In the Flesh: Godzilla vs. Kong

There’s a moment in Godzilla vs. Kong when everything snaps together, when the blur of crumbling skyscrapers and massive hills of muscle, fur, and scales resolves into a coherent ballet of movie magic as Godzilla completely shithouses the ape. It lasts about twenty-seven seconds and occurs fifteen minutes before credits roll. The rest is a bog-standard tangle of godawful CGI, slapdash human subplots, and astonishingly stupid music cues. Whenever a thing comes onscreen, the movie finds a song that mentions that thing and plays it. Elvis croons “Loving Arms” over a sequence depicting Kong chained to the deck of an aircraft carrier, presumably because the song mentions chains. Everything in director Adam Wingard’s take on the storied clash of the titans conforms to this level of thin, dull obviousness, pandering to a common denominator so low it’s miraculous that nearly a half-minute of the film emerged in watchable form.

Wingard’s movie is, before anything else, ugly. Its shots of the hollow earth, a vast world contained within our own, look like nothing so much as a 1998 Sierra PC game, all overexposed blues and muddy expanses of foliage and rock. It feels lifeless, unexceptional, its monstrous fauna afterthoughts without a connection to their surroundings, its hidden giant ape fortress like something straight out of Halo 2. You hear “this movie is like a video game, which is bad” pretty frequently in film criticism, and while I disagree with this as a blanket statement (the podracing sequence in Phantom Menace is quintessentially like a video game, right down to the urge to lean into the turns, which is why it rules), it holds true for Godzilla vs. Kong. Finding a lost ax made out of Godzilla parts, charging it with mystical radiation, Godzilla burning a hole to the center of the planet with his radioactive breath, it all reeks of the kind of thrown-together licensed game — all fetch quests and clunky action —- this film is surely trailing behind it like a bad smell.

The monsters themselves look mostly cheesy and cartoonish, devoid of charm or believable life. Kong’s facial expressions feel static, his nominally soleful moments of connection with a young indigenous girl — the mystic native thing is such a mess here — empty of any texture. Except for the aforementioned sequence in which Godzilla beats on Kong, the choreography of their fights is largely incoherent in the same mold as Michael Bay’s Transformers series, jumbles of badly-lit gray and brown smashing into each other. Mechagodzilla in particular is deeply unpleasant to look at. The film’s cast, meanwhile, is riddled with excess characters who serve virtually no purpose and plagued by the most phoned-in line readings I’ve heard in years. Rebecca Hall’s flat, dull delivery of “oh my God” when her adopted daughter is endangered belongs in some kind of audio archive. It’s probably the most memorable thing in the whole goddamn movie.