The greatest action movie of the year
"Godzilla vs. Kong" is a crowd-pleasing, smash-'em-up monster flick and a straight-up action picture par excellence. It is a fairy tale and a science-fiction exploration film, a Western, a pro wrestling extravaganza, a conspiracy thriller, a Frankenstein movie, a heartwarming drama about animals and their human pals, and, in spots, a voluptuously wacky spectacle that plays as if the creation sequence in "The Tree of Life" had been subcontracted to the makers of "Yellow Submarine." It has rainstorms and explosions and into-the-wormhole light shows, giant mammals and reptiles and amphibians and insects and beasts that might be hybrids of one or more of the animal kingdoms, with some zombie, robot, or demon thrown in. It dares to dream big and be goofy and sincere as it does it. And yet, for an over-scaled and incident-packed tentpole flick, "Godzilla vs. Kong" stays light on its feet, like its co-leading man, a skyscraper-sized primate who bounds through jungles, tropical and concrete, like an astronaut skipping on the moon. It might be the best studio film so far this year. If it isn't, it's for damn sure the most fun.
Directed by Adam Wingard ("The Guest"), and written by Eric Pearson and Max Borenstein (who wrote the first film in the series), "Godzilla vs. Kong" continues this series' tradition of moving the master narrative about the Monarch project forward while letting each successive team of filmmakers do their own thing. The first entry in the series, "Godzilla," was "Close Encounters of the Kaiju Kind," unveiling its creatures in Steven Spielberg magic-and-wonder mode, and introducing the franchise's unifying premise: giant creatures older than the dinosaurs once lived on the earth's surface, feeding on residual radiation from the Big Bang, then moved inside as that energy ebbed, hibernating in the "Hollow Earth" until humans disturbed their slumber with nuclear testing, strip mining, and the like.
This premise was fused to a philosophy that stayed consistent from film to film. Something like: the kaiju don't hate us. They don't even mean us harm (though they do enjoy a human snack now and then). They're animals jockeying for dominance, over territory and each other. If we hadn't treated Earth like a toilet for centuries, they would've stayed beasts of song and legend, talked about but never seen.
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