Godzilla vs. Kong (2021)

Film: Godzilla vs. Kong (2021)

Stars: Alexander Skarsgard, Millie Bobby Brown, Rebecca Hall, Brian Tyree Henry, Shun Oguri, Eiza Gonzalez, Kyle Chandler, Demian Bichir

Director: Adam Wingard

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Few cinematic franchises are quite as fascinating to me as Godzilla.  While, yes, we know that he's sharing the title here with Kong, the latter is just a series of remakes or looks at the same legend; a cool character, to be sure, but not much different than Dracula or the Mummy.  Godzilla, though, is an obsession to certain cinephiles.  Across 36 films, the monster's journeys seem to be less like a creature from the deep and more like a comic book hero, getting new interpretations on the beast across multiple decades, but instead of it feeling like a remake, it's more of an expansion of the character himself.  This is all a way to say that when it comes to Godzilla, the culture surrounding him is oftentimes more fascinating than the movie itself, but this also makes it easier to forgive the picture its flaws because it's clearly crafting something bigger than just one installment of a movie.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film, like every Godzilla film, features a convoluted plot, one that's difficult to properly explain even if you watched the film with a notepad, but serves mostly as a vehicle to allow Godzilla to destroy an iconic metropolitan area (Hong Kong, which has been through so much already, takes the brunt here).  I'm not even going to try to unfold the plot, tbh...suffice it to say that we're trying to find a way to bring Kong to an underworld kingdom where he can roam free, and that he & Godzilla are going to fight at some point, but the real enemy is Mechagodzilla, who has been created to serve as the "man-made" King of the Monsters...something that ends badly for all involved, particularly Oscar nominee Demian Bichir.

The film is dumb, obviously.  The plot makes no sense, the acting, in some cases from world-class thespians, is really bad & oftentimes at odds with what the actors did in the previous scenes.  And yet, I'll be real-I don't care.  The purpose of films like this isn't necessarily that they're going to be great, it's that they are entertaining.  Not all film needs to be a studied look at the human endeavor.  Some films are about giant monsters crashing into each other.  This is a reminder that while great films can achieve both, film is not literature...it has a visual component that must be achieved, and it's not a total loss if that's the only box that's checked.

And in this regard, Godzilla vs. Kong is a winner.  I loved the somber, constant twilight of the picture.  Its action scenes are adventurous, and the monsters are big & flashy (particularly Mechagodzilla, making his latest iteration).  For devoted or casual films alike, watching two of cinema's biggest names fight for the first time in almost sixty years is a blast, and I left raring for the next one, and honestly more intrigued about the intricacies of the series (if you study the film through an expert's lens, there's far more nods to past Godzilla monsters than a layman might guess).  A fun time in a world where there's are increasingly less common.