Godzil­la vs King Kong

Of course genre pic­tures can allow for com­plex­i­ty and sub­tle­ty, but their chiefest plea­sures are sim­ple and imme­di­ate: the blood-drenched kills of hor­ror; the raz­zle-daz­zle pro­duc­tion num­bers in a musi­cal; the chas­es and shootouts of the west­ern. The genre clas­si­fi­ca­tion sets the terms of a deal for the view­er, a nego­ti­a­tion no more com­pli­cat­ed than ​‘the more gen­er­ous­ly the film ful­fils those terms, the greater the viewer’s gross enjoyment’.

It is in this spir­it that we good peo­ple of Earth have come togeth­er to watch the giant ape fight the giant lizard. Start­ing with the title, the new crossover tying togeth­er Leg­endary Pic­tures’ con­nect­ed cin­e­mat­ic uni­verse of destruc­tive megafau­na promis­es a clash of titans to put Clash of the Titans to shame. One irate pri­mate, one hos­tile rep­tile – two beloved intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ties enter the ring, but only one shall leave.

Except that the stakes of the con­flict aren’t any­where near that defin­i­tive, or even that oppo­si­tion­al. (Nor could they be, as we realise pret­ty quick­ly. The stu­dio can’t be seen to play favourites with one or the oth­er, which is why they’ve tin­kered with the size of both beast­ies to con­trive a fair face-off.)

The com­peti­tors, pit­ted against each oth­er by their film’s very premise, fig­ure instead into a more elab­o­rate and extra­ne­ous plot prof­fer­ing an expla­na­tion for why they’re at odds in the first place. Godzil­la and King Kong may have their dif­fer­ences but, as ever, the real ene­my here is human­i­ty. The ques­tion the script must answer – a query hang­ing over ever inert scene of puny Homo sapi­ens hav­ing their sil­ly lit­tle dia­logues – is who can pos­si­bly care when the lord of all kai­ju could be breath­ing jets of blue fire at Fay Wray’s ex.

The CGI stars of the show do indeed trade mag­nif­i­cent blows in ear­ly scenes, and cred­it where it’s due to direc­tor Adam Wingard for giv­ing their tus­sles the bit­ter fury they deserve. Their fight scenes have been chore­o­graphed more leg­i­bly than most of the big set pieces in recent block­buster mem­o­ry; it seems more man­age­able to cap­ture a gar­gan­tu­an pas de deux than to get cov­er­age over a bustling bat­tle royale while keep­ing track of dozens of characters.

The numer­ous, drag­ging inter­ludes spent with the mere mor­tals, how­ev­er, suc­ceed only in elon­gat­ing the run time and grind­ing the action to a halt. A new round of sci­en­tists and mil­i­tary types (Rebec­ca Hall, Alexan­der Skars­gård, Eiza González) scram­ble about try­ing not to get crushed under­foot, though that’s not near­ly as snooze-wor­thy as the thor­ough­ly unneed­ed sub­plot involv­ing a cou­ple of exhaust­ing smart-aleck kids (Julian Den­ni­son and a return­ing Mil­lie Bob­by Brown) and a con­spir­a­cy-the­o­rist pod­cast­er (Bri­an Tyree Hen­ry, doing what he can).

This has been the con­stant com­plaint with Hollywood’s neo-Godzil­la pic­tures, that the sig­nal-to-noise ratio is all out of whack with too much time spent away from the mon­ster mash that drew us here. Wingard has learned from the mas­sive let­down of Big G’s last appear­ance in 2019, but the improve­ments he makes are incre­men­tal and minor. We spend less time with the low­ly human annoy­ances, and yet still too much. The com­bat has been fine-tuned some­what, while still lack­ing in the god­ly scale that came from the ground-lev­el cin­e­matog­ra­phy of Gareth Edwards’ supe­ri­or 2014 take on Godzil­la.

The open­ing scene, which calm­ly joins a King Kong in soli­tude as he wan­ders around his lush home­land and exalts in the majesty of nature, invites us to imag­ine a win­nowed-down ver­sion of the con­cept. The ide­al instal­ment of this franchise’s would be some­thing like a bru­tal Plan­et Earth episode, dis­pos­ing of all dia­logue and let­ting the dig­i­tal­ly-ren­dered dynamos of charis­ma at the cen­tre car­ry the film. It only took the orig­i­nal Toho pro­duc­tions a few movies to fig­ure out that fore­ground­ing their icon made for more reli­able enter­tain­ment. How long will it take us?