Godzilla vs. Kong

Despite placing Godzilla's name at the top of the card, Adam Wingard's Godzilla vs. Kong is very much structured around Edgar Wallace and Merian C Cooper's Eighth Wonder of the World. Like seemingly every Warner Bros tentpole these days, Godzilla vs. Kong's debut is preceded by rumours of production difficulties and whispers of a director being side-lined or second-guessed. This initial release version (presuming another may eventually follow) is very much like the theatrical cut of Zack Snyder's Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice in that the assembly itself has chosen their preferred combatant. While Snyder's film strained to place Batman in a driving seat that the character hadn't been designed for, this MonsterVerse sequel happily motors along under Kong's impressive steam. 

Josh Schaffer's brisk edit, and perhaps even Eric Pearson and Max Borenstein's screenplay, makes gigantic strides to keep the film under two hours. The minutiae of kaiju wrangling is renounced, circumvented by witty snips and tranquil 70s rock that centres Kong's predicament as the film's driving force. The soundtrack speaks for him. This computer generated Kong, mapped out by umpteen special effects studios, is never simply a featured trick - he's the film's mute male lead. An ape the size of a building that is (somehow) communicated as an underdog; struggling manfully to not only keep himself breathing, but to protect the puny humans that have made themselves his family. Wingard's Kong is one weathered by age, far past his blonde abducting years, happily settled into the role of a colossal Grandfather to the last human survivor of Skull Island, Kaylee Hottle's Jia. 

Lifted out of an enclosure lined with a flat panel sky, Kong is press-ganged into acting as a guide for Alexander Skarsgård and Rebecca Hall's seafaring academics - the hope being that a brush with his ancestral environment will spark something in the ape's latent, genetic, memory. The sense of discovery that Godzilla vs. Kong offers is communicated, not just thematically but emotionally, using the film's enormous gorilla. Godzilla is simply a reactive force, acting as the predatory answer to mankind's latest pilot driven horror. It's a portrayal very much like the King of Monster's role in the Millennium era of his Japanese series but it's also a framing that keeps him offscreen for the majority of the runtime. Kong on the other hand is placed in chains and shipped back to a point of origin that he has no living connection to. Like the 1933 original, Kong's story here is one of displacement. The character, always portrayed as some form of prisoner, suffers for the curiosity, or outright greed, of humans. 

In this film the physical trajectory, if not the dynamic, is reversed. So instead of being tranquilised then shipped off to a New York to be gawped at, the Skull Island native is drugged for passage to the Antarctic, the icy continent apparently the one stable access point to the mythical Pangea at the centre of the Earth. Kong's place in Hollow Earth is hereditary rather than personal but the prehistoric, lighting racked, location does allow the long-suffering primate an opportunity to assume the position of a monarch. A moment to pick up a magical weapon then take a throne that, once, could have been his. The human connection to this realm is technological, an opportunity to synthesise a particularly powerful energy wavelength. For Kong this brief stop, before battle is joined in Hong Kong, is therapeutic; it demonstrates to him that, not only does he physically come from a line of culture and Kings, but his predecessors were able to vanquish the lizards that plagued them. 

Although he passed away in 2017, Godzilla vs Hedorah director (and, let's not forget, Prophecies of Nostradamus' assistant director) Yoshimitsu Banno is still credited as Executive Producer on Godzilla vs. Kong. The credit acknowledges that this big budget monster movie still has its roots in an unproduced IMAX short - Godzilla 3D to the Max - that Banno had attempted to steer towards the largest possible screen. Banno's great big credit registers as ironic in an American production where the King of Monster's portrayal feels peculiarly laundered - specifically, one that has had its atomic hide sheared off. While Toho's creation has multiple, contradictory, creation stories, Wingard's film is the first to suggest that Godzilla and his kind might be naturally occurring behemoths. Presumably, the ancient saurischian bones scattered over the Hollow Earth's seat of power haven't been mutated by mankind's extremely modern nuclear arsenal? This hint of whitewash lingers, a distasteful correction that generates its own background radiation, particularly in a film where Asian characters are portrayed as either shopkeepers or attachés who behave like Vulcans. 

For its finale, Godzilla vs Kong offers up a triple threat in which every neon structure on the Hong Kong skyline sits ready to be used as a turnbuckle. True to form, the film examines these massive interactions from the perspective of the newly crowned Kong. Godzilla is clearly adversarial, a bristling abomination that charges through skyscrapers like a blood-crazed crocodile. Kong doesn't rely on his mass, and cannot count on fire breath, so he fights smarter - snatching up rotating restaurants to use as a shield or hanging from superstructures, crane cudgel in hand. Although we are repeatedly assured that Hong Kong is in the process of being evacuated, ground level shots of kaiju calamity are framed by darting pedestrians, struggling to get to safety. An early news report improbably tallies up only 8 deaths from a particularly violent Godzilla landing in California. The Hong Kong collision inspires no such updates but surely the count is far higher? 

For a film in which Godzilla's portrayal skews far more bestial and aggressive than either Gareth Edwards' Godzilla or Michael Dougherty's Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Wingard's film is reluctant to really embrace the individual, physical, calamity generated by a collapsing, photo-realistic, city. Even Mechagodzilla's synthetic villainy - when it finally puts in an appearance - is expressed purely in the realm of his contemporaries. The mechanical facsimile attacks a flagging Godzilla, exhausted from a night spent battling Kong, using spine rockets and electrified fists to clobber the ailing tyrant lizard. Firmly bracketed away from human terror then, this Mechagodzilla is simply a cheat. An opportunist who sees their chance to batter the current title holder. A backstory for MG that includes exhumed Ghidorah bones and a supercomputer run amuck barely factors into the robo-beasts characterisation - presumably included so the audience can delight, unapologetically, in this undead creature's eventual dismemberment.