Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire

 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.

Godzilla Minus One (Gojira -1.0)

  I'm not a huge Godzilla fan - I've always had affection for the guy, and he and his friends played in the background a lot when I was a kid. That affection's not enough to feel the need to revisit the films as an adult: I don't really have a lot of patience for '50s-style creature features - Kaiju movies have suits and destroyed miniatures going for them (and that does go a long way) but charm and nostalgia aren't that strong a pull.
 I've seen a few of the newer ones, both Japanese and American, but to be honest they kind of run together in my mind. Color me surprised, then, when there would be two stunningly good Godzilla movies in a row. Not just good Kaiju movies, but excellent films in pretty much any way that counts.

 Godzilla Minus One is a prequel to the original Godzilla, though it's best not to take continuity seriously in these things. As World War: the Sequel draws to a close Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki), a kamikaze pilot chickens out from his ordained duty to kill himself for the emperor, and goes back to land in a base at Odo island (the same island where the first part of the first Godzilla takes place). The ground crew boss, Tachibana (Munetaka Aoki) sympathises, as the war is almost over anyhow and he sees that sacrifice would be pointless.
 That night, however, a T-rex-sized Godzilla comes ashore and attacks the base. Tachibana asks Shikishima to use the guns on his plane to bring down the beast, but Shikishima once again panics and flees, leaving everyone to die. Only he and Tachibana survive; Awkward!

 From  there things move to Tokyo. With the war over, The city is a bombed-out, post-apocalyptic hellscape. Everyone Shikishima knew has died except for a neighbour who blames him saying that if he'd done his job properly her children might still be alive. Ouch. Shikishima befriends and forms a family of sorts with another survivor - Noriko (Minami Hamabe) and a young child she rescued. Wracked with survivor's guilt, he gets a dangerous job cleaning up mines from the Pacific. And wouldn't you know it, there he runs into Godzilla again. The big guy's grown to the size of a tall building, after a diet of warships, and is eyeing up Tokyo as the next course; Kaiju's gonna kaiju. The boat chase that ensues is a stunning bit of action filmmaking.

 From there the movie settles into the usual rhythms of these movies, as the plucky humans ineffectively try to stop the monster until they come up with a clever plan that might just work. What's different this time around is that the very grounded, post-war melodrama between Shikishima, Tachibana and Minami is just as compelling as any of the monster mash. The drama is extremely old fashioned - in fact, it'd fit right into movies made shortly after the movie takes place - but it's well written, well acted, and packs enough of an emotional punch to earn it a pass for its contrivances, common places and manipulative low blows.

 The drama dovetails nicely into the action, which is thrilling, well filmed, and visceral in a way that no other Toho Kaiju film I've seen has ever been. Writer/Director/FX artist Takashi Yamazaki makes his incarnation of old Gojira vicious; even when it deploys its back-plates it feels like an act of violence, its regeneration powers seem painful and chaotic, and whenever it blasts its heat ray you can see it burning away its own skin. The monster lays to waste several ships and pretty much the whole of Ginza, kills a bunch of people as graphically as a PG-13 film will allow, and is an all-round public nuisance.
 It's particularly impressive because this incarnation of the monster does away with a lot of the modernizations to the face, with very clear lines that feel heavily influenced by traditional Japanese art as much as anything. Very expressive. Gojira also does that thing where he seems to be swimming like a duck, seemingly standing waist-deep in water that's much deeper than that. The movie tactically doesn't show the furious paddling that must be going on underneath, but I got a chuckle out of imagining it.

 And of course it's all going to symbolize something; It's impossible to not assign meaning to a character that was created as an attempt to work out a nation's post-nuclear collective trauma. I won't go into any specifics here, as parsing out the messaging is part of the fun, but the human story at the center of the movie fleshes out the movie's unexpectedly rich thematic heft.

 The movie runs over two hours, but there's so much happening and it's so well-paced it's never noticeable.
 Personally, I think I prefer Shin Godzilla, as wry satires are more my speed than earnest tearjerkers... but I have to concede this one is the superior movie and an absolute joy.

Troll

 There are a lot of faults in this movie, but a misleading title isn't one of them.

 Building a tunnel through some Norwegian mountain, the fools done delved too greedily and too deep and woke up a hundred-and-fifty-foot-tall troll right out of Nordic folklore. What ensues is basically a Kaiju movie, with many of the classic Kaiju tropes, but unfortunately a whole lot of Ronald Emmerich-isms, too. Oh well.

 Our protagonist Nora (Ine Marie Wilmann) is first shown as a teen, as her father Tobias (Gard Eidsvold) regales her with troll legends. Twenty years later she's a successful paleontologist (of the sort that magically knows where bones are buried, finding a whole T-Rex skull as if it ain't no thang), and is contracted as an expert to figure out just what burst out of that tunnel.

 As is usual in this sort of film, she's the only one who can make out the troll in a blurry film taken at the site (using the arcane arts of rewind and pause). She doesn't want to admit to herself what it is, but she convinces the government to go pick her estranged dad up, whom we learn believed in trolls too damn hard and became some sort of Troll conspiracy theorist; a classic Emmerich touch which rarely adds anything worthwhile to any of his movies; Here, at the hands of someone who isn't a complete hack, it mixes in some likeable melodrama as the father/daughter relationship is repaired. In case you're wondering, yes, he turns out to be correct about everything despite being portrayed as a complete kook. The Emmerich is strong in this one.

 Nora soon gathers a group of like-minded individuals around her - an aide to the PM (Kim Falck) and a military captain (Mads Pettersen) who breaks protocol for them and accrues enough faults during the film for a court martial and umpteen dishonorable discharges, but who's counting? Not the movie, that's for sure; it later has a general basically give the thumbs up to high treason.

 The ragtag group watches on as the troll wades through ineffective military attacks, put together a hilariously daft plan (that almost works!), get fired from the government commission to stop the menace, and then go at it on their lonesome... There are no worthwhile surprises at any point as the script follows the standard Hollywood playbook for this sort of thing pretty damn close, including a stirring speech at a last stand, a government cover-up, a stupid and counterproductive plan from the powers-that-be, a crowd-pleasing stick it to the man moment, etc. etc. A whole mess of dumb, populist bullshit.

 It's kind of fun, for a while at least, and it looks pretty good with crisp cinematography, pretty clear action, and thankfully, good use of the sheer scale of the big bad. The Norwegian landscapes and folklore, great effects work, game performances, and the sheer batshit craziness of the premise almost give this enough energy to make it worthwhile... but by the third act an accumulation of weapons-grade stupid bring it crashing down to the ground (among many other things, you can bet that it steals and uses the "hackers are magic" chestnut from Hollywood).

 But even before that point it's hard to shake the feeling of a sort of compound deja-vu, that you've seen this movie several times before. Not necessarily better done, but not worse enough as to validate this one.