Godzilla vs Kong, review: exactly the loud, trashy mayhem we’ve been missing this year
Dir: Adam Wingard. Cast: Rebecca Hall, Alexander Skarsg?rd, Kaylee Hottle, Brian Tyree Henry, Millie Bobby Brown, Kyle Chandler, Demián Bichir, Shun Oguri, Eiza Gonzalez. 12A cert, 113 mins
Forget the Oscar and Bafta contenders. No film has made me ache more for the reopening of cinemas in May than this trashily sublime, visual-effects-driven blare-a-thon, in which a king-sized gorilla and a radioactive lizard settle their differences over the smoking remains of a city or two.
For those of us who have spent much of the last 13 months pining for a bit of big-screen spectacle, this latest instalment in Legendary Pictures’ MonsterVerse franchise arrives like a naughty WhatsApp message from an old flame. Remember this?, it purrs, while coyly flattening a skyscraper, or sending a spaceship through a rainbow-coloured wormhole. Not much longer to wait now, it adds, with a winking, kiss-blowing emoji.
It’s hard while watching Godzilla vs Kong not to wish that you were seeing it projected in towering proportions (in countries where cinemas are currently open, including China, the film has already taken ￡90 million). But on a large enough television, it still delivers the kind of base, brain-dazing pleasures that the average Best Screenplay contender couldn’t hope to match.
As the fourth instalment in an ongoing series, there is no standing or stomping on ceremony here: no fleeting, partial glimpses of the film’s title characters before jumbo-scale mayhem ensues. The film opens on Kong himself, who is trying to break free from a Truman Show-style compound, and then brings us up to speed with his scaly rival, who’s laying waste to the Florida coast.
In the previous MonsterVerse instalments, Godzilla was something of a heroic figure, fending off an assortment of giant winged and clawed threats. But this latest unprompted attack signals an apparent shift in loyalties, so an operation gets underway to bring the creature to heel. This is masterminded by Walter Simmons (Demián Bichir), the chief executive of a deeply sinister cybernetics corporation, and it involves a Jules Verne-like voyage to a hidden subterranean realm, where lies the only power source on the planet capable of subduing the beast.
The expedition is led by geologist Nathan Lind (Alexander Skarsg?rd), but its whopping sherpa is Kong himself – coaxed into service by Rebecca Hall’s doe-eyed primatologist and her deaf adopted daughter (Kaylee Hottle), who has managed to teach the big lug some basic sign-language.
A few more supporting players are scuttling around other subplots, including Millie Bobby Brown’s spunky teenage activist, returning from 2019’s Godzilla: King of the Monsters, and Brian Tyree Henry’s conspiracy-mongering podcaster, who suspects – correctly, would you believe – that the brandy-swirling, velvet-jacket-wearing Bichir may, in fact, be up to no good. (To be specific, he and his company are preparing the way for the only classic Godzilla-adjacent monster yet to appear in the series.) But such weedy mortals are only really present for the sake of scale, and aren’t given much to do but cower and gawp.
Every plot development in Godzilla vs Kong is in service of viewer bedazzlement, and every shot calibrated for maximum neon-kitsch impact. Take the descent into the underground valley, which involves flying a hi-tech craft through some kind of gravity-reversing portal which causes reality to bend and strobe. Why? Because it allows director Adam Wingard and the visual effects team at Weta Digital to stage a hallucinatory light-show in the style of the Star Gate sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey – and frankly, that’s reason enough.
Godzilla’s various Hollywood outings have typically been less keen to capitalise on their scaly protagonist’s knack for outsize allegory than the best of the Japanese productions, which have reflected over the years on everything from that nation’s postwar terror of nuclear holocaust to the devastation wrought by the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami (in the highly recommended Shin Godzilla, from 2016).
But there’s no shame in shallowness carried off with this degree of showmanship. The scraps between Kong and Godzilla themselves are always energetic, stylish and surprising – the twosome even develop some chemistry, of a mostly roar-based sort – while the film’s impressive willingness to throw both caution and taste to the wind results in some thrilling passages of pure junk spectacle. I especially loved the scene where Kong lumbers into a vast and ancient ceremonial hall miles beneath the Earth’s crust, and wearily plonks himself on the throne, surveying the ruins of what was presumably a giant gorilla civilisation of the past.
The danger now, of course, is that the franchise will loop back to fill in the gap, and give us an entry on the downfall of the Kong royal bloodline, with violence, scandal, treachery, and an ill-advised interview on Newsnight with a 50-storey Emily Maitlis. Yet the image is so bizarre, so grandiose, so imagination-spinningly suggestive, that it would be a pity to explain it away. Some backstories are best left un-grunted.
Available via VoD now