Godzilla vs. Kong puts two of cinema’s oldest monsters in the same frame and lets them settle it. The movie runs 114 minutes, directed by Adam Wingard, and it knows exactly what it is selling. The tagline is “One will fall.” That is the promise. The film keeps it.
It is the fourth entry in Legendary’s Monsterverse, following Kong: Skull Island (2017) and Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019). It is also the 36th Godzilla film and the 12th King Kong film. That is a lot of history to carry into one fight, and the movie carries it lightly. Too lightly, in the end.
Trailer, via Warner Bros..
Kong in the Dome on Skull Island
The plot moves fast. Five years after the three-headed alien King Ghidorah woke the giant creatures called Titans and Godzilla defeated him, Kong lives inside a dome on Skull Island. A perpetual storm has closed around the island. Jia, the last Iwi native and the adopted daughter of Kong expert Ilene Andrews, visits him. Jia is deaf and signs.
Andrews worries the storm will swallow the island. She refuses to move Kong, because she fears Godzilla will come for him the moment he leaves.
That fear is correct, and the movie does not waste time proving it.
Bernie Hayes and the Apex Facility
Bernie Hayes works at Apex Cybernetics and hosts a Titan conspiracy podcast. He pulls data suggesting sinister activity at the company’s Pensacola facility. Then Godzilla attacks the facility, and Bernie sees a massive device giving off a beacon during the rampage.
Madison Russell listens to Bernie’s podcast. She recruits her friend Josh Valentine to look into why Godzilla is attacking. Madison is the daughter of Monarch scientists Mark Russell and the late Emma Russell. Millie Bobby Brown and Kyle Chandler reprise their roles from Godzilla: King of the Monsters.
Apex CEO Walter Simmons brings in Nathan Lind, a former Monarch scientist and Hollow Earth theorist, to lead a search for a power source in the Hollow Earth. Lind hesitates. His brother died on an earlier expedition there, killed by a strong reverse-gravitational effect. Walter changes his mind by revealing that Apex has built HEAVs — Hollow Earth Anti-gravitational Vehicles — craft that can survive the gravity field.
Lind talks Andrews into letting Kong guide the mission through an entrance in Antarctica. Lind, Andrews, and an Apex team under Walter’s daughter Maia board a barge escorted by the US Navy, with Kong sedated and restrained. Godzilla hits the convoy and beats Kong. The ships trick him into thinking they are destroyed, and he leaves.
The Long Writers’ Room Behind the Script
Legendary announced the project in October 2015, when it declared plans for a shared cinematic universe between Godzilla and King Kong. The writers’ room came together in March 2017. Wingard was named director in May 2017.
Principal photography started in November 2018 in Hawaii, Australia, and Hong Kong, and wrapped in April 2019. The film was delayed from a November 2020 release date because of the COVID-19 pandemic. It opened internationally on March 24, 2021.
The screenplay credits run long: Michael Dougherty, Max Borenstein, Zach Shields, Terry Rossio, Eric Pearson. Five names for a movie whose best scenes have almost no dialogue. That is not a coincidence.
Skarsgård, Hall and the Human Cast
Alexander Skarsgård plays Nathan Lind, a Monarch geologist and chief cartographer. Skarsgård called him a reluctant hero who is “not an alpha, bad-ass” and “thrown into this very dangerous situation and is definitely not equipped for it.” He described Nathan as an homage to 1980s films like Indiana Jones, Romancing the Stone, Lethal Weapon, and Die Hard. He researched the Hollow Earth and learned American Sign Language to communicate with Kaylee Hottle, who plays Jia.
Rebecca Hall plays Ilene Andrews, a Monarch anthropological linguist and Jia’s adoptive mother. Hall called Ilene “the Jane Goodall of Kong.” Brian Tyree Henry plays Bernie Hayes, the Apex technician turned whistleblower. Demián Bichir plays Walter Simmons. Eiza González plays Maia Simmons. Shun Oguri plays Ren Serizawa, in his Hollywood debut. Lance Reddick plays Guillermin. Hakeem Kae-Kazim plays Admiral Wilcox.
Brown described the film as a coming of age story for Madison, saying the character has “grown-up” and become more “independent” since the last film. Producer Alex Garcia called Madison the “advocate for Godzilla in this film,” who tries to “vindicate” him.
That is a strong cast. The movie gives most of them a corridor to stand in and a line to say before the next fight starts.
The Fights Carry the Film
Here is the thing about Godzilla vs. Kong: the human plot is not a story, it is a delivery system. Apex wants a power source for a secret weapon meant to stop Godzilla’s attacks. Monarch wants Kong somewhere the storm cannot reach him. Madison wants to prove Godzilla has a reason. Every one of those threads exists to move a creature from one place to another so it can hit something.
When the creatures hit something, the movie works. Wingard shoots the battles with weight and clarity. Kong’s size reads against ships and buildings. Godzilla’s size reads against Kong. The Hong Kong setting, shot on location and then dressed with neon, gives the final act a scale the rest of the film does not earn.
The Hollow Earth sequence is the best idea in the movie and the least developed. A whole world under the crust, with reverse gravity, and the film treats it as a hallway.
A Conspiracy Thread That Goes Slack
The conspiracy thread is where Godzilla vs. Kong loses its footing. Madison, Josh, and Bernie break into Apex to find out what the company is hiding, and the answer is a device in a room. The movie spends a long middle stretch on a mystery whose solution the audience guessed from the poster.
Bernie is the symptom. Henry plays him with real comic timing, but the script hands him podcast-host rants instead of scenes. He exists to say out loud what the film should be showing.
The film also inherits a problem it cannot solve. Godzilla: King of the Monsters ended with Godzilla as the planet’s defender. Godzilla vs. Kong needs him to be a threat for an hour, so it makes his attacks mysterious and lets the audience wait. That is a stall, not a story.
The 5.9 Score and What It Measures
The 5.9 of 10 is the right number, and it is a split verdict. As a monster movie, Godzilla vs. Kong delivers: two icons, clear staging, a runtime of 114 minutes that never drags during a fight. As a film, it is a vehicle with a passenger problem. The humans are casting, not characters.
The detail that matters most is the release date. This was a pandemic-era theatrical release, and it was built to be seen in a room full of strangers. That context explains the movie’s shape better than any script note. It is a crowd film, and it was denied its crowd.
The detail that matters least is the convoluted Apex scheme. Strip it out and the film loses nothing.
What is worth watching is Kong. The Monsterverse has never figured out what to do with Godzilla beyond making him large and angry, but Kong gets a home, a storm, a child who signs to him, and a reason to leave. That is more interior life than any other Titan in the franchise has been given. The movie knows it, which is why the ending goes where it goes.
Godzilla vs. Kong is not a good movie. It is a good fight with a movie attached, and it is honest about which half it cares about.
Godzilla vs. Kong: 5.9 of 10
The Numbers
- Title: Godzilla vs. Kong (2021)
- Director: Adam Wingard
- Runtime: 114 minutes
- Score: 5.9 of 10
- Franchise position: Fourth Monsterverse film; 36th Godzilla film; 12th King Kong film
- International release: March 24, 2021
- Original release date: November 2020, pushed back because of the COVID-19 pandemic
- Principal photography: November 2018 to April 2019, in Hawaii, Australia, and Hong Kong
- Tagline: “One will fall.”
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