientific stupidity there’s science, junk science, redneck science, Star Trek science, Doctor Who science, Forteanism, and somewhere way down at the bottom of the stack, just a slim step above a consensus of leading public policy experts, there’s Godzilla science.

So let’s have no more attempts at thinking realistically about this movie, okay? Let’s just accept it for what it is: a giant monster slug-fest in which a major modern world-class city—in this case, Hong Kong, not Tokyo—gets stomped into rubble. This is the movie you’ve been waiting for ever since the second Pacific Rim movie turned out to be such a disappointment. This is the movie that Legendary Pictures has been building up to ever since they released their 2014 Godzilla reboot, followed by Kong: Skull Island (2017) and Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019). This is the next chapter in a continuing story and a direct sequel to King of Monsters, and yet you need not to have watched any of the previous movies for this one to make as much sense as it’s ever going to make.

The plot is—aw hell, who cares, it’s a Godzilla movie. It has all the intellectual depth and drama of a WWF tag-team match. Anything the human characters do or say is just there to move the point-of-view along from one titanic set-piece battle to the next.

Legendary has done one fairly clever thing with this series in general and this movie in particular. In his past incarnations, King Kong has always had just one story, and it’s a recapitulation of the plot of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1912 novel, The Lost World. To wit:

1. Expedition to uncharted place find fantastic land where giant ancient animals still survive
   
   
2. Expedition captures one such giant animal and takes it back to civilization to show it off
   
   
3. Said giant animal breaks loose and goes on rampage through city only to be killed in the end
   
   
4. Oh yeah, and there’s a romantic subplot between two of the human characters, but who cares?

I mean seriously, how many times have you seen that story?

For this iteration of Kong, though, Legendary has done one thing that is decently creative. Instead of a giant gorilla and yet another regurgitation of the Lost World plot, they’ve made Kong a gigantic primitive hominid. He’s an intelligent, tool-using creature, the last known descendant of a race of such beings, and he is quite capable of communicating with humans when he wants to, thanks to [SPOILER ALERT!] an adorable little deaf girl who has taught Kong sign language.

That is the nicest touch in this movie. The major problem with this movie, and I hesitate to say it, is Millie Bobby Brown. In Godzilla: King of the Monsters, her character, Madison Russell, was absolutely central to the story and to the development and resolution of the plot. In this movie, though—

Honestly, she’s given nothing important to do. So instead she spends a lot of time running around, pursuing a sub-plot involving a paranoid podcaster that eventually produces one meaningful reveal, but her part could just as easily have been cut completely from the film and replaced with about thirty seconds of exposition.

RECOMMENDATION: Gorgeous CGI, titanic giant creature battles, lots of rubble and destruction; inside this ponderous two-hour behemoth there’s a really good 90-minute action movie roaring with rage and demanding to be let loose. Don’t stream this one. Go to your local Redbox and rent the disc—or better yet, buy it, as you can probably get the used Blu-Ray for about three bucks now—and then you can watch it at your leisure and fast-forward through all of Millie Bobby Brown’s frenetic but meaningless scenes. 

Categories: movie reviews