Film Review: Godzilla vs. Kong

Godzilla vs. Kong might just be the best American-made Godzilla movie. It's also an incredibly disappointing film. It comes close to being a perfect blend of the sheer scale of the 1954 original and the smaller human drama of Gareth Edwards' 2014 film, but it's undone by a weak script, too many boring human characters and an off-putting deployment of that blend between the monstrous and the human. The film comes so close to being perfect it’s frustrating that it doesn’t.

Director Adam Wingard and his team know viewers are here to see two big titans do battle and they deliver in spades. Save a few missteps, the fight scenes are well-choreographed and easy to follow. The action is rarely disorienting and usually in daylight in a marked departure from Godzilla: King of the Monsters.

The decision to have most of the fights in the daytime allows the film’s stunning visual effects to take center stage. King Kong’s visual effects stand out in particular. Kong is the closest thing the film has to a main character and the fidelity of the visual effects gives the character a pathos and sympathy a less accomplished visual effects team wouldn’t have been able to provide.

King Kong is Godzilla vs. Kong’s emotional center and Wingard and his team use several different tactics to bring the emotion out of Kong and the characters around him without using too many exposition dumps.

The most striking is the film’s sound design. Kong’s main human contact is Jia, a Deaf girl native to Skull Island played by newcomer Kaylee Hottle. Jia communicates with Kong using ASL and the sound drops out and becomes muffled when they’re the two primary characters on screen, showing viewers Jia’s subjective perspective of Kong. The sound sometimes comes in and out multiple times in a scene, but it’s never jarring because of how the sound design interacts with the visuals to give viewers the often literal whole picture.

(Hottle is a Deaf actress playing a Deaf character, which is a far bigger deal than it should be.)

The film is not without its technical missteps and nitpicks. There are some weird editing choices throughout, especially during the fights. The film sometimes prioritizes the human scale over the monstrous while Godzilla and Kong are coming to blows; a shot of a fighter pilot in the middle of a fight sequence immediately comes to mind.

Godzilla vs. Kong’s biggest problem is its script and not just in a “I wanted a little Shakespeare in my kaiju movie” sort of way. One has to wonder whether there’s a draft screenplay somewhere where Godzillla and King Kong don’t fight.

The script practically twists itself into a pretzel to get Godzilla and Kong going after one another. On *two* separate occasions, Godzilla and King Kong are in completely different locations about five minutes before a fight and then are brought together through a plot contrivance. Some of those plot contrivances lead to really cool moments, but they’re still plot contrivances.

Most of the human characters beyond Jia and her adoptive mother (Rebecca Hall) aren’t worth the time of day, either. The subplot involving Millie Bobbie Brown’s character could’ve been cut completely despite decent performances from Julian Dennison and Brian Tyree Henry and Alexander Skarsgard is completely wasted as the guy who I *guess* is supposed to be the main protagonist.

The human character done the dirtiest is Rei Serizawa (Shun Oguri). Rei is supposed to be the son of Ken Watanabe’s character from the 2014 Godzilla, but Kong never really makes this clear outside of a throwaway line. Making that clearer would have helped Rei’s actions make a lot more sense and made him a more interesting character.

There are so many tiny little changes that it’s easy to see a world where Godzilla vs. Kong is a movie worth recommending no matter your stance on monster movies. It delivers the goods in spades and Adam Wingard really understands the monster movie as a piece of visual spectacle. Unfortunately, the film doesn’t have the script to back it up.

Final score: 6.7/10