The first meeting between Godzilla and King Kong — the iconic mega-monsters of Japanese and American B-movie cinema, respectively — was in 1962’s King Kong Vs. Godzilla. The premise was that a businessman thought a couple of massive kaiju having a fight would make for good publicity; while the VFX budget may have changed in the six decades since, this is essentially more of the same: a flashy, big-name boxing match to bring in the punters.
Exactly why they’re fighting this time is never really made totally clear. Beyond some muttered dialogue about “ancient rivalries”, it all feels rather reverse-engineered, a pairing purely to sate studios hungry for the next most ambitious crossover event ever. Still, the skyscraper-sized scraps — likely the only reason anyone really wants to watch this — make for by far the film’s most straightforwardly enjoyable moments. Compared to the other entries in this reboot run, the kaiju brawls here are modestly meatier: more coherent than Godzilla: King Of The Monsters, more muscular than Kong: Skull Island. It has a decent sense of scale (if not — still — any sense of the human cost of all this destruction); fight choreography that pleasingly resembles a pub car park punch-up; and impressive CGI that, in Kong, at least hints of the beast once killed by beauty.
Over 40 minutes of runtime pass until the two titans actually meet, and those minutes feel like a slog.
But damn, it makes you work for the fun. Over 40 minutes of runtime pass until the two titans actually meet, and those minutes feel like a slog, as we’re introduced to a new ensemble of Exposition Delivery Units that could charitably be described as ‘characters’. Any time the monsters are not on screen, in fact, is draining. Every ‘MonsterVerse’ movie, from Gareth Edwards’ 2014 Godzilla reboot onwards, has struggled to know what to do with the human characters on the ground, and in some ways, this is the worst offender yet for it.
We can only mourn for the classically trained actors forced to deliver aggressively stupid dialogue about “gravity inversion” and “psionic uplinks”. Pity, in particular, poor Brian Tyree Henry, who plays a conspiracy-theorising podcaster plucked straight from outdated stereotypes, given cringing comic relief lines like, “If this wasn’t contributing to world destruction, it would make a great DJ booth!”; and Rebecca Hall, who seems to have the role previously held by Ken Watanabe of attempting to impart some gravitas on what is really a very silly endeavour (“Kong bows to no-one!”).
There are hints of a more intriguing film. One (literal) deep-dive into hard science-fiction world-building is a welcome shot of weirdness, if never fully explored; and an opening sequence of Kong having a shower in a waterfall to a ’50s doo-wop track is nothing if not unexpected.
Ultimately, the real battle here is not between Godzilla or Kong, but between the two movies within the movie: a lovingly rendered, big-budget tribute to B movies of the past, and a crushingly mediocre, cliché-bloated sci-fi. Sadly, the wrong monster wins.
