Godzilla vs. Kong had the promise to restore Legendary Picture's MonsterVerse to its full glory. And by "full glory," we're speaking of the good-but-not-great Kong: Skull Island (2017). "Quality" is a very relative term with this series. This whole Godzilla revival started off pretty shaky with the 2014 reboot, which was fairly solid but pretty forgettable. The 1973-set Skull Island re-introduced us to King Kong with a great ensemble cast and a lot of humor. Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) was an unwatchable mess of spectacular visual sequences paired with emotionless, perfunctory "plot" (and not a lot of it).
So now the two titans of monster-dom meet in Godzilla vs. Kong, but instead of bringing back the loopy charm of Skull Island we get more endless F/X nonsense. Adam Wingard directed it. His work includes a lot of much smaller-scale horror and thriller stuff, scrappy stuff like You're Next (2011) and The Guest (2014). Maybe he should've stuck with that type of thing. Some of the cast from King of the Monsters is back, including Millie Bobby Brown (Stranger Things) and Kyle Chandler. It hardly matters, because the human cast is completely superfluous here.
We see Kong briefly living his own Truman Show, trapped and under observation under a sky-like dome. Eventually this leads to Kong visiting a place called "Hollow Earth," which is apparently an actual theory held as fact by some folks in real life. There's a portal at Antarctica that leads to a secret landscape where gravity is inverted. Something like that. They take Kong there, which is apparently where the giant ape hails from, to wait out a big blowout battle between him and Godzilla. Godzilla has been wreaking havoc on the Apex Cybernetics facility.
I mean, this is brain-bruisingly irrelevant stuff. Yes, there is a nominal plot. Yes, there are human cast members. No, there's likely not a soul alive who demands anything more from these elements than the scant amount presented. Or at least that's what the film's producers seem to believe. People went to see it because it was nice to have a mega-budget action and F/X movie after the long pandemic-induced cinematic drought. But no one will remember this or be able to tell it apart from Godzilla: King of the Monsters. I guess the F/X are good? I'm not sure, looks like a video game to me (and a very boring one, at that). I could barely drag myself through to the conclusion but this will satisfy some folks with undemanding taste.
Warner Bros. Home Entertainment's Blu-ray has a nice assortment of supplements. I couldn't bring myself to even sample the Adam Wingard director's commentary, but it's here. There's also no less than ten featurettes, each under ten minutes but totaling about 72 minutes of additional content.
So now the two titans of monster-dom meet in Godzilla vs. Kong, but instead of bringing back the loopy charm of Skull Island we get more endless F/X nonsense. Adam Wingard directed it. His work includes a lot of much smaller-scale horror and thriller stuff, scrappy stuff like You're Next (2011) and The Guest (2014). Maybe he should've stuck with that type of thing. Some of the cast from King of the Monsters is back, including Millie Bobby Brown (Stranger Things) and Kyle Chandler. It hardly matters, because the human cast is completely superfluous here.
We see Kong briefly living his own Truman Show, trapped and under observation under a sky-like dome. Eventually this leads to Kong visiting a place called "Hollow Earth," which is apparently an actual theory held as fact by some folks in real life. There's a portal at Antarctica that leads to a secret landscape where gravity is inverted. Something like that. They take Kong there, which is apparently where the giant ape hails from, to wait out a big blowout battle between him and Godzilla. Godzilla has been wreaking havoc on the Apex Cybernetics facility.
I mean, this is brain-bruisingly irrelevant stuff. Yes, there is a nominal plot. Yes, there are human cast members. No, there's likely not a soul alive who demands anything more from these elements than the scant amount presented. Or at least that's what the film's producers seem to believe. People went to see it because it was nice to have a mega-budget action and F/X movie after the long pandemic-induced cinematic drought. But no one will remember this or be able to tell it apart from Godzilla: King of the Monsters. I guess the F/X are good? I'm not sure, looks like a video game to me (and a very boring one, at that). I could barely drag myself through to the conclusion but this will satisfy some folks with undemanding taste.
Warner Bros. Home Entertainment's Blu-ray has a nice assortment of supplements. I couldn't bring myself to even sample the Adam Wingard director's commentary, but it's here. There's also no less than ten featurettes, each under ten minutes but totaling about 72 minutes of additional content.
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