Somewhere in Hollow Earth...
There's a certain point where you just can't get annoyed at a movie for being stupid; It is what it is, and if you're watching it, you can only get mad at yourself.
I've long lost hope for any of these Universal Monsterverse films to rise above idiocy, let alone over basic Saturday morning cartoon plotting. And in that sense, the new Godzilla x Kong (god, I feel stupid just typing that) doesn't disappoint: it's an absolute mess of dumb ideas clumsily hammered into a basic narrative that you can just about call a plot, if you squint. I can't imagine anyone ever calling it a good plot, though.
No matter; it manages to do the bare minimum, which is to cram a lot of giant monsters bashing each others heads in, along with a healthy side of collateral damage. As a bonus, the amount of time devoted to the worthless human characters has been reduced; That's a distant next best option, next to writing interesting characters with compelling plotlines- but since that's clearly not going to happen, I'll take it.
OK, let's get it over with. After the events of Godzilla vs. Kong, Godzilla was left in the surface, and Kong deep within the earth's crust in the verdant, megafauna-infested hollow earth - any other arrangement would lead to them coming to blows again.
Kong's getting settled into his new life when a series of earthquakes reveal a hole that leads to a new stretch of land where he runs into other giant apes - including a mini-kong, whom we'll call Suko after his name in the credits. The trailer makes it seem groanworthy (all wide eyes and cute cooing sounds) but trust me, the way their meeting ends up going contains the film's only inspired (and very funny) idea. In any case, after a rough introduction, Kong conscripts Suko to guide him to Kong country, which ends up being a massive monkey Mordor ruled over by the ruthless Skar King, a spindly giant ape / petty tyrant asshole who keeps his tribe under his heel by using a crystal to mind-control a cute icy Pokemon-looking dragon thing. Bonus points for making Skar red, so whenever I saw him from the back, he kind of reminded me of an aggressive Elmo.
They fight, of course, and Kong gets his ass kicked; He barely makes it out alive, with Suko's help.
Meanwhile, on the surface, Godzilla senses a new threat, so he starts fighting other Kaijus to level up, much like a pimply teen would grind on a JRPG to get an ultimate weapon. And... honestly, that's it, that's Godzilla's plot for most of the movie. Hard to believe it only took three people (Terry Rossio, Simon Barrett and Jeremy Slater) to write this!
Finally, the least interesting part - the humans. This time around it's about a little girl (Kaylee Hottle) - the last survivor from Skull Island's Iwi natives - who picks up some sort of telepathic distress signal from hollow earth. Her adoptive mother (Rebecca Hall) mounts an expedition to try and track it down, along with an insufferable conspiracy theorist podcaster (Brian Tyree Henry) and a flamboyant Australian (Dan Stevens). After some misadventures they find the source of the distress call - the OG Iwi tribe, who live in a magical crystal kingdom and have a (sigh) prophecy about Mothra, one in which the little girl is the only hope. Mothra's only task? To convince Kong and Godzilla to work together to beat Skar, who honestly just never seems like the world-ending menace he's painted out to be. But there you go.
So... yeah, the plot is absolute toss. Par for the course in the series. The saving grace is that the film is less than two hours long, and though the shitty story ensures the pacing is shot to hell, it's stuffed full of action: Godzilla fighting a bunch of other Kaijus and then falling asleep curled up like a kitten in the roman coliseum. Godzilla vs Kong vs the pyramids. Godzilla x Kong x Mothra against Skar and a bunch of his underlings. Kong vs a variety of megafauna.
The spectacle side of things is fine. Only a few of the fights take place in the real world, so not that many cities get levelled. On the other hand, the visuals for hollow earth that aren't set in magic crystal city - where another landmass spreads overhead instead of the sky - are nonsensical but spectacular. With so much of the film focusing on Kong and the other completely digital creations, it ends up looking aggressively artificial - something that's exacerbated by a use of bright, saturated colors. It didn't wow me at any point, but it's not a bad aesthetic.
Unfortunately, there's something to the way director Adam Wingard chooses his shots that seriously rubs me the wrong way. I would need to watch it again to put my finger on it, but there's an over-emphasis on reaction shots and on posturing that made me wince more than a few times.
Similarly, even though the humans get less screen time, the film still feels the need to include them needlessly. It’s most egregious here when everyone in the human cast gets a cut away and a chance to offer running commentary on the fight when Godzilla and Kong arrive at Hollow Earth, every single one of their contributions inane and superfluous. It's not just pointless and condescendingly didactic, it hurts the flow of the action.
It's silly to talk about acting in a movie like this where everyone is pitching their character to the rafters; Hall does a good job - she's one of those actresses that will always elevate whatever she does, and the only one who comes out of this with any dignity. Hottle is fine in a very wish-fulfilment-y, kiddie film role. I normally like Stevens, but his character reeks of desperation. He lends his Kaiju vet a lot of his likeability, but the character feels like one of those '90s cartoon characters that strained to be cool and hip. A Poochie.
That leaves the most annoying role to poor Brian Tyree Henry, who's absolutely dire. Through no fault of his own - I can't imagine any actor breathing life to a creation so artificial... call him a Ronald Emmerich character.
In fact, this is a pretty Ronald Emmerich movie, just slightly less dumb, slightly less histrionic. Thanks to a surplus of the old monster mash, it remains just on the right side of stupid, and as unessential as it gets.
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