2021-05-28
in
3 min read
“Godzilla vs. Kong” (2021) two of the world’s Titan monsters battle it out with each other as the world waits to figure out who is the real villain and who is the real savior.
I’ll admit that this was one of the movies I was dreading having to see as part of my first run movie challenge. I set my expectations very low for this. Brain cotton candy with great special effects is what I was prepared for. While it certainly delivered on special effects the brain cotton candy may have been setting my expectations too high. I’ll be blunt. The movie is fucking stupid. I can hand wave off physics, even inconsistent physics in the movie’s universe, or too many tropes as long as there was a story there. There is no story there. This has all of the story of a WWE match with pre and post match “interviews”. In essence that is of course what Godzilla vs. X or Kong vs. X movies are though aren’t they? They are battle royales with the necessary movie apparatus around them to make them last long enough. It’s like porno movies from back in the day where for some reason they need to have a plot, back story, etc. to hang the actual sex scenes around. Actually I take that back, this didn’t even bother to have a plot of 70s/80s porn movie quality. That level of plot development would have at least made this movie enjoyable. Either way like modern porn, and this is just special effects porn after all, maybe they should just skip all the pretense and just do battle scene after battle scene.
The good news is that since there is no real plot of substance I don’t actually have to cover anything with spoilers. News flash Godzilla and Kong are going to be fighting each other. It’s in the title. It’s in the movie artwork. Big surprise. The villains get their comeuppance. Everything gets a nice bow tied on the end. There’s a nice setup for the next sequel if they choose to make it. Yadda yadda yadda. The most redeeming part is I got to see Alexander Skarsgård in a modern production where they didn’t fuck up the character like in The Stand remake from last year. I guess other good news is that they showed off some very impressive CGI for the special effects. The downside with that is that I can already see how the CGI is going to age poorly. It’s like watching the CGI in the Star Wars prequels where you could tell it was CGI but good CGI for the time. The key phrase there is “for the time”. Going back and watching those movies now is almost cringe inducing how bad it looks twenty years later.
I’m guessing fans of the series have a much better impression of this movie than I did. As it was by the half way mark my eyes hurt from rolling so much that I thought I had seen enough and should leave. I decided to stay and get the most out of ticket. Thank god it was one of my free tickets for the week so I didn’t pay for it but the popcorn I ate still cost $9. Because the special effects were good for the present time I’m going to rate this 2/10.