Godzilla Vs. Kong

 GODZILLA VS. KONG

** SPOILERS **

Godzilla Vs. Kong is booked perfectly according to pro wrestling rules. First, you have Godzilla, the heel, who has apparently turned on the human race that he was purportedly protecting. To beat the literal monster heel, Monarch and Apex Cybernetics bring in the babyface, Kong, who's admittedly an underdog against the radioactive lizard. They clash in a two-out-of-three falls Iron Monster Match that does end with a decisive victor - until there's a run-in by Mechagodzilla, who's the real monster heel of MonsterMania. It turns into a two-on-one handicap match where the best monster prevails. I won't say who he is, but, in the worlds of the late, great Pat Patterson, "The crowd go banana."

With the satisfyingly straightforward Godzilla Vs. Kong, director Adam Wingard delivers the goods. The bloat, i.e. the overabundance of jabbering human characters no one cared about in Godzilla: King of the Monsters, is largely excised. (Kyle Chandler, the star of the previous film, is in this movie and he might have a half dozen scenes and a dozen lines tops.) Even Godzilla himself, who has top billing, is shuffled into the background for much of the film. Godzilla Vs. Kong is smart enough to bet all of its money on Kong, who is the most empathetic and loveable movie monster of all, and make him the main character. It's Kong's heroic journey we follow, from Skull Island to the Hollow Earth at the center of the planet (think the Savage Land of Marvel Comics), and into Hong Kong (of course) for the final showdown with two types of Godzilla. Incidentally, Hong Kong's power grid is miraculous to behold, because, despite three giant monsters rampaging on the island, the buildings continue to be lit up in neon colors to provide groovy mood lighting for the creature brawl.

Godzilla Vs. Kong begins with Godzilla turning heel and attacking the Pensacola, Florida facility of Apex Cybernetics - a company whose name kind of gives away what they're really doing in their secret subterranean labs. In response, Apex comes up with a crazy scheme to use Kong to venture into the Hollow Earth to find the secret power source that fuels all of the Titans. Meanwhile, poor Kong is living on Skull Island in a version of The Truman Show. Monarch set up a biodome over the whole island to constantly watch Kong and keep him safe from Godzilla, lest the giant lizard comes to the island to defend the title of King of the Monsters. A couple of scientists played by Alexander Skarsgard and Rebecca Hall lead the Apex mission to bring Kong to Antarctica, which is the gateway to the Hollow Earth. Of course, they transport Kong by boat and in chains, and Kong pouts the whole way as he gets rained on and we wonder what happens when he needs to go to the bathroom after he eats the piles of fish Apex feeds him.

Since Godzilla wants to kill Kong, under the logic that after the ending of the last movie, Godzilla wants all the Titans to bow down to him but Kong bows to no one, the lizard finds the ape at sea and attacks. As one would figure, Godzilla has the advantage in the ocean and he nearly drowns Kong. Only then does Skarsgard think, "Hey, maybe we should have flown Kong to Antarctica?" Better late than never, one supposes. Skarsgard and Hall are joined by Eiza Gonzalez, the fetching daughter of the billionaire CEO of Apex, Demian Bichir. They have a couple of Star Trek shuttlecrafts that can allow humans to survive the gravitational inversion at the gateway to the Hollow Earth. There's also Kaylee Hottle, a little deaf girl who Kong befriended and who taught the great ape sign language. Altogether, they follow Kong to the Hollow Earth where he finds what is, apparently, the Kong family's ceremonial battle-ax and throne. Who built the Kong throne room? Who knows? But wouldn't you know it, as soon as they harvest the Hollow Earth power source, Gonzalez betrays Skarsgard, Hall, and Kong. Hilariously, they die, of course, and just as hilariously, Gonzalez's father never even finds out what happened to her before he bites it himself in Hong Kong.

Meanwhile, Millie Bobby Brown, who was in the last movie and was kidnapped by her crazy mother Vera Farmiga, leads a goofy side mission with her best friend Julian Dennison and a Titan conspiracy podcaster, Bryan Tyree Henry. They uncover what Apex is really doing: building Mechagodzilla! To power it, they need that power source from the Hollow Earth, but to control the robot lizard, they're using the head of Ghidorah, which was recovered at the end of the last movie. (No mention of whatever happened to Charles Dance, who bought the head in the black market.) Shun Oguri, who plays the son of Ken Watanabe from the previous two Godzilla movies, controls Mechagodzilla but, of course, there's a technical screw up and Ghidorah's psychic evil takes over Mechagodzilla. Here's the thing though: before he died, Bichir's logic for building Mechagodzilla was he was sick of Titans rampaging whenever they wanted and he didn't trust Godzilla to be our benevolent protector. (And really, why would you?) Mechagodzilla was designed to be a Titan killer to free humanity at last from the threat of all monsters. Well, he's kind of right! Sure, he turned out to be kinda evil, and Mechagodzilla was flawed, but his logic is basically correct. Every Japanese robot cartoon is about humans having a robot to fight and kill monsters. Apex was sort of doing the right thing.

Anyway, when Godzilla somehow finds out that Kong made it to the Hollow Earth, he atomic fire breaths a hole all the way to the Earth's core so Kong can climb up for the rematch. With his atomic fire breath-absorbing ax in hand, Kong whoops Godzilla and wins the second fall. His victory is short-lived, however, as Godzilla makes a comeback and wins the third fall, stomping on Kong's heart for good measure. Still, Kong earned Godzilla's respect and, after the good humans used the Hollow Earth energy as a defibrillator to jump-start Kong's heart, the great ape joins the fight between Godzilla and Mechagodzilla. This is Kong's finest moment since he totally lays the smackdown on Mechagodzilla after Godzilla totally couldn't get the job done. Kong saves the world and is confirmed as the true hero of Godzilla Vs. Kong. Godzilla, a little embarrassed, slinks back into the sea while Kong goes back to ruling the Hollow Earth. 

If Godzilla Vs. Kong is the last MonsterVerse movie, it's the best way it could go out for Kong lovers like yours truly. There are also a couple of hilarious nods to other movies: When Kong's shoulder is dislocated, he slams it back into place just like Mel Gibson does in Lethal Weapon 2. And after he kills Mechagodzilla, Kong tears its robot head and spine out just like Captain Jean-Luc Picard does to the Borg Queen in Star Trek: First Contact. It's nice that Kong watches the same movies I do.

Godzilla: King of the Monsters

GODZILLA: KING OF THE MONSTERS

** SPOILERS **

Roland Emmerich's Godzilla 1998 is still the worst American-made Godzilla movie, but Michael Dougherty's Godzilla: King of the Monsters makes a hearty bid for that crown. Unlike Emmerich, the new Godzilla gets the monsters right, at least, but both films are populated with humans that deserve to go extinct. While Emmerich leaned towards bottom-feeding 1990s sitcom archetypes for his characters, Dougherty's film is populated by complete idiots who think they're smart but no, they're complete idiots. Here is the human cast of Godzilla: King of the Monsters: Coach Taylor (Kyle Chandler), Norman Bates' Mom (Vera Farmiga), the Kid Who Does Whatever She Wants (Millie Bobby Brown), Godzilla's Biggest Fan (Ken Watanabe), the Lady Who Likes Sea Monsters And Is Killed Offscreen (Sally Hawkins), A Clown (Thomas Middleditch), A Clown Who Voted For Obama (Bradley Whitford), Ice Cube's Kid (O'Shea Jackson, Jr.), the Asian Lady No One Knows Is Twins - Or Do They? (Zhang Ziyi), and Tywin Lannister (Charles Dance). Except for Tywin, they all work for Monarch, a secret organization with unlimited resources that collects giant monsters (now called Titans) like Pokemon - gotta catch them all! Monarch's mission statement is "Discovery and Defense in a Time of Monsters" but their real playbook is "Let Godzilla Do Whatever He Wants. Godzilla Is Always Right" because, apparently, he is.

After the attack on San Francisco in the 2014 Godzilla that killed Norman Bates (Honolulu was destroyed in that film too, but no matter), Norman Bates' Mom invented Orca, a sonar device that can 'talk' to the monsters and calm them down, apparently. Like Homer Simpson, she stages a phony kidnapping by Tywin Lannister and his unnamed mercenary group to get to the Monarch Antarctica outpost. There rests Ghidorah, the giant three-headed dragon, and for some reason, Bates' Mom thinks releasing him and then all of the other Titans is the best way to save the planet from climate change. She reveals her innermost thoughts to her ex-husband Coach Taylor and the rest of Monarch in a preposterous speech and after hearing it, the Kid realizes her mom is fucking nuts. In this movie, the monsters and their radiation are the planet's natural line of defense. Bates' Mom spouts some weird hippie shit about humans and monsters living together in harmony (amidst the ruins of our smashed civilization?) and it's not even clear whether she believes it or not. No matter, because it doesn't take long for her to realize she's an idiot, but it does take her a lot longer than it took me.

Once Ghidorah is released and Godzilla is unable to stop him, the dragon is revealed to be an alpha among the monsters that rivals Godzilla himself. The other Titans start waking up to meet the new boss, who's not the same as the old boss. There are at least 17 other monsters in this movie and we see a lot of them but the Big Four are Godzilla, Ghidorah, Mothra, and Rodan. All of the monsters start wrecking cities all around the world but Monarch has a plan: let Godzilla handle it. The US Military has a different plan - kill them all - and it's a good plan but they also fuck it up. Admiral David Strathairn announces the military has a new weapon: an oxygen destroyer missile that can kill anything that breathes oxygen within a two-mile radius. They fire it at Godzilla and Ghidorah in the ocean; it doesn't work on Ghidorah because it's an alien dragon, but it doesn't kill Godzilla either. But the oxygen missile does kill millions of fish, despite the fact that fish don't breathe oxygen. This is that kind of movie.

Oxygen destroyers are stupid anyway because along with a giant undersea base and a super jet, Monarch has nuclear weapons, which they apparently have authority to use whenever they want without clearing it with anyone. In their nuclear sub, Monarch chase Godzilla and find out the Hollow Earth theory pitched in the vastly superior Kong: Skull Island is correct: there are massive tunnels beneath the surface connecting the whole planet and that's how Godzilla gets around. In fact, there's even an ancient Godzilla City deep, deep under the sea. Godzilla went back to take a nap and recharge but Monarch decides he's taking too long so they decide to launch a nuke at him to speed things up. When they realize they have to literally hand deliver the warhead to Godzilla - a one-way trip - Ken Watanabe volunteers and no one tries to talk him out of it. Bradley Whitford says he'll miss it when Ken says "Let them fight!" even though he wasn't in the last movie the one time Ken said it. No matter, Watanabe brings the nuke to Godzilla and says "Goodbye, old friend" as if they're old friends and Godzilla knows or cares who he is. And another thing: he's deep in the Earth's core, where it must be blazing hot, but Watanabe just removes his gloves and helmet and he's fine. It's the same when everyone is in Antarctica (average temperature - 49 degrees Celsius or -120 degrees Fahrenheit for us dumb Americans) but they all walk around with no hats and their heads fully exposed. Not to mention the radiation of the monsters and the nukes - everyone in this movie should have radiation poisoning, cancer, or worse but they can't help touching the monsters like the teenage girl did the Brachiosaur in Jurassic Park.

Back to the Kid, who gives her mom a big FU by stealing the Orca. This kid just takes the device, which is left unguarded, and strolls out of a secret bunker crawling with armed mercenaries and then walks miles on foot to Fenway Park in the middle of a Boston under emergency evacuation. Her crazy mom, Tywin, and the mercenaries don't realize the Kid is gone until she's already at Fenway blasting the Orca on their loudspeakers, which the Titans can apparently hear no matter where in the world they are. The Orca draws Ghidorah, who was hanging out in Washington D.C. for some reason, to Boston, and yet, this lightning-shooting three-headed dragon the size of the Hancock Tower can't kill one stupid kid. Monarch arrives with Godzilla, and Mothra and Rodan also join in the fatal four-way match, but the movie is much more concerned with Coach Taylor and his crazy wife finding their dumb kid, who went home to her townhouse because it's "safe" there, I guess? (It isn't.) Meanwhile, Godzilla is supercharged with nuclear radiation and Bradley Whitford announces he'll go thermonuclear in 12 minutes, then six minutes, but it takes a lot longer than that for Godzilla to blow. By then, Norman Bates' Mom driving a Humvee has led Ghidorah on a merry chase around Boston while the rest of Monarch escape in an airplane where they leave the rear hatch wide open the whole time, giving them a nice aerial view of Godzilla's nuclear explosion destroying Boston and killing Ghidorah. But it's fine because you can just be a few thousand feet away from a nuclear detonation and no worries, you're all okay.

Godzilla: King of the Monsters is so immensely stupid that the monsters bowing to Godzilla at the end - Rodan, a giant pterodactyl, even knows how to genuflect and practically does a curtsy - almost seems normal. In the end, Monarch is exposed as a Keystone Cops operation that's even more dangerous and out-of-control than the monsters and it's an outfit where a drunk ex-football coach and his boneheaded teenage daughter can just do whatever the hell they want and this one family is more of a threat to the safety of the world than the Titans are. So, sure, let Godzilla be king of the world because Godzilla knows best, but as for me, let me off this crazy fucking planet.

Kong: Skull Island

KONG: SKULL ISLAND

** SPOILERS **

Kong: Skull Island will make you love the smell of giant gorillas in the morning. A rollicking King Kong meets Apocalypse Now mashup, director Jordan Vogt-Roberts' Kong: Skull Island throws out the hoary old rulebook about how to do a King Kong movie. No, Kong is not ape-napped and brought back to New York City to go on a rampage. Seeing that monkey fall off the Empire State Building is like watching Bruce Wayne's parents get shot in that alley or Uncle Ben get murdered. Kong: Skull Island has other, much better ideas, and by the time the dust settles, the horrific other monsters on the Island are dead, and Kong beats his chest in triumph, we realize with delight that the planned MonsterVerse is just getting started. 

Set in 1973 at the conclusion of the Vietnam War, John Goodman, representing a shadowy organization called Monarch (they're like S.H.I.E.L.D. except they're all about giant monsters), bamboozles the US Military to back his expedition to the mysterious Skull Island - the only unexplored region on the map which is surrounded by perpetual storm clouds. Goodman has a motley crew with him: a platoon of soldiers led by Samuel L. Jackson, Monarch scientists Corey Hawkins and Jing Tian (from The Great Wall), photographer Brie Larson, and a former British SAS officer who's a expert in tracking through jungle terrain, Tom Hiddleston. They storm the island in a fleet of thirteen attack helicopters, dropping seismic bombs throughout the jungle, and they immediately raise the ire of Kong - the island's 104 foot tall gorilla protector. Kong is god around here, and the soldiers didn't know what hit them (trees thrown like javelins, Kong's big hands swatting the whirly birds down like flies) until most of them were already exploded.

Jackson - who says "Hold onto your butts!" for the first time since 1993; the mark of monster movie quality - immediately undergoes a psychotic form of jungle fever and declares war on Kong. Hiddleston, Larson, and some of the other survivors, separated from Jackson and his men, realize something even worse is happening on this crazy island. They meet John C. Reilly, a slightly loopy American World War II vet who crashed on Skull Island and survived for 28 years. Through Reilly, we get the wild info dump about Skull Island: it's a gateway for what's known as the "Hollow Earth" theory, that giant monsters lived on this planet long before Man and still reside in massive caverns underneath the surface. Through Skull Island, some can escape. Kong exists to fight them and kill them if they do. Skull Island is in fact crawling with all kinds of murderous beasts - giant spiders, flocks of killer birds, trees that are really enormous wooden insects - and not so dangerous, like gigantic water buffaloes. The worst are the Skull Crawlers, giant two armed lizards that killed Kong's family, leaving their skeletons in a massive Boneyard on the island. Kong is the last of his kind; if Kong goes, the whole island falls to the monsters.

Kong: Skull Island pushes all the right nerd buttons, especially for Marvel nerds. Through its sly casting, basically Loki, Captain Marvel, Nick Fury, Doctor Doom (Toby Kebbell), and Corpsman Dey from the Nova Corps all landed on the Savage Land. It's a pleasing multi-national cast where everyone is completely game; the characters are smart and make reasonable choices when faced with surviving an unbelievably dangerous environment. Jackson becomes deliciously unhinged, staring down the enormous Kong with rage in his eyes. Hiddleston is a solid and heroic center of gravity. Maybe the biggest bad ass of all the humans is Larson; while everyone else faces the giant monsters armed with guns, grenades and samurai swords, Larson only has a camera. She's the blonde woman in the group but she's no damsel in distress. Larson bravely risks her neck out there just the same. When Larson and Hiddleston meet Kong, it's happily a more Spielbergian Jurassic Park than screaming Fay Wray moment. As for Kong, we see loads of him in broad daylight, and he's magnificent. Kong's final battle with the Skull Crawler is appropriately awesome, with Kong using a ship's propeller and a chain as a weapon, overcoming the Skull Crawler with a little help from his new human friends. All of this is set to a blazing soundtrack of some of the finest 1970's rock.

In every measurable way, Kong: Skull Island is superior to every other King Kong movie since the 1933 original classic, and it's worlds better than the 2014 Godzilla. Setting Skull Island in the 1970's was a savvy move; we've seen Godzilla tear apart our modern day cities and fight our modern day military. The retro-feel of more "innocent" Vietnam-era grunts facing giant monsters delivers a lot more analog fun. By the time the end credits finish rolling, Hiddleston and Larson are recruited not exactly kicking and screaming into Monarch - a nod to Nick Fury informing Tony Stark about the Avengers Initiative at the end of the first Iron Man. Hiddleston and Larson are shown cave drawings of some other familiar monster sights to Japanese kaiju nerds: Godzilla, Rodan, King Ghidorah, and Mothra. "Kong may be King, but there are other kings," Skull Island announces - a promise that Kong's monkey troubles are just beginning.

Godzilla

GODZILLA

** SPOILERS **

"Let Them Fight!"

In Godzilla, though the big guy bears the moniker "King Of All Monsters" (according to cable news), we learn that like many of his Japanese-born brethren, Godzilla is really just a salaryman. He has a job, a difficult one, which we're not clear he particularly enjoys. Probably not. But he gets up in the morning, makes the long (And I mean long! Thousands of miles!) commute to work, clocks in, keeps his head down, does his job, clocks out, and goes home. No nonsense. All business. You have to respect a work ethic like that.

And yet, Godzilla is also a movie star. Director Gareth Edwards' Godzilla ought to have had a serious talk with his agent about just how much screen time Godzilla should have in a movie bearing his name. In Godzilla, it's surprisingly little. He owns the final act of the picture, but for a movie called Godzilla, the filmmakers sure kept Godzilla under wraps. Maybe during his long swims in the Pacific Ocean, Godzilla commiserated with the shark from Jaws about directors withholding the namesake stars of their own movies from audiences who paid to see them.

There are other monsters in Godzilla that get considerably more screen time. They are called MUTOs -- Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms, though one of them can fly and is no longer terrestrial, which the movie is quick to point out. The MUTOs are giant insects, like skyscraper-sized praying mantis that collapse skyscrapers when they land on them. We learn, via a haphazard info dump, that the MUTOs and Godzilla have been on Earth longer than humans, from a time when the Earth was far more radioactive. The MUTOs have been living underground where the Earth's core is more radioactive, but now they're awake and stomping around the Pacific Rim looking for nuclear missiles and other sources of radioactivity to feed on. The MUTOs are in fact Mr. and Mrs. MUTO and the Mrs. is quite with child. If they're allowed to successfully procreate, they will spawn a terrible army of MUTOs. Thankfully, Godzilla, the Alpha Predator, has risen to prevent this from happening.

How does Godzilla, who has lived deep in the bottom of the Earth's oceans since 1954 when the Japanese and Americans "tested" nuclear weapons in the Pacific to kill him, know the MUTOs are now on the surface? And why does he come to stop them? Only Godzilla knows for sure, and he's not talking. Left to speculate is a shadowy organization called Monarch that has kept the secret of Godzilla hidden for 60 years. They're lead by Ken Watanabe, Godzilla's biggest fan, although everything he "knows" about Godzilla and Godzilla's motivations are really just fanboy speculation. Watanabe, normally a charismatic and interesting actor, is afflicted with Ben Affleck in Argo syndrome -- he just stands around in every scene, mouth agape, almost in a catatonic state, seemingly pained to recite what little dialogue he is given. His big moment is when he convinces US Military big wig David Strathairn that Godzilla is really the only thing that can stop the MUTOs. "Let them fight!" Watanabe demands. Well, who's really gonna stop them from fighting?

The most interesting person in Godzilla is Bryan Cranston, a nuclear scientist stationed in Japan who lost his wife in a tragedy in 1999. That tragedy was caused by one of the MUTOs being awakened and attacking the power plant looking for sustenance, which the Japanese government covered up. Cranston's buff soldier son Aaron Taylor-Johnson (soon to be Quicksilver in Avengers: Age of Ultron) must carry the torch for the family when Cranston checks out of the movie, killed when the MUTO contained in the power plant reawakens and smashes everything. When Cranston and his ability to deliver entertainingly unhinged monologues leave the movie, so does any real human interest. Taylor-Johnson, unfortunately, is a dead zone of charisma, as we watch him rejoin the military and perform incredibly dangerous missions to stop the MUTOs, nearly dying several times. He does get face time with each and every monster in the movie, and they all take a moment to stare at him, as if trying to reconcile how he can be the same nerdy kid who wore green spandex and called himself Kick-Ass? Taylor-Johnson has a pretty young wife back in San Francisco, Elizabeth Olsen, who is a nurse and has little to do except abandon their son so he can be placed in mortal danger on a school bus when Godzilla strolls by the Golden Gate Bridge. The main reason to separate the family is to have them touchingly reunite in the end, a feel good moment thanks to Godzilla.

One thing Godzilla does well is use the monsters and the devastation they bring as a metaphor for our collective fears today. The original Japanese Gojira movie in 1954 made Godzilla a blatant stand in for Japanese fears of nuclear annihilation in the wake of the bomb being dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki nine years prior. Edwards fills his Godzilla with imagery of tsunamis, superstorms leveling coastal cities, nuclear power plants being destroyed. The US Navy seems to have jurisdiction over everything regarding Godzilla and fighting MUTOs; no other world government gets involved. When Godzilla surfaces, his massive spinal spikes piercing the water, the Navy proudly sails their aircraft carriers and battleships alongside Godzilla. They also shoot at Godzilla constantly, but Godzilla doesn't care one way or the other if the humans are for him or against him. Godzilla doesn't find the humans or their problems that take up most of the movie's running time particularly interesting. Besides, Godzilla has a job to do.

Godzilla's job is to fight, and though the movie plays coy with showing the fights -- teasing the monster-on-monster action via news footage or using Cloverfield-like man on the street perspectives before vision is obstructed -- the final act of Godzilla finally lets us see what Godzilla can do, although the fights are pretty brief, considering. Once we witness him in fully in action, we see Godzilla is kind of bottom heavy ('fat' is what some unkind Japanese fans have called him.) Indeed, how much radiation is down there in the Earth's core for Godzilla to feed on that he put on so much weight? Godzilla does use his ample girth to his advantage, fighting sumo-style when slapping the MUTOs around. The numbers game works against Godzilla, but soon he rallies, using his spiky prehensile tail and his Atomic Fire Breath to finally defeat Mr. and Mrs. MUTO. (He kills Mrs. MUTO by blowing Atomic Fire Breath right down her gullet.) Amusingly, Godzilla takes a page from Ric Flair and Flair Flops face down after the fight, exhausted.

When the dark monster rises from his well-deserved nap, Godzilla merely stomps back across the ruined San Francisco to the ocean to make his long commute home, his job done, oblivious to the cheering throngs of humans who hilariously call him "Our Savior." Godzilla needs no thanks. He's a watchful guardian, a silent protector. And like any salaryman, he must merely do his job. Which begs the question, how does Godzilla blow off steam after work? Does he hit up the bars and strip clubs like his fellow salarymen? Someone should follow Godzilla down to the deep ocean trenches to parts unknown; maybe CNN should send Anthony Bourdain to see where Godzilla hangs out after work. Now, that would be a really interesting Godzilla movie.