Director: Adam Wingard
Year: 2024
Length: 115 minutes
The Gist:
Kong is living his new life in the Hollow Earth. He has a treaty with Godzilla. Godzilla gets the surface world, Kong gets the underground. Monarch watches all. To what end is never really established. They're under pressure from external governments to destroy the Titans rather than just watch them. But Monarch know's we've been knocked down a peg on the food chain.
Kong is battered after fight with a pack of Hollow Earth ... wolf-ish-things. He has a toothache and returns to the surface so Monarch can take care of it. He seems to understand they're there to help him. Trapper (Dan Stevens) is the free-spirited "vet" that takes care of it.
Meanwhile, Jia (Kaylee Hottle), the sole survivor of the Iwi tribe of Skull Island is having a hard time adjusting to day-to-day life at the Monarch schools (it annoys me that we get hints of this Monarch-centric world but there's no exploration of it) but she's also receiving visions and falling into fugue states. She worries about her mental health. Her adoptive mother, Dr. Ilene Andrews (Rebecca Hall), worries too, only to discover that the pattern Jia draws in her fugue states resembles the seismic readings she's been getting from Hollow Earth. She goes to Titan conspiracy podcaster Bernie Hayes (Brian Tyree Henry) for help because the rest of Monarch just shrugs it off as coincidence. His condition for helping is a trip to Hollow Earth.
So when he discovers that both the image Jia is drawing and the seismic readings are a distress call from Hollow Earth, a small team (consisting of Ilene, Trapper, Jia, Bernie and their redshirt pilot) go to investigate.
Meanwhile Kong has encountered other giant apes for the first time and they attack him. But he is Kong and they are not. The larger ones flee, but the child ape Kong hangs onto, and forces the child (a pesky little runt) to take him to the rest of the apes.
As Kong encounters what remains of the society he is descended from, a community of apes enslaved by the Scar King as they search for an escape to the surface (doesn't seem that hard, mind) the humans (less their redshift) discover a whole other tribe of Hollow Earth Iwi. They tell of the war the Skar King led against Godzilla, and his desire to rule the surface. Jia is the prophesied last of Skull Island who will come and awaken Mothra, who will help Godzilla in defeating this threat against the planet.
Kong fights the Skar King, and his slave masters, and the giant ice-breathing lizard he has power over. Kong loses and flees only with his life. His hand is mangled, but Monarch has, conveniently, a power glove from an abandoned mech suit ready for Kong to help him both heal and fight better.
Meanwhile, Godzilla, barely in the picture, has absorbed the nuclear radiation of a French power station, and has gone up against the dragon Tiamat and stolen its home in the antarctic where the solar radiation is most strongest.
Kong goes to the surface and with Mothra's intervention, enlists Godzilla into helping defeat the Skar King. Middle Earth fight. Our heroic trio prevails. Godzilla returns to his nest in the Colosseum in Rome for a catnap, Kong has the family he's been searching for, and I guess the humans are going to just leave the Iwi in peace and never speak of it again (Bernie's been taking video this whole time, but Trapper gives him a warning of sharing it...there's not even a concluding moment of Bernie destroying his recordings or anything.).
Godzilla, Friend or Foe:
Friend
The Samesies:
Like the Godzilla films of old, there's a human story here that matters less and less and less as the story goes on, and, frankly, doesn't really matter a whole lot to begin with. But that's also typical of Godzilla films. The human story is often time-biding padding until we get to the monster fights.
The difference here from old Godzilla is, well, the samesies as Godzilla vs Kong, where the film's main character is Kong, and we do spend a lot of time with. We follow Kong around as he traverses the Hollow Earth and its dangers. Like the previous Kong movies in this Monsterverse series, he is such a soulful character and it's hard not to be emotionally invested in him.
Godzilla films have, a number of times now, given Godzilla a junior version for him to adopt into his life. For the first time, Kong is the recipient of a junior giant ape to dote over... or to grab by the leg and swing around like a cudgel(!). If you thought from the trailer that this little doe-eyed red-furred ape would be a totes dorbs aww-meme generator, Wingard instead makes him a little shitheel scamp that betrays Kong a number of times over. But we learn the kid is traumatized from the environment he grew up in, and Kong showing him a kindness or two does eventually sway the brat.
In my watchings of the Godzillas these past few months, Mothra has emerged as perhaps my favourite kaiju, if not necessarily the creature herself, but for all the trappings around her. Her native worshippers, the fariy twin Shobijin, the glorious Masura song they sing, the way they set up Mothra as protector of the Earth only for her to basically be defeated by almost any threat and explode into stardust... but to have larval offspring also called Mothra. There's a whole twisted world to her that I really enjoy. And by dovetailing Kong's native tribe, the Iwi, into Mothra's, it's a blending I like. But pageantry around Mothra this time is not up to standards. There's no song, nor larvae (that was already done in King of the Monsters, so I get it), and Mothra doesn't explode for a change. So, some losses, but a win.
It's not a net positive, but the surface fights between the Titans, in various cities, feels much like the Toho Godzilla films, where the world feels constructed for the purpose of being torn down. It doesn't feel like the real world even with the occasional composited shot of people fleeing. We're such a long way now from Gareth Edwards' mastery of feeling the awe of monsters fighting overhead. But the brawls do feel like the CGI version of the suitmation fights. They're a lot more elaborate in their physicality and camera angles, the the sensation is just the same.
The Differences:
It's weird to say, but Hollow Earth as an environment, is just setting. It's no longer treated with much majesty and as such it loses so much of its "wow" factor. We got a lot of "wow" factor out of GvK and even Monarch:Legacy of Monsters but we don't get much of that here. Bernie has a few bulging eye moments but that's about it. In observing this film largely through Kong as our POV character, we lose the sense of scale. Likewise, leaving the surface for much of the film, there's no structures in Hollow Earth for us to get scale comparisons to.
The Legendary Monsterverse has spent four films and a 10-episode TV series building up Monarch, only for it to be relegated very much into the background of this story. I guess they're just leaving any intrigue around the organization, or the politics of its existence to the TV show, should it return. Which is a shame because it's really what this Monsterverse is built around, and it should be our guide through this. I don't dislike that Wingard and the writing team have fleshed Kong out over two movies the way they have...these two pictures really do fit nicely together as a duology. But the title of these films isn't Kong: Homecoming and Kong: No Way Home, but Godzilla vs/x Kong, and the other half of that title has such little presence and purpose other than force of nature. In a way it's fitting as we often only get a 15 minutes of Godzilla in any given film, but when we do the focus is squarely on the King, and here, he's a sideshow.
Anyone worth caring about?
Ilene and Jia are the two essential holdovers from the prior film. It's a good choice. Rebecca Hall has such a way of drawing the audience into her performance. She's able to trigger a sympathetic nerve like few other actors can, without ever being cloying about it. Part of that comes from her relationship with Jia. Having a deaf daughter means the communication is largely silent and expression conveys so much more. And Kaylee Hottle, for these two films comprising the bulk of her acting career, has been great in both of them. An absolutely endearing performer who is able to convey depths with just expression.
This film is so deep into quiet communication... Ilene and Jia, the telepathic Iwa people, the apes, Jia and Kong, Kong and Godzilla, Mothra and everyone. It's all very quietly emotive, which is what makes the dialogue so hard to digest. Like Trapper isn't really *that* annoying a character, except everyone else is saying so much without saying anything that his ballyhoo cries are just... a lot. And then there's Bernie.
I've loved or liked every Brian Tyree Henry performance I've seen. Except this one. Bernie is a conspiracy nut who is pretty much correct about most of what he's gone nutty over, but he's a caricature in these two films. He doesn't seem like a real person. And as "comic relief" in this film in particular, almost every jokey line falls incredibly flat. Plus, his character, beyond the initial discovery of the call for help, is useless. Much like the previous film, Bernie contributes one thing, then just takes up oxygen in the film. And it drove me nuts that Bernie, an established podcaster, kept going on and on about his blog.
The Message:
erm...home is where the heart is? I dunno. It's not that kind of movie.
Rating (out of 5 Zs): ZZz
I would say I enjoyed this as much as I enjoyed GvK and yet, the more I think about it, the less impressed I get. I'm not deep in the weeds on it, but I'm annoyed that I can't seem to reconcile the Hollow Earth of King of the Monsters, GvK, Monarch:LoM and this film. That may be on me, but I don't think so. I just don't think the writers/producers care enough about continuity/consistency.
The diminished role of both Godzilla and Monarch are definitely detractors for me, but, and I need to be clear, I love the ape stuff. Absolutely love it. Is it what I wanted to see out a a Kaiju movie? Not really. Or at all. We already have a Planet of the Apes movie coming out this year from the same studio. Why did we need another one, just plus-sized?
If these Legendary Monsterverse films do continue, the next time better be space aliens, Gigan and Megalon, with Godzilla in front, recruiting Kong on the back-side.
I did want to call out that I really enjoyed the Godzilla/Kong fights in Egypt. But they couldn't have worked the pyramids into Titan lore somehow? Through the Iwi at least? Sigh.
Sleepytime Factor:
None actually. I had a pretty good time.
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