Goddamn! It’s Godzilla!

...and Kong!

Appetizers

I promised myself that I wasn’t going write anything about “Justice League: the Snyder Cut”. I’ve discussed it and aired too many complaints, bile, and snark from Facebook to High Heaven. However, I did realize that another kind of loud and stupid was drawing me.

I am and have been since a wee child, a huge fan of Godzilla and his simian rival. I first saw the 1933 original while eating a TV dinner, being baby sat, if memory serves by my brother and his first wife. By this time, I had already seen the Universal monster classics (my mother was surprisingly supportive of my fascination with film in general and monster movies in particular) but “King Kong” was something else.

It wasn’t just the stop-motion special effects that grabbed me. One of my first movie going experiences was a re-release of “Jason and the Argonauts” and I was convinced that stop-motion is the way we should all move. Okay, I wasn’t but gee whiz, that was a swell flick. But “Kong” was more. I responded to the characters (I’m thinking I was around 9 or 10 at the time) and my heart broke as those bastards unloaded lead on our hero atop the Empire State Building. I was ripshit when Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong) hammily proclaimed, “‘twas beauty killed the beast”! Fuck you, Denham! What did Kong ever do to you, you rat bastard! It was enough to make me throw my Swanson’s TV dinner at the set.

Godzilla was a different matter. I think I had actually seen the Raymond Burr version of “Gojira” a couple of years earlier and remember us kids in the neighborhood taking bets on who would win in “King Kong vs. Godzilla”, a movie that I don’t think any of us were going to be able to see. I didn’t until I was a preteen. I got the sense that Godzilla was of a kind of lethal force that other film creatures could never match. He wasn’t bad. I got that. No more so than Kong and I recognized in his later days that he was downright benevolent.

Well, I think he's cute...

He was also a fascinatingly designed creature. I built all the Aurora brand monster models available and while my favorite was the Creature from the Black Lagoon, Godzilla was a very close second. But I had little interest in most of his films. I loved Mothra, Ghidorah, Rodan, et al., and was an early adapter of Japanese pop culture in the form of Gigantor, Ultraman, Speed Racer, and Astro-Boy, but I thought the later Godzilla films were silly (what was my benchmark for silly I have no idea), and I had no use for Minilla, Godzilla’s son. What a useless piece of latex that kid was.

While I rewatched Cooper’s “Kong” more times than I can count, caught the restored version in the early seventies, avoided the DeLaurentis version but loved Peter Jackson’s, I only saw the Burr “Godzilla” a couple of times and endured Emmerich’s 1998 update grudgingly. God, it was awful. I thought there was a place for Godzilla to be handled reasonably well in the new Jurassic World of storytelling, but that wasn’t it.

A few years later, I caught up with Godzilla in “Godzilla - The Final Wars" (2004) thanks to my friend Mark Hiznay. Loved it! It’s a sly flick and highly recommended. Bitchin’ soundtrack, to boot (R.I.P., Keith Emerson).

Around the same time, “Gojira” found a restored release in the U.S. as it was seen in Japan and it devastated me. The nuclear metaphors were spot on and the suffering in the film felt genuine, a thinly veiled representation of what the firebombing of Tokyo and the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki must have been like. This was not a kids’ movie.

When Gareth Edwards’ version was announced, I rewatched “Gojira” again and wondered what a 21st century American filmmaker could bring to the tale. Turns out, not a lot. Oh, sure, there were great - and I mean great - special effects and there were actors who existed solely for exposition and to either die or say or do heroic things. Thematically, I guess there’s something to pick at, but mostly, it was a Saturday morning matinee flick pumped up to epic proportions on steroids. I saw it, enjoyed it, and promptly forgot about it.

“Kong: Skull Island” came out and I liked it, as well. Better script, a more cohesive plot than these things usually get, and an ace cast went a long way to doing something different with King Kong. It’s not my Kong. There’s no Ann Darrow for him to fall in love with, but Brie Larson shares a moment that calls back to that relationship for a beat or two and that was fine. The overall conceit of “Apocalypse Now” meets King Kong isn’t bad. Setting it in the early aftermath of the Vietnam War was shrewd and it really didn’t feel like the subplot of the Monarch Corporation hunting for MUTOs was necessarily setting up the movie to be shoehorned into a series. “Kong: Skull Island” stood on its own. Kudos, then, for that.

I left the theater and forgot about it.

A couple of years ago, “Godzilla: King of the Monsters” came out. I didn’t see it. Kyle Chandler, Vera Farmiga, and Millie Bobby Brown are all fine actors and Michael Dougherty is a more than capable director but I had to say I was kind of done with the idea. Friends who had seen it seemed lukewarm to it and I put it aside as inessential.

Then “Kong vs. Godzilla” was announced and I thought, well, why not? I decided to revisit Legendary’s entries in their Monsterverse and caught “Godzilla: King of the Monsters” and feel better equipped to not have to pay too much attention.

Oh, about “Godzilla: King of the Monsters”? Not bad. I liked it. I may actually like the characters more, but they’re still just fodder for exposition and demise. As I write this, I have not seen “Godzilla vs. Kong”; that happens tonight. Do I have expectations? No. I do not.

All of these movies exist to generate some sense of awe, play with fairy tales, and maybe, I don’t know, draw up analogies about our environmental crises, humanity’s hubris, and so on. Ultimately, though, they’re kiddie rides, entertainments that draw in the eye and provide some kind of approximation to being in the presence of critters the size of skyscrapers.

There are certainly “cool” moments, as when Godzilla goes fully nuclear in “King of the Monsters” or when Kong is fighting with and then eating the swamp squid in “Skull Island”. I enjoy the motion capture and the amount of work invested in the stars of the film to show emotions. Kong is given much more to do than Godzilla in that department, but the giants are only given slightly less range of expression than their human counterparts.

I think all these films are only around two hours long, which makes them far more easy to bear than Snyder’s unending exercise in tedium. There’s still so much fat on them, though, that they could shave off 20 to 30 minutes and I don’t think anyone would notice. The movies might even gain something in impact.

All of this is also to say that I have hardly watched anything of substance lately. I watched “Match Point” the other night and while Woody Allen might well be an atrocious person, he made a well-crafted thriller. I was impressed that he also let Jonathan Rhys Meyers’ Chris Wilton walk and that it read as not glib. He committed two murders and is going to move on from it. But you get the feeling it will eat him alive or he’ll succumb to some kind of aberrant behavior or he’ll eventually crack. After all, the movie introduces him reading “Crime and Punishment” and as hammy as that foreshadowing might sound, it actually rather works.

In any case, it was refreshing to watch something where there was no great special effects, people spoke in dialogue that sounds like the way people talk, and there were long stretches of quiet that moved the narrative along as opposed to things blowing up or monsters vomiting nuclear breath at each other. It was lovely.

“Godzilla vs. Kong”: The Main Meal

We start with “The Truman Show” starring King Kong as Jim Carrey. The fine opening graphics catch us up, but something tells me there’s more exposition to come! Yippee? There's also a little girl who can communicate with Kong. Cool, I suppose.

Cut to Brian Tyree Henry as Bernie Hayes a podcaster talking about big trouble coming.

Cut to the Apex Cybernetics, whose CEO Walter Simmons (replete with Demián Bichir looking like a real wrung out Tony Stark) is up to no good, I guess.

It’s not long before we cut to the big lizardy dragon type guy. He seems pissed off about something and attacks Pensacola (well? Is that the worst thing?) Somewhere amongst the jump cuts we see what Apex is up to: there’s a MechaGodzilla!

Maddie Russell is a Hayes fan and she’s taking to heart what he’s saying and bolts to tell her dad Mark (our hero from “Godzilla: King of the Monsters”, Kyle Chandler) and frankly, I was barely paying attention. In the meantime, Walter Simmons is trying to recruit Nathan Lind, a game (aren’t all actors in these things game? I mean, in one meaning of the word or another) Alexander Skarsgård.

Oh. Right. I guess we need to get back to Kong for a bit. Apparently, Monarch Apex...Monarch, Apex...feh... is keeping him “safe” from Godzilla on the premise that the planet can’t sustain two apex predators but they also know that the current arrangement can’t last. Rebecca Hall’s Ilene Andrews seems to be the lead scientist on this Skull Island refuge and we have a Kong whisperer in the form of Kaylee Hottle as Jia. She is a fine little actor whose family spans four generations of deaf people. Anyway, she’s there no doubt, to provide a couple of plot points. I’m not going to worry about them (or her – she’ll be fine).

Eiza González as Maya Simmons (dad’s devious daughter with an unknown agenda?) shows up in some capacity to diss Nathan Lind who’s doing something in all this. It’s all kind of stupid and pokey pretending to be tense and exciting. All we know and all we need to know is that Kong is in chains, pissed off and sad and may suspect that something’s up (as Apex seems planning to leave him off at Antarctica at an entry point to the “hollow Earth”).

In the meantime, Bernie and Maddie have finally met and both agree that Apex is up to no good and Godzilla wasn’t attacking Pensacola but going after Apex (which makes sense, I guess). And they have a Third Musketeer! Josh Valentine (Julian Dennison – another fine performer – check out “Deadpool 2”) and the plucky little gang is going to follow leads and go into the Apex site.

In a movie filled with meantimes, we get our first rock-em-sock-em-Kaiju battle en route to the South Pole. Then back to the Scooby Gang where we find Apex is breeding Skull Crawlers (see “Kong: Skull Island”) and they find themselves on their way to Hong Kong (why? I don’t know; ask me how much I should care) when we cut to a fleet of helicopters flying a sedated Kong to a hole in the Pole. Make of that whatever you want. They drop him off and then they split.  He seems resigned on waking to realize that humans are shit. Jia is there to reassure him that he’s near “home” (his old home from millenia past) and naturally, Lind is starting to voice doubts about Jia’s communicating with Kong. Kong doesn’t totally buy the Return to Home scenario, so Lind cajoles Ilene to tell Jia to tell Kong that there may be others like him down there. She does and Kong expresses a bit of ire.  And for good reason: he’s really just being used to lead these crummy humans to the hollow Earth for their own purposes (i.e., to find more creatures like Kong and ‘Zilla and either a.) preserve them or b.) destroy them, or so one assumes).

It’s not long before Kong encounters some flying critter and makes short work of it (and has a snack off its head, as well) and we get to see a whole bunch more.

Not only is there a whole nifty underground realm down there, but gravity acts weird, with floating rocks and a sculpture of a hand??? Whatev.

Another meanwhile and My Three Homies have arrived at Apex in Hong Kong. They have entered a facility of some sort where they are privileged to witness the rise of the MechaGodzilla (controlled by Ren Serizawa played by Shun Oguri, the son of Dr. Ishiro Serizawa who died in “Godzilla: King of the Monsters”). The Mecha pretty much filets and turns into soup a Skull Crawler as the earnest trio head back to the craft they came in on.

Meanwhile number whatever in this series, Kong makes his way back to – yes, his family’s home. There’s a battle axe and a throne waiting for him. Odd that all of that seems familiar, but he wasn't sure where he was on his way there...How is that the family's home when he was king of Skull Island and his parents were killed there when he was a child in the earlier film? I know, I know; don't look for continuity or consistency. In films like this, that can make you nuts.

I should mention here that in keeping with the other movies in the series, the visuals are arresting. I can and will make fun of these idiot flicks, but I will absolutely stand by them as visually stunning. I’d happily watch them (and kind of do) for just the visuals.

I don’t quite get what the relationship is between the Godzilla and Kong’s charging use of Hollow Earth energy is (don’t ask, but it’s a thing), but it’s not long before we discover that the connection is direct: in Hong Kong, Godzilla blasts a hole in the earth that – goes directly to where Kong is in hollow Earth. Not sure the geography maps out, but there you are. Kong is even more pissed, crushes the villainous Maya Simmons who was trying to harness the energy source in Hollow Earth to jumpstart the Mecha some more at Apex. How? Silly! By downloading the energy itself via a file transfer to her dad’s lab, of course! It’s what all the cool kids are doing!

A pissed off Kong shows up in the Hong of the same name and he and Beast with Atomic Breath proceed to beat the stuffing out of each other. Godzilla gets the upper hand with that breath of his as Kong climbs a building (finally! A call-back everyone would get!) to retrieve his axe and somehow knocks Godzilla out with it (it reached critical mass before it could split Godzilla’s skull?)

Anyway, Daddy Simmons’ security detail has found our Intrepid Trio, explains his plan, and then it’s back to Kong and the G-dragon beating each other stupid.  Holy shit, Godzilla’s stomping all over Kong. Pretty funny, though: they actually get to yelling at each other. Apparently, it’s enough for Godzilla to beat the bejesus out of Kong and just walk away (guess who is someone’s beyotch now?)

Godzilla’s day is not over, though. Simmons is going to release the Mecha. It may be controlled by Serizawa, but it’s power source is the DNA from one of the heads of Ghidorah. Consequently, Serizawa’s overridden and the Mecha shows up to deliver his beatdown on our scale-covered champion. Shit, he can even launch missles! Oh, hell! He’s one mean Godzilla beatin’ machine.

On another side of the city, Kong is dying, of course, so they need a charge strong enough to start his heart. Lind uses one of the energy cores from one of the little HEAV crafts to charge the craft and do Kong-size CPR. Godzilla sustains a big blast from his Mecha version and goes down. Lind seemingly sacrifices himself so Kong can live and Jia says hi to Kong, tells him Godzilla’s not the enemy and points out that the Mecha is. She convinces the big guy to engage. Looks like he must have dislocated his soldier (which he fixes by slamming it into a building, as one does.)

Kong goes ape on the Mecha and he and Godzilla tag-team the shiny bitch. He grabs his battle axe and just as the Mecha is about to drill him, Josh causes a power glitch (don't ask) from the satellite pick-up so Kong can chop the Mecha down to size. I am not sorry for any of the puns or hacky references I’ve just made.

Kong lies back in one of those “I’m too old for this shit” kind of collapses. Turns out Nathan’s alive. Mark finds Maddie and all is well with the world. There’s a ton of hacky-as-my-previous-hacky-puns dialog, and we see Godzilla and Kong yell at each other one more time before Zilla heads back into the bay. Kong? Back to Hollow Earth.

Dessert? Anyone?

Oh, god, this was a slog and it was under two hours. Once again, it’s the critters and their fightin’ that make whatever in the film works work. The humans? I just don’t care. Admittedly, I felt the most affinity for the cast in “Kong: Skull Island” but jay-zus this sort of stuff numbs me after a bit.

Again, as stated earlier (and by others elsewhere), the early Godzilla films and the first “King Kong” were fables fabulously told. Cautionary and romantic as required by the stories being told, they were also examples of economical storytelling and how a movie need not suck time and oxygen from your life. “Godzilla vs. Kong” is actually under two hours long; but it felt interminable.

Why? Again, setting aside the inanity of the premises anyway (and people in tights that can shoot energy beams from their eyes, faster than light travel, and all the rest are genuinely inane in most circumstances), we go along with them for fun. However, fun shouldn’t be comprised of lapses in pace, or undue lingering on poorly written characters that can’t be fleshed out because their cadavers have none on their bones to begin with.

Out of this whole series, if I tout the first Kong entry over the other three, it’s because some care was taken to present characters with motivations that made some kind of sense, and led to conclusions of story arcs that supported and felt organic within the overarching structure. In the remaining three films, well, no. And that’s a problem for the larger stories.

You don’t need to have a Mamet-level script for a creature feature to succeed. But you need to have characters that evince some internality to relate to. Or take a page from Edwards’ 2014 “Godzilla” and just use the cardboard cut-outs sparingly. Apologies to Elizabeth Olsen and Aaron Taylor-Johnson (not to mention Juliette Binoche and Bryan Cranston), but there were no people there. There didn’t need to be. The Big Guy was all the character you needed and his MUTO antagonists were fine accompaniment.

Lastly, given that this is the second major HBO flick to premiere within a month, how did this blockbuster measure up against “Just This Leak” (sorry, I just don’t want to give it any air)? Despite not having much in the way of characters, I’d still take “Godzilla vs. Kong” over Snyder’s cinematic miscarriage any day of the week. At least, the performers here were able to let some of their innate charm show through and there were moments of genuine wonder in the package that really were far more exciting than anything in the Four Hour Bloat.

However, I think I’m done with the Big, Loud, and Stupid for awhile. I need a dose of Bergman, Godard, or Tarkovsky. I’ve not written much on this blog because Myanmar has been on my mind on my other platform and because, frankly, there are times when it’s nice to read or write or paint as opposed to watch.

That said, I still have some posts coming up that I’m researching and now that I have a lot of mindless action done with, I can get back to Hitchcock in the 30s and catch up with some more recent work that doesn’t involve large massive CGI critters or an overabundance of really stupid music trying to make something ridiculous feel like it’s more than that. (I may need to do something about musical cues and soundtracks at some point down the line, but not anytime soon.)