Godzilla V Kong (Dir Adam Wingard, 1h 53m)

The year is 1960. Willis O'Brien, the very-probable-genius behind the stop-start animation that brought King Kong to life nearly thirty years ago, has an idea; for the legendary ape to fight Frankenstein's monster. Through a veritable series of hand-and-trade offs, hampered by King Kong's production company, RKO having pulled out of film production, and the prohibitive cost of stop-start animation, the script eventually finds its way to Japan, and to the desk of Toho. The rest is history, as in 1962's King Kong V Godzilla, Kong is pitted against Toho's signature monster in an east-v-west monster rumble that sees Godzilla enter the colour era to battle a colossal version of Kong, the duo finally duking it out on the slopes of Mount Fuji, before Kong emerges triumphant, launching one of cinema's great lines of apocrypha suggesting Godzilla won in Japan.

Now, more than half a century on, we're back for round two, as the cinemas begin to open, and Godzilla V Kong may well be the opening salvo of a cinematically-stuffed 2021. Indeed, everything in Legendary Pictures' Monsterverse has built up to this final showdown; heck, the film's opening credits match the usual fictional history and censored documents we've come to expect from this series with a veritable setup for this bout as we go through each of their victories, elimination-style, until we're left with this duo. Elsewhere, the plot nicely throws back to the original '63 film, beginning with Kong himself; he, in all honesty, is GvK's protagonist, with Godzilla, for perhaps the first time in the entire series, making the mother of all face-heel turns from hero to villain in his first scene.

Kong is introduced in captivity, now accompanied by a small girl, Jia (Kaylee Hottle) and her guardian, Dr Ilene Andrews (Rebecca Hayes, in full Jane Goodall mode), who not only is able to communicate with the now-titanically large ape, but is the only person he'll listen to. That she not only communicates with Kong but the world via sign-language, and played by a deaf actress, is a smartly played and inclusive bit of casting, the use of muffled sound during key scenes only adding to their emotional impact. Protected from Godzilla, as the other alpha of the Monsterverse, Kong is shown as frustrated and trapped, with the machinations of the shadowy Apex Cybernetics bent on using him to uncover the entrance to a supposedly mythical hollow earth in a expedition led by Nathan Lind (Alex Skarsgård), that has a nefarious purpose.

From here, the film leaps via conspiracy theorist Bernie Hayes (Brian Tyree Henry) to Godzilla attacking the headquarters of Apex in a seemingly unprovoked attack, that Bernie believes is to do with a mysterious object, which leads to the reintroduction of one of our few returning characters, Madison (Millie Bobby Brown), who together with her school-friend and Bernie, set off to uncover what Apex are hiding. For all this silliness; and, to be fair, Godzilla, aside from the 1954 original, 2014's American reboot and Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi's nightmarish Shin Godzilla, has always had a degree of either creaky, non-sensical plots and/or tongue-in-cheek camp or earnest entertainment to its proceedings, this trio essentially neatly keep the plot ticking over, and hold the corner for Godzilla, as they uncover the truth behind his attack and the plans of Apex CEO Walter Simmons (Demián Bichir).

But one doesn't come to a kaiju monsters expecting intricate plots in the same way that one doesn't attend or watch the often farcically over-the-top plots that string together WWE and its ilk for its sub-soap opera narrative. We’ve come to watch a giant monkey from parts unknown, and a giant fire-breathing Japanese-hailing reptile knock the absolute bejesus out of each other for two hours in multiple locations on the largest screen possible. This Godzilla V Kong does superbly; what many of the think-pieces, even from critics that largely support the oft-maligned monster movie genre, don't get, in their complaints of wooden plots, too much monster action is that the humans aren't the protagonists, and, in both GvK and Godzilla King of the Monsters, aren't even really supporting characters, but bystanders in decades-long smackdowns and rivalries between 200+ft protagonists that just happen to be multiple stripes of kaiju.

Our hero in this outing is absolutely Kong; we spend most of the first act in his company whilst Wingard goes around setting up his human side-stories, and, through a neat co-opting of sign language as he and Jia are transported to the Antarctic to begin the expedition into the Hollow Earth, he's certainly a far more human, and more empathetic protagonist, with touches of Andy Serkis' performance in 2005's remake of King Kong coming through to Toby Kebbell's (sadly uncredited) motion capture performance. He is also clearly an intelligent strategist-something we've clearly not seem in the rough-and-tumble raw power of Godzilla and his kaiju ilk to date. This perfectly sets him up against this film's version of Godzilla.

For, if the previous two-Godzilla centric films lean heavily upon the nuanced depiction of Godzilla as colossal destructive, but ultimately benificent force, this is Godzilla in all his fearful malevolence-we see his attack on the fleet transporting Kong in brutal terms, with Godzilla crunching through ships before bursting from the water in response to Kong's bellows. What follows is a superbly kinetic action scene, with Godzilla and Kong slugging it out atop an aircraft carrier that then capsizes, as the duo continue to battle in Godzilla's territory under the sea, leading to Godzilla besting Kong and the expedition having to transport Kong by air. This version of Godzilla is nasty, downright malevolent at two points where he practically grins at the audience as he beats Kong into submission, and even his tweaked design makes him a meaner figure, a far more angular and jagged look that plays nicely into his foilish tendencies in this film, as he glowers and crashes his way through against Kong.

What Wingard brings to GvK, in short, is a sense of fun-in their later fight, once Kong returns to the earth's surface to do battle with Godzilla in Hong Kong, we get what I can only describe as snorri-cam style shots, as we see Godzilla and Kong crash through buildings, cameras tracking fists and tails and head and feet as they pummel each other, Kong's ability to wield tools not only leading to another callback to King Kong vs Godzilla as Kong tries to force his axe down his opponent's throat, but an ability to block and charge his club, as a dorsal plate from one of Godzilla's ancestors makes it both axe and shield to Godzilla's radioactive breath. One could argue that there's less gravitas to this film than previous, more human-centric outings, and at points things get a little too cartoonish in terms of just how much damage each of them can take, even when they (rather inevitably) become allies, but Wingard gives the film, even in the human characters, an enjoyable brevity.

Which is somewhat of a problem. Godzilla v Kong, after all, is what we've been building to since all the way back in 2014, when Godzilla was released. It's the intended endpoint of the entire Monsterverse, and whether it carries on buoyed by GvK's sterling box-office receipts, or whether Godzilla and Kong go their separate ways, and Godzilla swims off into the sunset back to Toho, GvK feels...anticlimatic, particularly in the wake of King of the Monsters. We're catapulted back from a film in which Godzilla beats his ultimate rival to what amounts to a backyard scrap between two (rather than multiple) monsters, in which any attempt of plot is merrily launched off into the stratosphere, and it feels like a step down, a step backwards. If this is Godzilla's last rodeo in the west, it's something of a let down.

Nevertheless, Godzilla v Kong is an enjoyably ridiculous slab of monster action; whilst it may not be the best of the American outings for Kong and Godzilla, it, perhaps more than any other outing captures the spirit of Godzilla's 1960s and 1970s heyday. In its titanic clash of two iconic figures of monsterdom, on a colossal scale, Godzilla V Kong is a sterling end to this first era of Godzilla-in-America, in a crowd-pleasing if plot-lite crash through the Monsterverse at its best, and most outlandish.

Rating: Highly Recommended.

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