Mister Minutes' Cinema Circus

In sitting down to write this review, I was trying to think of a good, funny opener. I could have done this hyperbolic "the day has finally come, and the horror is behind me" thing, blow it up to sound like this is the worst movie ever made, but the truth is, it isn't. It's not even the worst MonsterVerse movie. Godzilla vs. Kong is exactly as good and as bad as any of the other movies in this series, and that's the worst thing it could be. In the Marvel Cinematic Universe I can without hesitation point to my favorite and least favorite movies (Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 2 and Captain America: Civil War respectively - in case you were wondering), but these monster movies are all exactly the same with no difference in level of quality or intensity of problems. Pick any one of them, watch it four times, you've experienced the MonsterVerse. Isn't that sad? I think that's sad. Even if they wanted to, these movies do not improve or change anything substantial about their production, writing, acting, direction - even in this "universe", there is no sense of change or progression or advancing of time. In my opinion this entire endeavor is completely pointless in all respects other than the box office, but I guess that's what really matters in the end, isn't it?

Wow, bummer of an opener, huh? I'm honestly just so disappointed. As I've said in the past, I was really excited about this MonsterVerse stuff. I like the idea of a cinematic universe, I like Godzilla, I like King Kong, I like monster movies. But right before watching Godzilla vs. Kong, I watched the latest episode of Marvel's The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, a continuation of a cohesive story 11 years in the making; multiple storylines have converged on this moment, multiple characters have had personal arcs to lead them to a town square in Latvia; I've been following the political and socioeconomic repercussions of multiple fictional world events that all lead to John Walker's Captain America standing over the broken body of an idealistic revolutionary while bystanders broadcast his descent into villainy, and I could not be more captivated. In the MonsterVerse I feel no sense of progression or development. There's no reward for following the story, no grand payoff to an overarching plot. As much as these films claim to share a universe, I feel no connection from one movie to the next. You could watch them completely out of order and get the same feeling, whereas in the MCU, if you don't keep up, you will be lost. If you've been reading these reviews for a while, I'm sure you're tired of hearing me compare the MV to the MCU, but that's the only comparison there is to make. Marvel is the only series that has actually succeeded in creating a deep, realized world of stories, and everyone else is just pretending. The MV universe is completely superficial and shallow, with only the most base, fanservice connections to make the audience go "I know that name!" The opening credits feature a snippet of John Goodman's Bill Randa from Kong: Skull Island giving a talk on the Hollow Earth theory, with no context other than its relevance to the plot. Randa was considered a kook in Skull Island and everybody thought his theory was nonsense. He's mentioned in a throwaway line in King of the Monsters, but other than that he is important only within his role in Skull Island. They could create continuity by showing old footage of a Randa seminar, or show a scientist character reading his book or something; pepper continuity throughout multiple movies, instead of only bringing up elements when they're relevant to the plot. Later in the movie we see a newspaper clipping showing Vera Farmiga's character with the headline "EMMA RUSSELL: VILLAIN OR SAVIOR?" and she is never once brought up or discussed once otherwise, despite the fact that she kickstarted the monster apocalypse in the very last movie. In fact, the destruction wrought by King Ghidorah and his monster minions is never once discussed here. It's just the most lazy kind of continuity, and it wouldn't be hard at all to do it better. They just didn't care enough.

Godzilla vs. Kong in particular feels bizarre, partly because it's pairing morbidly frivolous human death with stupid movie tropes that have never been good, but were already beyond old when Transformers did them in fucking 2007. Like for real, every overweight black man in a sci-fi action movie has to be a fast-talking, wisecracking comic relief character who's paranoid and afraid of the government? Do we really, seriously, for real have a villain who says "oh, shit" before he dies? Why the fuck are we still doing this in 2021?

Chris talk about the actual movie-- oh right, sorry. The movie.

The movie starts in exactly the way my high school film teacher told us never to start a movie because it's boring as dirt: with the main character waking up in bed. Yes, we start with a flimsy attempt to humanize Kong since we fucked it up in Skull Island, so we get to see the giant ape... wake up. And take a shower. And scratch his ass. Literally. A slow, romantic song plays over this montage, interspersed with shots of a little girl which I swear gives the impression that Kong has feelings for this child (the Kuleshov effect, look it up); it's seriously weird but that's how they cut it for real. Continuing the tradition of dropping the previous movie's main character entirely in favor of new ones, this child is Jia, the deaf daughter of the new meaningless protagonist Ilene Andrews. Jia seems to have some kind of connection with Kong (this connection is never explained, elaborated on, or demonstrated but once when it becomes critical to the plot), and Ilene leaves her child unsupervised on the most dangerous island on earth with a 200 foot tall gorilla who literally would not notice if he killed her. Good parenting. Meanwhile, disgraced physics professor Nathan Lind is hired by an evil businessman to journey to the center of the earth to find a magic energy source so he can make a weapon to kill Godzilla (I am not making this up), so Lind approaches Ilene (who is incredibly stupid) to get her to manipulate her child into manipulating Kong to lead them to the magic energy source in the Hollow Earth. Meanwhile meanwhile, Millie Bobby Brown's character is... ugh. Look, I'll level with you - I could describe the bumbling antics that she and her nerd friend get into with the wisecracking paranoid black man, but it's honestly so inconsequential and meaningless it should have all been cut from the movie, except then they wouldn't have had enough material to qualify for feature length so they kept it in. Suffice to say, Madison Russell is a total psychopath just like her mother, worships Godzilla even though he's a sentient atom bomb who would happily kill her with a sneeze; her friend Josh is COMPLETELY unnecessary to the story in any way, shape, or form - if they'd let Maddie have a car there would be literally no need for Josh's existence; and Bernie Hayes is just embarrassing. It's doubly embarrassing because Bernie is played by Brian Tyree Henry of Atlanta and Into the Spider-Verse. I haven't seen Atlanta, but his role as Jefferson Davis in Spider-Verse is so deep, heartwarming and sweet (don't tell me the scene where he's talking to Miles through the door doesn't make you cry), it just bums me out that such a clearly good actor has to spew out this meaningless Funny Black Sidekick dialogue running around with the kids so the tweens in the audience have something to laugh at in this otherwise humorless film.

I know I'm harping on Bernie as a character, but Marvel managed to avoid this trope for 23 entire movies. There's not one Funny Black Sidekick in the entirety of the MCU; there are plenty of black sidekicks, and that's its own discussion, but James Rhodes and Sam Wilson and even Okoye are all treated with dignity and respect, as witty and intelligent people who could easily operate on their own and lead their own films. I doubt Bernie could go to the grocery store without spouting catchphrases at people.

So anyway, they somehow sedate Kong and chain him onto the deck of a cargo ship to go find the magic cave in Antarctica that will lead them to the center of the earth (again, not making this up), when Kong gets restless because he is a monkey on a boat in the ocean. Jia goes out to comfort him, at which point we realize that she has taught Kong sign language. "Doctor" Ilene Andrews has spent the last ten years living on Skull Island, studying Kong in a gigantic Monarch-built bio dome enclosure, keeping him in one section of the island for a decade with eyes on him 24/7... and she never, ever, not once noticed her small child teaching the 200 foot tall gorilla sign language, nor was he ever caught on security camera footage practicing his signing. You can see why these movies stress me.

Eventually they do find the cave portal into the Hollow Earth (why is there a magic portal to go... deeper inside the earth? Why not just drive through a long tunnel?) and I have to say, the Hollow Earth stuff is really great! If you're not familiar, the Hollow Earth theory is a real-life pseudoscience theory that claims Earth is hollow, with our planet core acting like a second sun, giving light and warmth to the inner realm inside the earth, where unknown creatures and humans (or aliens, or escaped Nazis) live in secrecy. It's total nonsense of course, but it's fun, harmless nonsense that has the potential to tell a lot of really cool stories. And I have to admit, I loved this part of the movie! It's the first piece of media I've seen (but there are plenty out there) that goes into the Hollow Earth, and this portrayal of it is really cool. Instead of being depicted as the inside of a sphere, this Hollow Earth is one mountainous, rocky surface directly facing the inner crust, like that scene in Inception where Cobb folds Paris over on itself. These two grounds have relative gravities, and there's a point above the peak of a mountain where rocks hang in suspension between the two opposing gravities. It's seriously beautiful and exciting, with tons of potential for adventures that will be completely forgotten and tossed aside the moment the credits roll on this film. It's honestly really disappointing that such a cool concept and beautiful imagery is wasted on a movie that couldn't give less of a shit about it except in service to Kong. This movie does the exact same dumb thing that King of the Monsters did, where they introduce an incredibly cool piece of world lore, only to destroy it so that they can ignore it in subsequent movies. In KotM, the whitebread characters discover expansive underground ruins of an ancient society that worshiped Godzilla as, well, a god. That's beyond cool, that's so fucking rad! I want to see a movie all about that, about exploring this once great civilization, but no, it just gets obliterated by a nuclear explosion to revive Godzilla. The thesis statement of this whole series is wasted potential. It's here in the Hollow Earth that we discover that Kong is actually... the last member of a once-thriving civilization of Kongs who hated the Godzillas so much they made a big Monster Hunter axe out of a Godzilla's back spike. Again, not making this up. And instead of exploring this concept of tribal Kongs and their war with the Godzillas that the characters love to reference, the chamber is destroyed and rendered inaccessible by Godzilla spewing nuclear breath all the way through the planet's crust to try and kill Kong (which tbh is pretty badass), thereby destroying the second example of the most interesting MV lore. Forget it happened, guys, just wipe it from your memory!!

Now with a direct shot to get to Godzilla, Kong jumps through the hole to Hong Kong and... wait a minute. Fuck. I just realized the entire plot of this movie is digging a hole to China. God this movie sucks.

Anyway, Godzilla and Kong start to fight in Hong Kong and it's here that I remember why I hate these movies. The two giant monsters start throwing each other into fully populated skyscrapers that come tumbling down, killing hundreds upon thousands of human beings in a single, inconsequential moment. These MonsterVerse movies are honestly insulting with the amount of wanton death and suffering Godzilla creates, while still pushing this flaccid narrative of him being the hero. Godzilla is a hero by necessity only; he is an animal who protects his territory, and his territory just happens to be the entirety of planet Earth. You can't tell me they evacuated the city, either; you can't fit all of Hong Kong's 7 million people into the single shown titan shelter, the movie shows office workers trapped in a building, and Kong knocks over an operational ferris wheel in the middle of a ride. Millions of people are dying underneath the two "heroes" we're supposed to root for, and the movie could not give less of a shit. At one point Kong tears a circular structure off the top of a building and throws it at Godzilla like Captain America's shield. There were people in that. The very idea that characters like Maddie and Ilene and Dr. Serizawa can look at these two weapons of mass destruction and think they're blameless saviors to be protected, is disgusting to me. I think Japan sees and understands this, too. I'll admit that I'm no expert on the Japanese Godzilla movies, having only seen three (Gojira, Godzilla Raids Again, and Shin Godzilla), but those that I've seen don't treat Godzilla as a savior figure. I've gone on this tirade before in my review of Godzilla 2014 so I'll try to keep it brief here, but I don't understand the obsession with treating Godzilla as some sort of messianic hero when really he should be treated as a natural disaster ravaging whatever unfortunate city he decides to emerge in. Hideaki Anno's Shin Godzilla in particular is terrifying to the core, and shows Godzilla as an unknowable, undefeatable force with no goal other than wanton destruction - which, in my opinion, is what Godzilla should be. That's what he started out as, a nuclear bomb metaphor. Now in Godzilla vs. Kong we have two sentient nuclear bombs absolutely leveling Hong Kong, and I'm supposed to feel bad that the one with a more human face got beat up? Fuck that, fuck both of them. Kong is just as bad as Godzilla. A movie's point of view does a lot to show you what it thinks is important. All these Godzilla movies focus solely on the monsters, with absolutely no consideration to the people caught in the mayhem. That's another reason why Shin Godzilla is incredible, because that movie focuses on the Japanese government's response to the crisis, it's about the humans trying to solve the problem and end the terror, and it's a scathing commentary on ineffectual crisis management through bureaucracy. The movie has something to say, it has a point it wants to make, which it makes through a monster attack as a metaphor. The MonsterVerse has nothing to say; it doesn't care about anything, it makes no statement one way or another on anything other than "Monsters are cool" and I think that sucks.

Last Thoughts

• Ilene said a storm killed all of the Skull Island natives?! This is beyond lazy and disappointing writing. First of all, it isn't relevant to the story at all, and it just shows a huge lack of care for your universe to wipe out a whole culture of indigenous people in one lame throwaway line.


• I sympathize more with the villain than the heroes. Godzilla is dangerous, and it makes sense that humans would want to fight back to protect themselves. The creation of Mechagodzilla is cool, using one of King Ghidorah's skulls is really cool -- although why his brainless skull would still retain telepathic abilities is dumb.


• How the hell has no one explored and mapped all of Skull Island yet since it appears to be about 50 miles off the coast of Hawai'i?


• Sometimes the CGI in this movie looks straight up unfinished. There are elements without shadows, the blue gems in the Hollow Earth often don't have rendered lighting, and the way water falls off the monsters just looks really unconvincing to me.


• For some reason Dr. Serizawa's previously unmentioned son Ren is a bad guy, piloting Mechagodzilla. This is just a really stupid and unnecessary thing to throw into the plot. First of all, the only Japanese character in this movie has to be related to the only other Japanese character in the series? Nice job, guys. But it's also stupid because Ren's presence is never explained. I could understand it if he felt neglected by his father's obsession with Godzilla, and wanted revenge on the lizard for occupying all of his father's attention, but once again I'm giving these movies more thought than the writers did. Just embarrassing.

In the end, I honestly think the MonsterVerse is a huge waste of time. It adds nothing new to the Godzilla mythos, it does nothing interesting from a story or filmmaking perspective. It's just eight hours of time down the drain in service of boring, empty spectacle. Save yourself the trouble and watch Gojira or Shin Godzilla instead. Or, yes, even the one with Matthew Broderick.