GODZILLA VS. KONG Review

While appreciating Gareth Edwards' aspirations with 2014’s Godzilla and becoming perplexed by how Michael Dougherty’s 2019 sequel could be so little fun despite its reactionary take to criticisms leveled against the first film, it seems the only movie in Warner Brother’s new monster-verse that knew exactly what it was and what it needed to be was Jordan Vogt-Roberts’ Kong flick. This may then explain why in Adam Wingard’s (You're Next, The Guest) clash of the titans that Kong is made to be the center of attention; the lynch pin on which every cockamamie human character's quest hinges. That isn't to say the king of the monsters doesn't factor into the match of the century in any meaningful capacity, but more that Wingard takes up Vogt-Roberts' mentality of embracing the absurdity in this universe and then lets his imagination run wild more so than he does try to either ground this in any kind of reality as Edwards did or let it be brought down by the human characters as Dougherty did. There is little to no regard for logic and no one - especially screenwriters Eric Pearson and Max Borenstein - seems to have been bothered with the semantics of how a "sci-fi quack trading in fringe physics" is able to convince Rebecca Hall's Dr. Andrews AKA "The Kong Whisperer" to have military assets escort Kong from his home on Skull Island to Antarctica in order to enter a portal to Hollow Earth on the whim of a tech billionaire (Demián Bichir) who is looking to harness the energy of this "ecosystem as vast as any ocean" so that he may power a weapon that can compete with Godzilla who recently became a threat again after a seemingly unprovoked attack. The best part of it all though, is that none of this matters, not really, and only exists to prop up reasoning for how the two titular titans come face to face with one another. Whereas Edwards elicited Dante's Inferno in the Halo jump sequence in his Godzilla film, Wingard elicits a Saturday morning toy commercial in Godzilla vs. Kong and naturally - it's more fun than anything this monster-verse has produced thus far. One could complain the creative team behind the film doesn't take great pains to make any of this thought provoking in terms of Godzilla beginning as an allegory for nuclear war or discussing Kong's origins in analyzing colonialism and man's need for dominance over others, but this isn't about those things or even those characters individually. This is a movie about a giant gorilla and a giant lizard coming to blows with one another and it's just as stupid, ridiculous, and thoroughly entertaining as something with that simple premise should be.