I genuinely loved going to the cinema; even if that used to mean coming into relatively close proximity with other human beings and their inevitable terrible etiquette. It is one of the few things I have actually missed during the last year of hopeless shuffling between one lockdown and the next and as the dim light of normalcy slowly creeps up on the horizon the prospect of sticky floors and terrible popular music playing in the background is actually quite appealing. That being said there is nothing quite like this new experience of watching brand new releases in the comfort of your own living room (assuming they aren't nearly 4 hours long and the kind of disappointing that is usually reserved for use between parent and child on the adolescent's first arrest for drinking underage and writing defamatory graffiti on the slide at the local playground). For instance I paid less than the asking price of 2 tickets and accoutrements for a week old movie and I get to watch it as much as I can manage over the next 48 hours.
I could get used to that.
It won't last forever. As soon as the multiplexes can open, they'll be cramming punters in with cattle prods and sheepdogs to make up for all the lost profits (no relation to the erstwhile Welsh "Nu Metal" band with the unconscionable deviant as a lead singer) and that'll be that. Still, we're still a whole away from that, so I may as well get what I can. So in the spirit of everything being arse-about-face, I'm going to start where I usually end today, just for the sake of switching things up a notch.
I really enjoyed Godzilla vs Kong.
This should come as no surprise to anyone really. I have a soft spot for giant monsters doing the things giant monsters are wont to do. I don't know if it's some sort of unremembered childhood trauma that means I find such wanton destruction so satisfying and I'm sure any therapist worth their salt would have an absolute field day with me, but as it stands I'm not rushing to find out. This recent Monsterverse has had its moments; shaky beginnings in the first Godzilla movie where there was far too little actual Godzilla, to solid showings in both Kong Skull Island and Godzilla King of The Monsters which seemed to take on board much of the criticism form its predecessor and ramped up the Kaiju action to acceptable levels. Godzilla vs Kong was Thanos-like in its inevitability and it is exactly what it says on the tine. Giant ape, giant reptile, giant collateral damage, all's well that ends well I guess. Job done, see you next week.
Not quite.
It is painfully obvious that the script writers literally sat down in their first meeting with a notepad that just read "Godzilla Fights Kong" and hashed things out liberally from there. Even though this is nearly 2 hours of movie, everything seems really rushed and disjointed. Want to know how Monarch trapped Kong in the isolation habitat on Skull Island? Nope. Want to know how they managed to get him off the island and onto those ships in the trailer? Nope. Why is Kong roughly 4 times the size he was in Skull Island? I mean there's a throwaway line but that's it. How about where all the other Kaiju from the end of the last Godzilla movie went? Nope. Where's Charles Dance? I mean probably off doing something more thespian, like Alien 3 or The Golden Child I guess. Look, I'll admit that most of this is really not important to what we'll generously call the plot, but some of it really is; The Hollow Earth bit is basically vital to how everything shakes out but none of it really makes sense; I don't want to spoil anything but there's no attempt made to explain it at all, and we're supposed to believe an ancient race of giant apes put all that together I think. Arnie's line from Predator "pretty sophisticated for a bunch of half-assed mountain boys" is a fairly succinct way of putting it. It'll make more sense when you see it. Mecha Godzilla was spoiled months ago and teased in the most recent trailers, so it shouldn't be a shock when he rocks up but his whole arc is just really flimsy and glossed over by more or less everyone; no proper build up whatsoever, random event, and awaaaaaay we go. I know what you're probably thinking: why was I expecting some sort of Shakespearean Tragedy out of a movie like this? Honestly, I really wasn't, but if you're going to burden your audience with a plot, at least flesh it out a bit. It really does feel like they let the FX teams make a bunch of fight scenes and they just did the bare minimum they could to get from one to the other.
Speaking of fight scenes, the technical side of this movie is almost flawless to be fair. The sheer amount of pixels bombarding your eyeballs from start to finish is staggering, but at no point does the CG ever look out of place. The real trick when the two banner stars of your movie are entirely non-corporeal is to have your audience forget (to some extent) that they're watching the result of countless hours of motion capture, animation and rendering. Even the fight choreography is pretty great; it's no spoiler to reveal that our titans really do love ramming each other's skulls into buildings and it's loads of fun. I'd love to tell you Kong uses a variation of Silat or that they adapted some of Godzilla's tail whips from Krav Maga or something equally pretentious but nah, these are just two big dumb animals smashing each other's brains out using whatever they can get their hands/claws on including but not limited to fighter jets, construction cranes and the actual top of a building. It's the closest any of the new movies have come to capturing the feel of the original Toho classics; what's not to love?
Well, there are, however, some really odd decisions in the cinematography department, particularly when it comes to camera angles. There are a couple of moments in the penultimate fight scene where we get a VR style Kong's eye view of the battle and then a disorienting viewpoint of the humans whizzing around in their little hovercraft-thing; the whole thing feels like it was specifically filmed for one of those first-person movie tie-in rides at Universal Studios where they fling you around on pneumatics in a little carriage on the verge of personal safety trying to make it look like you're flying on a broom with Harry Potter or swinging around New York with Spiderman (those two oddly specific examples brought to you by my own personal experience at Universal Studios in Japan. Weird flex over). I mean it isn't the most off-putting thing in the world, but it is odd.
You could also argue that there are still too many humans in the mix, but I think they might even have gone too far this time and gave the little flesh bags too little to do. Millie Bobbie Brown was the real heroine last time round but her arc here is little more than a side quest with the truther stereotype and a pointless sidekick. In fact all the returning cast seem to be there just to make up the numbers and provide a tenuous link to the prequels, and the plot rests on the shoulders of all new broadly written stereotypes. Alexander Skarsgård showing that he wasn't completely put off working with computerised apes from his ill-received jaunt as Tarzan (which wasn't terrible I guess) seems to be simultaneously nerdy, academically marginalised professor, experimental aircraft pilot and oversized-gorilla physiologist. Rebecca Hall is a knock-off Dian Fossey who spent so long closely observing Kong she failed to notice a very significant plot point (spoiler free folks, I try my best) and there are some generic bad guys who get their come-uppance in one form or another but are far too bland to make it worth looking up their actors on IMDb. I think one of them was in a Michael Bay movie. Literally nobody cares.
All that being said, of course, you'll be wanting to know who won in the end, right?
Spoiler alert:
Me. I was the real winner here, because I got exactly what I wanted. I wanted a big, dumb action movie which predominantly features big, dumb mythological beasties knocking big, dumb lumps out of each other and big, dumb me got exactly that.
Long live the lockdown release schedule.
Patience is a virtue and yours has been rewarded with this hearty thanks for making it to the end. In case you were wondering I've rattled on about Godzilla before:
https://angerinamansuit.blogspot.com/2017/04/just-when-you-thought-it-was-safe-to-go.html
https://angerinamansuit.blogspot.com/2017/12/sweet-shin-music.html
Add me on Facebook while I still haunt people's feeds occasionally: https://www.facebook.com/angerinamansuit
Twitter is still sort of a thing: @angerinamansuit
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