There were a few reasons why I was looking forward to checking out “Godzilla vs. Kong.”
For starters, 2017’s “Kong: Skull Island” was legitimately pretty damn fun to watch and gave a great cast the opportunity to ham it up against some beautiful locations and solid effects work.
Full disclosure: I have not seen the 2014 “Godzilla” reboot nor its 2019 sequel, “Godzilla: King of the Monsters,” but when I saw that Adam Wingard had been secured to direct this new battle-centric sequel, my interest level piqued. His 2011 home-invasion thriller “You’re Next” is one of my favorite genre films in recent memory, so I was interested to see what he would do with two of the most legendary cinematic monsters of all time.
It’s unlikely that any filmmaker could have given this lackluster effort the boost it needed as the completely nonsensical storyline and laughable dialogue serve strictly to give the people what they think they want (in this case, lots of shit exploding, crumbling, and breaking).
The meager plot involves testing out the Hollow Earth theory and trying to send Kong straight to Hong Kong to meet Godzilla through a little pitstop at a portal in Antartica.
Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t expecting Shakespeare and fully admit that this is exactly the type of experience that is best suited for the biggest screen possible. Even with an admittedly beautiful 4K Dolby Vision transfer in my living room, the visual effects fly past on screen at such a frenetic pace that I often could barely keep track of what was happening.
Would an immersive IMAX screening have made a difference? For me, probably not, but if you just can’t get enough of monsters screaming at each other over holes in the Earth and/or large bodies of water, this is the movie for you!
Despite also being available for home viewing, the movie did break a pandemic-era box office record. It scored nearly $50 million at domestic theaters and is already on the cusp of $300 million globally. That virtually guarantees we haven’t seen the last of these massive monsters on film.
“Godzilla vs. Kong” is in theaters now and streaming free for HBO Max subscribers through April 30.
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