Godzilla vs. Kong: A Professorial Deconstruction

DISCLAIMER: There are a great many things worth being upset about in life. Human rights violations, for example. People who stand right behind you while you’re in line at a supermarket is a good one. I would also accept “anyone who says Wes Anderson is amazing at what he does”. But as a whole, movies are just bits of entertainment to help us hobble along until we meet our inevitable deaths. They’re the screensavers of existence. So, as a whole, they’re really not worth being upset about and despite the words that will inevitably follow, I’m really not as upset as I will sound at times. In case you’ve been living under a rock, I’m a fairly dramatic person. That being said, I will do my best to be calm, reasonable, and understanding. Thank you.

Fuck this movie.

I think everyone involved with this movie should be tried and convicted for Crimes Against Humanity.

Allow me to explain something to you, straw figure that vaguely resembles a man who happens to be sitting before me as a willing listener. A good monster movie is not hard to make. All you have to do is have, at most, two compelling human characters and plop them in the middle of chaos and monster mashiness both to ground the viewer in a world we recognize and also make us care about something. We’ve all seen the television infomercials about starving children in other countries and most people are unswayed as they wait for their re-airing of The Andy Griffith Show to resume, but if we know one child in our circle of friends who happens to climb to the top of the Empire State Building and fall off while grabbing at a toy airplane? Oof. That’s a doozy that will take us a while to get over. This is for a very simple reason: Humans are stupid and our only way to keep at bay the crushing horror of the suffering of the world is to only see it in little pieces and segments. It’s easier to fathom the suffering and death of one person than it is to fathom the death and suffering of millions. It’s the same in movies. If you follow one character, well-written, over the course of a movie and something bad happens to them…it’s gut-wrenching. But if you see a big monster devastating an entire city, undoubtedly killing tens of thousands of nameless, faceless, innocent bystanders…eh. Big monster go boom.

Characters matter. People matter in monster movies. If you don’t think so, that’s okay. Just please don’t sit next to me at a dinner party, you absolute psycho.

Now that we’ve established that amazing deconstruction of the cinematic form, let’s meet our heroes of this cinematic tour de force.

Godzilla: A big lizard. A Titan. An old god who keeps a vague balance to the world.

Kong: A big monkey. A Titan. An also old god who keeps balance to the world kinda. It’s a yin-yang thing.

Alexander Skarsgård/Nathan: An idiot. A moron. Some guy who, because of his shitty science book, was relegated to a basement where it looks like he either drowns kittens or harvests organs from toddlers. He’s also our hero? Even though his main role is to be deceived into helping a lunatic create a supermonster while accidentally being the cause of (ballpark) a hundred thousand deaths? I mean, sure. Why not?

Rebecca Hall/Ilene: The sort of caretaker of Kong, she is easily deceived by Thoroughly Clueless Accidental War Criminal Nathan into taking Kong on a boat for ‘reasons’. This despite the fact that he is, again, a basement-dwelling Gollum person with no professional credibility. Honestly, that’s about it. Also, she’s been studying the big ape for a decade and somehow never realized that the skyscraper-sized behemoth has been sign-languaging with a child. You’re a scientist, Ilene. You’re supposed to be observant. How bad are you at your job?

Millie Bobby Brown/Eleven: Returning to her character from “Godzilla: King of the Monsters”, the writers for GvK chose a bold route of scaling her two dimensional character from the former film down to something resembling a dimension so thin we’ve never seen anything like it. It is something so small, so lacking to the point of near nonexistence, that it may in fact cause the Large Hadron Collider to do something weird and bring about the end of mankind. All this, for the sake of…well…nothing. Deus Ex Strangerthingscashgrab.

Brian Tyree Henry/Guy: I mean this is just Alex Jones.

And lastly, Jia: The only compelling character who takes the form of a small deaf child who has a special bond with Kong. She’s adorable, she’s cool, and she’s a pint-sized badass.

Oh! And Kyle Chandler is once again in a movie, proving for the umpteenth time that untalented human beings can always get a 9,518th chance if they look like Matt Damon if Matt Damon had been ruthlessly stung by an entire hive of bees.

I guarantee you, it’s possible that I just put more thought into all of these characters than any of the screenwriters ever did at any point during the conceptualization of this movie. How do I know this? Because they just…do things. There’s no rhyme or reason, there’s no logic, they just endanger the entire scope of humanity for the sake of progressing a plot that isn’t so much a plot as it is “Okay…How do we get these two big monsters to fight a lot?” At which point, a man either stoned out of his gourd or high on ludicrous amounts of LSD said “What if, and hear me out, a guy tricks a scientist to take Kong to the center of the Earth, where there’s this crazy energy and also some sort of double-world, and there’s this rich guy who wants the energy to create a robot Godzilla! And then regular Godzilla fights Kong. Kong has a throne by the way. Oh holy shit, what if we give him an axe too?! And then there’s the robot! And then we have kids doing funny things and making jokes! And omg we can have Kyle Chandler in it! People like him, right? We can stab him with an Epipen if his face looks too puffy!”

And the studio executives said “By god, Stanislaus. Put down that mop, you scraggly-haired janitor boy! You’re one of us now!”

And Godzilla vs. Kong was greenlit.

I assure you this is 1,000% probably what totally happened. At the very least, that could maybe excuse the atrocity of cinema and monsterness that I was forced to sit through.

Over the course of two hours or, perhaps, a timelessness so great and vast that I can only assume it will soon be mimicked by the eternity of darkness I’ll inevitably have to face after an undoubtedly heroic death, we’re treated to poorly-written jokes that are only out-dueled by their poor delivery. We get shoddy CGI that comes and goes in its quality as someone inevitably had to say “Well look. We don’t have the funds for all of it, so lets go the cheap route on a lot of this and hope no one notices.” We get some of the most muddled and laughable contrivance and plot devices that they make “Godzilla: King of the Monsters” look not just like a proper movie, but a timeless epic destined for status alongside “Schindler’s List” and “There Will Be Blood”. We see massive holes drilled into the center of the earth about 700 feet wide (I can’t imagine that won't have dire ecological consequences). We see sets and effects that must’ve been purchased off eBay from JJ Abrams after the umpteenth terrible Star Wars movie. And over and over again we’re told (through flashy implication): But look! Look, you simplistic potato minds! There are flashy colors, big noises, and monsters! Please love us!

I was once a clueless 17 year old boy who thought a really cute girl was just super busy ALL THE TIME and not, you know, really not into my dorky teenage self. I possessed more self-awareness than the people who put out this movie under the guise that it resembled something even tangentially related to “Quality.”

Did I mention there’s Mechagodzilla? I’d say he’s a wonder to behold, but he’s been so poorly and hysterically designed that you might as well tape a banana to a Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robot and hit yourself in the head with a hammer. I’m 99% sure it’ll prove to be a more visually satisfying experience.

In summation, other than our titular super beasts, I didn’t know until the writing of this review what any of the character names were. If a man were to storm into my apartment with a gun and a strangely topical mortal demand, I wouldn’t be able to describe with any coherence what the actual plot of this movie was and would be inevitably shot after stumbling through what I thought might be a description of the villain’s motivation only to find that I must’ve chosen that moment of the film to relive all my childhood traumas. At the very least, that would’ve been more enjoyable. There is no plot, there is no characterization, there is some of the worst dialogue I’ve ever heard in my life, and no matter how big and cool any special effect happens to be…there’s no amount of bandaids that can re-attach a gangrenous leg to this septic sprinter.

This movie forces me to yearn for the world-weary character drama of Air Bud: Golden Retriever.

On threat of my life, I beg for the screenwriting magnificence of the final episode of Game of Thrones.

There is a special place in Hell reserved for those who would have the gall to ruin the legacy of Godzilla, one of the greatest cinematic creations to ever be. I’d say that they should pack some sunscreen to protect them from the heat that will greet them, but I won’t. I’ll simply sit back and hope that that kind of thinking ahead will be observed by Satan, caught, and all bottles will be confiscated upon their arrival. It will serve as a fitting punishment for those who planned for damnation more capably than they did the creation and release of a tentpole monster movie that should’ve stood a decades-long test of time as an unparalleled popcorn movie.

You stole away the last remnants of my childhood wonder that was already on life-support after the release of “Godzilla: King of the Monsters” and you beat it to death with a shovel.

I hope you’re happy, you human stalk of celery. When I evolve into my final form as a warped and frustrated old man, you’ll have only yourself to blame. Pummeling and splatting a child with a gardening tool… how could you?

In summation of my summation, I’ll put a pin in this with the words I uttered when the credits began to roll: What the fuck was that?

Godzilla vs. Kong: 1 star out of 439

Idiots.