After Legendary Pictures decided to revisit the idea of a showdown between Godzilla and King Kong, they must have discovered that only about twenty minutes of their one-hundred thirteen-minute movie was dedicated to fighting scenes between the two titans.
After this discovery, the studio must have decided they needed to come up with a story to fill in the gaps. Obviously, the only logical choice was to rip off ‘Journey to the Centre of the Earth’ – did anyone else miss Brendan Fraser’s cameo?
The movie itself starts with Godzilla attacking Apex Cybernetics, causing humanity to question his allegiance.
The CEO of the same cybernetic company, Walter Simmons (Demián Bichir), approaches Nathan Lind (Alexander Skarsgård) to pilot an expedition to the center of the Earth, which he believes to be the home world of the Titans.
Lind convinces Ilene Andrews (Rebecca Hall) to let him take Kong off Skull Island and use him as a guide to find the Titans’ home world (because apparently you need a Titan to lead you there).
Along the way, Godzilla and Kong have their first scrap.
After Kong finds the Titans’ home world, the explorers trigger a power source within Kong’s ancestral throne room. This alerts Godzilla to their presence which leads to a second altercation between the two Titans.
The B storyline of the movie involves Madison Russell (Millie Bobby Brown), Bernie Hayes (Brian Tyree Henry), and Josh Valentine (Julian Dennison) investigating why Godzilla attacked the cybernetics company. This leads to them discovering that Apex Cybernetics is developing a weapon to fight against Godzilla and lied about their reason for sending a team to the Titans’ home world.
These two plots then merge as Godzilla and Kong must now become allies and take down Apex Cybernetics’ weapon.
I understand that, going into the movie, one has to suspend a certain amount of disbelief. After all, when you break it down, the movie is about a giant prehistoric reptile fighting an enormous gorilla.
The problem doesn’t lie with Godzilla or Kong. Even if you’ve never seen any of the films, you are aware of their existence. Examining even the most recent installments – 2014’s ‘Godzilla,’ 2017’s ‘Kong Skull Island,’ and 2019’s ‘Godzilla King of Monsters’ – you didn’t walk into those movies going, “I don’t buy any of this.” You accept the fact that Godzilla is a monster that fights other monsters; the same thing goes for Kong.
The fight scenes between the two titans were not the problem. The fight scenes were what I came to see and were the only highlights of the movie. It was everything else that was unbelievable.
Let’s have Kong travel to the center of the Earth and find the throne room of his ancestors. Because all of the previous lore about Kong being from Skull Island? Yeah, forget all that. Kong is actually from the center of the Earth, and the center of the Earth has its own gravity.
I would believe you if you told me the script was written by a group of small children. I can see them pitching the idea: “And then Godzilla blows a hole into the center of the Earth at the exact spot Kong is standing. Then Kong should climb up out of the hole and fight Godzilla with a giant axe he just found that’s made from a dorsal plate of a different Godzilla.”
And the highlight of the film had to be the mystery villain at the end of the film because, let’s face it, everybody knew that Godzilla and Kong would have to come together in the end to fight a common enemy. This villain is controlled by a supercomputer that is easily worth a couple of billion dollars. It’s impossible to hack but wait, I know how we can destroy it: let’s pour some alcohol on it. Again, I would believe you if you told me small children wrote this stuff. Perhaps they can relate this to a time they spilt juice on their mom’s laptop or tablet.
Legendary Pictures didn’t have to try to reinvent the wheel on this one. It didn’t have to be this elaborate film or involve technology that would be better suited to a ‘Star Trek’ movie. The movie could have just been about Godzilla and Kong duking it out the whole time and the audience would have got what they came for.
On a scale of 1-5, I give ‘Godzilla vs Kong’ two out of five stars.
If you were to cut down this movie to just include the fight scenes between Godzilla and Kong, it would be an amazing twenty-minute movie but, when you include the other ninety-three minutes of this movie, it becomes whatever this mess was.
Now excuse me as I go watch 1998’s ‘Godzilla,’ as that movie made more sense than this one.
