The mutant monsters are back, bitches. All of them. Godzilla, Kong, and me. They’re back and misunderstood. I’m back, but understood all too well.
But before I continue, hello. How are you? I missed you. Or, at least, I missed having someone to complain to. What have you been up to? Did you die during the pandemic? If so, sorry about that.
I’ve been busy as a fuck baker in a sexy flour factory. First, I got drunk, then someone said we should all avoid other people or we’d die. I didn’t believe it at first because multiple women in my past have given me similar excuses. I got drunk some more, started sleeping in a closet. Made sickie on my pajamas a few times. Argued with myself and usually won. Wife stopped talking to me. Got money for not working, which validated my career choice. A guy yelled at me for wearing a sweat sock as a mask in Walmart. It was his sock. Got sober. Woke up and wife was talking to me again, so I could safely start drinking again. And here we are! Hectic times I hope things settle down now.
Anyway, back to the review. It’d be nice to be misunderstood sometimes. That’s what gives Godzilla and Kong their mystique. Are they good? Are they bad? What do they want? Should we be afraid of them, or should they be afraid of us? A little misunderstanding makes a guy a little more intriguing as to why he keeps demanding more and more mayonnaise at Subway. What fucking demons is that bastard wrestling with?
Godzilla and Kong are monsters you try to figure out. Why don’t they like me? When they flatten an office building, is it really just an expression of my own shortcomings? Am I to blame? I want to please them, but I don’t know how.
If I were not so predictable maybe the teenagers under the Garrison Street Bridge would like me and stop throwing pennies into Ralston Creek because they know I’ll go into the freezing water to get them. Every fucking time. I fall down on slippery rocks, soak my clothes and bruise my shins. I get a handful of pennies. They laugh. Maybe, just once, though, the kid with the lazy eye who has all the coins (Mr. Penny Zillionaire, I call him because he said I had to and, well, he has the pennies) mixes in some dimes and quarters.
Studios love misunderstood monsters and superheroes because all they need to do is apply hack plots and pop psychology to turn them into “universes.” That’s a movie term for an excuse to burp out sequels and mashups ad infinitum and it includes an expectation that slobbering fanboys will get emotionally and financially invested in what’s next for their make-believe superfriends. Once a studio stumbles onto a popular character, their labs splice genes and artificially inseminate the fuck out of it to make as many cash babies as they possibly can.
Kong vs. Godzilla is the latest in what Universal Studios calls the “Monsterverse,” their cynical grasp for an eternal cash cow featuring old characters dressed in new horseshit. Them calling it the Monsterverse probably pisses off Limp Bizkit because it sounds like something they would call a comeback album. So, even if these movies have sucked with one exception, at least they stopped Limp Bizkit.
Each Monsterverse movie promises it will be epic. More epic than the last one. That’s pretty damn hard to do without admitting you’re holding shit back. When you hold shit back, you are purposely making something not as good as it could be, which is a business decision and not an artistic one. And holy shit, do these movies feel like the product of assholes with MBAs in conference rooms with their eye on the bottom line. For audiences, a studio universe is like playing the Monopoly game at McDonalds. You’re collecting pieces in the futile hope that you’ll get paid off later. And while you do it, you’re getting fed some real crap.
I don’t know what Kong vs. Godzilla is building toward in the Monsterverse, but I assure you that some men in suits do. They’ve thought long and hard about T-shirts, breakfast cereals and collectible Slurpee cups before they committed to anything. Good movies are a negligible variable in the calculation.
When the movie opens, Kong is stuck on Skull Island, “contained” by a giant man-made dome. Why? Who the fuck knows. He was perfectly happy there before humans fucked with him. Meanwhile, a previously dormant Godzilla is agitated and wrecking shit at some evil robotics campny. How do we know the company is evil? Because they make fucking robotics. It’s not like the dumbfucks in Hollywood are going to bother to think up clever new villains.
Oh, and guess what? The sneering boss is a really bad guy. As to why he’s bad, well, the moviemakers don’t put a lot of thought into that. Some horseshit about how he wants to make sure humans are the apex predators. Oooo, scarrrryyy! For that he’ll have total secrecy over thousands of employees and factories to build a skyscraper-sized mechanical robot that looks like Godzilla (MechaGodzilla). I should point that MechaGodzilla is supposed to be a big surprise to audiences, but it’s as well kept a secret at the Harelip’s genital warts.
The humans decide that the only way to save humanity from Godzilla is by releasing Kong from Skull Island to fight him. This is the equivalent to releasing mongooses to control the snake population, and then lions to control the mongooses. Then Godzilla to control the lions.
So, Kong and Godzilla are old rivals, going back millennia. Even though Godzilla is pissed about MechaGodzilla, he fights Kong. For a while. They’re really just killing time while a half dozen tiresome stories involving two dozen dull people futz around with really bad approximations of science fiction in search of something that resembles human connection.
Because the people who made the movie or are in the movie are way dumber than the people watching it, the only characters who know about MechaGodzilla are the pissed off Godzilla and a plucky trio of misfits with annoying tics as personality. They are led by spunky Millie Bobby Brown and they can easily walk into top secret facilities, access sensitive information, and stop a giant robot by spilling liquid on a keyboard. This movie is a giant house of cards, all toppled by a light breeze.
Also included in this group is a guy who works for the robotics company and suspects something bad is going on. So, he podcasts as a whistleblower using his own voice, yet nobody can figure out who he is!!! This robot company has amazing tech and shit security.
Spending time with the humans in this movie like being at an essential oils home party in Salt Lake City, packed with dumb, poorly educated assholes who think science is whatever sounds about right. There are so many lousy subplots that are supposed to make us care. Crap about a little deaf girl who befriends Kong and does sign language with him (which she taught him without anyone knowing inside his 24/7 monitored enclosure). Some shit about a hollow earth and a trip to it, to another tropical world where Kong has a throne, palm trees thrive with no sunlight, and there are super powerful energy crystals bad guys need to power their giant robot monster. There is a scientist deemed a crackpot who espouses the hollow earth, which turns out incredibly easy to get to. There is the evil billionaire’s evil daughter who wants two things most of all: to show off her cleavage and to kill. Then there is the mildly concerned father played by some fat TV dad whose entire dialog is lines like, “Godzilla is hurting people and we don’t know why,” and “What is going on?” and “What is that?” and “Where are you?”
Good science fiction is implausible-but-imaginable. It doesn’t insult you. Kong vs. Godzilla does, and aggressively. It is determined to make no sense whatsoever and not be based on anything approaching real science. Just like essential oils. Anti-gravity, a hollow earth with just as much gravity as the surface, neuro-nonsense. And why? Why so many humans? Why so many terrible scientific explanations? You don’t have to spend 80% of a movie making up stupid reasons for monsters to fight. David Berman and the Silver Jews summed it up in two lines: “Why can’t monsters get along with other monsters? They don’t wanna.”
Universal and its factory of retread screenwriters have taken what was fun and turned it into another desperate stab at spectacle. Charm is replaced with loud. Silliness is no longer embraced. Giant monsters are serious business! Now, everything must not only be explained in detail but also have some sort of connection to previous movies and upcoming ones in the Monsterverse.
The only times this movie comes alive is when the monsters fight. Even then, though, it’s hard to escape the feeling we’re being thrown a meager bone by some CGI technicians. There are flashes of inspired mayhem, but you saw them all in the trailer. In the meantime, the action is rote. By the time Kong and Godzilla team up to fight their real enemy, MechaGodzilla, the battle is rushed, unspectacular, and interrupted by insipid human interactions.
Two Fingers for Kong vs. Godzilla. It boggles my mind that Universal could build an entire universe around monsters and then care so little about them. Until they understand the difference between fun and bombast, or that people don’t come to Godzilla movies to watch a distressed father talk to his daughter on the phone, they’re gonna keep wasting precious resources.