Boy does it feel good when something does what it’s supposed to. In Godzilla vs. Kong (in theaters and on HBO Max, March 31) you know what happens? Godzilla, fearsome sea lizard with a laser mouth, and Kong, giant ape with sad eyes, get to fighting. They fight on the water; they fight on land. They bash and smash and clobber and roar. Godzilla vs. Kong competently, efficiently does its job, which is really all you can ask of the fourth movie in a rickety franchise.
Godzilla’s last outing in this particular iteration was in 2019’s Godzilla: King of the Monsters, a sloppy and dull monsterpalooza that probably should have killed the series. But Warner Bros. soldiered on, finally giving us the grand convergence first promised in 2014’s Godzilla and continued in 2017’s Kong: Skull Island. The aim of these films was once, I think, to make the world of its beasts a bit more credible, more serious, more tinged in the post-Dark Knight hues favored by a lot of blockbusters. That approach sorta worked in the first two films, but then King of the Monsters tipped the whole thing sideways.
Godzilla vs. Kong isn’t a return to form, though. It is instead a happy eschewing of anything so cumbersome as plot or continuity or gravity. Director Adam Wingard mostly just throws a lot of eye-popping stuff up on the screen and lets us enjoy it—though there is structure, at least in terms of how legible the battle scenes are. It’s blessedly easy to follow the film; all its crashing and clamor keenly register, even on a digital screener viewed on one’s couch, which is certainly not the ideal way to watch this movie. Credit also to Ben Seresin’s cinematography and the production design by Tom Hammock and Owen Paterson, which set stage and mood nicely.
Again, everyone’s duty here was just to make some cool settings for Godzilla and Kong to fight in, and to allow them the physics necessary to not just stand and swat at each other limply. They’ve done that. The film’s closest inspirations are likely the two Pacific Rim movies, with their skyscraper-sized kaijus and mecha suits thrashing around nighttime cities. At its best, Godzilla vs. Kong conjures up that same awesome wonder, heaving with dizzying scale. It lets itself be sillier, though, conscious of its goofy dimensions and thin, perfunctory premise.
Those who have seen the earlier films in the series might be wondering why Godzilla and Kong are fighting, since both have been established as good, noble monsters. The answer to that question lies in curious places, like a mysterious science lab run by a wicked Demián Bichir and, quite frankly, at the center of the dang Earth. There is a verdant, primeval land in there known as the Hollow. Kong and a merry band of humans must travel there to— You know what? It doesn’t really matter. Just watch and savor all the whizbang.
The humans are a game troupe, among them Brian Tyree Henry, Rebecca Hall (having an interesting season between this and her Sundance directorial debut, Passing), Eiza González, Alexander Skarsgård, and Millie Bobby Brown. They do their tasks—delivering exposition and pointing out where Kong and Godzilla are at any given moment—and then get out of the way, acting in impressive responsiveness to green-screen suggestion.
It’s rare to see a consciously dumb movie not overdo it on the meta self-deprecating. Usually there is some kind of mugging or winking that ruins the fun by gesturing toward it. Godzilla vs. Kong avoids almost all of that, graciously allowing the audience to assess on their own, free of insistent irony. It’s a pretty straightforward movie, one that gets right to the main event without much preamble and is mostly unconcerned with its context in broader pop culture discourse. (Though the giddy destruction of Hong Kong may carry some political weight, intentional or not.)
Godzilla vs. Kong really is just as advertised, slick and agreeable and certainly worth a month’s subscription to HBO Max. Whether it’s worth trekking out to theaters is between you and your vaccinator. If you can do it safely, though, this is a paws-and-claws brawl clamoring for the biggest screen it can find.
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