Where do they go from here, sequel-wise? Is it too much to hope for an appearance of the Controller from Planet X? Wrap-around sunglasses are overdue for a comeback.
Also, Kong jumped off the exploding carrier in slow motion, ala John McLane in Die Hard
Something positive:
I think this movie was totally appropriate for kids. I see that it is PG-13, but other than ripping a monster’s head off and some mild-monster-violence, I thought the whole thing was super clean cut and family appropriate.
I’m surprised they didn’t secure a PG rating, but I think studios prefer PG-13 as that is a big draw for many people.
My memory is not perfect, but it is one of the cleanest movies I’ve seen from a big studio in awhile. Was there anything objectionable in the movie?
Serious question.
Who was the “good guy”? Kong or Godzilla? Who are we rooting for?
Sure. King Kong was the good guy for the majority of the movie. In the end, they fought together to take down Mechagodzilla, the last-second antagonist.
Godzilla wins the battle with Kong and Kong nearly dies. Godzilla…walks away for some reason and Kong is shocked back to full life and helps defeat Mechagodzilla.
Note: Godzilla ended the previous movie as “good”, but something drove him mad and he attacked to start this movie.
He was attacking the threat posed by Apex who was using parts from his vanquished enemy (Ghidorah) to build a weapon.
The day they figure out they need to completely remove any human involvement in this movies apart from sacrificial army dudes and random bystanders pointing and screaming and stick to giant monsters doing 100 9/11’s in random cities around the world we’ll have true masterpieces.
Good Lord this was awful, and I LOVE monster movies.
The monsters themselves were OK, with Mechagodzilla being the coolest of them and the fight at the end was decent, but who came up with this plot?
-It seemed irresponsible to bring a little girl along on such a dangerous mission, regardless of her connection with Kong
-By his weight alone, Kong could probably sink that ship
-Somehow Apex managed to build a 12,000 mile tunnel from Florida to Hong Kong, and Billie Bobby Brown AND her father ended up there at the same time. Did HE take the same tunnel because there is no way he could have flown there in time for the fight.
-There is little or no explanation what caused the “inverse gravity” while visiting hollow Earth
-Unless I missed it I had no idea that the woman that gets killed in the airship by Kong is the billionaires daughter. Speaking of which the Hollowed Earth craft was ridiculous.
I mean I could go on and on and on, but here’s the thing with monster movies: you really don’t need a complicated, far out plot. Monster A runs into Monster B, and they fight and destroy a city. Hell throw in Monster C while you are at it. That’s what monster movie fans want, not some conspiracy subplot (I HATED Brian Tyree Henry and that chubby British kid in this), Hollowed Earth, or implausible technology. And you KNOW the plot is stupid when the characters have to tell you what’s going on.
Good monsters ruined by one of the stupidest fucking scripts ever.
I also love how in EVERY single monster movie, the military tries to take down the monster with firepower, and it NEVER works. But they keep doing it.
The scene where Millie Bobby Brown walks up to the cadaver with its spine exposed in the Meachgodzilla testing lab. There also was a lot of killing of people, I think PG-13 was fine.
For me, when it comes to Godzilla movies, that’s a plus.
Given that, how bat-shit crazy are we talking? Say, on a scale from 1 to 10, where 1 is the somber, played-completely-straight Hiroshima allegory of the 1954 original and 10 is 2004’s deliriously insane Godzilla: Final Wars, which blatantly stuffed parts of Destroy All Monsters, the X-Men movies, The Matrix (they even cast a dude who looks like Keanu for the main role), and Independence Day into a blender and flung it at the screen, bringing back the Xilians, but this time they want humans as a food source and are mind controlling all the other kaiju to destroy Earth’s cities, and it’s up to Godzilla, who can’t be mind controlled because the plot requires it, to battle the rest of the monsters and stop them. Meanwhile, G’s son Minilla tries to drive a car.
Well, on that scale, I dunno, maybe 6 or so? I think it’s amplified, though, by the fact that this such a rote, big budget Hollywood blockbuster that just casually throws in
a secret hyperloop between Pensacola, Florida and Hong Kong, anti-gravity aircraft and just off-handedly mentioning it as part of a recruiting pitch, using Ghidorah’s skull as a psychic control mechanism for a mech, and all of that is done by a random private corporation, oh, and there’s a hollow earth, and that’s where King Kong comes from, and, I guess, maybe, the movie’s not clear, Kong’s people were actually a technological civilization.
Like, all of that doesn’t really rise to the insanity of some of the Toho stuff in and of itself, but seeing it with done with a Hollywood mega-budget and taking itself so seriously amped up the nutso factor for me.
By being that crazy, it kind of insulates itself from any nitpicking about things like bulletproof power grids or the buoyancy of aircraft carriers. You can only roll your eyes so many times before you either lose interest or start rolling with it and having fun. That was the difference between this and the previous two films for me. This one was just plain fun.
I really liked the previous Godzilla movies, the first one especially. Well, the first one in the current series. I appreciated the conceit of shooting the monsters only from a human perspective, so you only see them from the street or from a rooftop. The standout sequence, of course, was during the HALO jump, so you very briefly get to see the kaiju fight from the air. Makes you appreciate that Godzilla and friends are pretty much forces of nature and humans can do little or nothing to affect them.
All of that being said, the highlight of the current movie Godzilla vs. Kong was the fight between Godzilla and King Kong, with Mecha-Godzilla thrown in for good measure. Once that gets going, it was great! But they really took their own sweet time getting there. They could have easily dispensed with the Hollow Earth detour and contrived some other way to get Kong to Hong Kong. And what was the deal with the whole stealing energy subplot? Just cut the faffle and get the giant lizard fighting the giant ape; that’s what people are looking for anyway.
The kid protagonists are getting younger and younger. The first movie had Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who was a full-blown adult. The second movie had Millie Bobby Brown, who is a teen. The current movie has Kaylee Hottle who is a tween. I predict that the next one will have a toddler caring for some giant larva.
I can pick apart logical or plot-driven problems in movies with the best of them, but I watched this movie last night expecting nothing more than to turn my brain off and watch giants monsters fighting. And that’s exactly what I got. So I feel like I got my money’s worth (which I guess would be an amortized percentage over time of how much of our decision to get an HBO Max subscription is because we wanted to watch this and the other first-run movies).
I remember being 6 or 7 and looking forward to “Monster Week” on the 4 o’clock movie on channel 7 after school. Godzilla would fight Mothra and a bunch of other bad monsters. I loved seeing those guys in fake-looking rubber monster suits stomping over cardboard miniatures of buildings while model helicopters bounced around on fishing line. Makes me wonder how my 7 year old self would have reacted if 7yo me could somehow have seen the 2021 G v K. My head would probably have exploded.
When I was seven, it never occurred to me that those were rubber costumes. I knew they weren’t real, but I really had no curiosity about how the film makers did it.
Yeah I wasn’t too concerned with the craft and technique either when i was 7, just that it was awesome. As opposed to my kids who grew up much more jaded watching movies, seeing effects that were light-years more advanced and saying stuff like “that CG looks soooo fake!”
The biggest crime against my childhood were all those soft news stories with Roddy McDowell showing how they applied the Ape makeup.
I thought segments like that were interesting, I liked that behind the scenes stuff. Sitting still in a chair for 2 or 3 hours (whatever it was) every day to get the ape makeup applied? Crazy! As a kid the idea of sitting still for more than 15 minutes for any reason sounded like an extreme hardship. But it didn’t spoil my willing suspension of disbelief when watching the POTA movies.
So when the pilot of Mechazilla is killed was it the mind of Ghidorah controlling the mecha?