Or, why can’t America make a Godzilla movie that doesn’t make me want to punch myself repeatedly in the face? Because Godzilla x Kong kind of makes me want to do that.
I feel like I should start this out by stating what is probably obvious by now: I’m yet to have seen an American version of a Godzilla story that I don’t hate at least a little bit.
But I LOVE Godzilla. And I love Kong. But this movie had some stuff going on that made my brain feel like it might be bleeding – or that bleeding brain might be an upsell.
So, to throw it all right on out there, here are my grievances:
I did some digging into the reason why Godzilla went and straight up murdered Tiamat, and it finally makes a little bit of sense, but since they jammed so much weird exposition in there already I wish they would have mentioned that these two have a history (apparently this is in the comics). Apparently Tiamat is “hostile and territorial” and her and Godzilla have had it out before – because he was trying to horn in on her territory. In the Arctic Ocean (what the hell, Godzilla). It kind of annoys me that they could tell me 842,000 things that weren’t very important to the story, but couldn’t find the time to mention that.
Why is Kong looking so old, but the Skar King is presumably the same age he was when the Iwi people made their showdown-cave-drawings? Was that supposed to be recent or something? And is the implication that Kong is just way older? I don’t understand. They made it seem like those drawings weren’t new…
And while we’re talking about that scene, what the actual fuck was the deal with the lady “translating” the drawings? She made that all super weird.
And I HATE what they did to Bernie Hayes. Why was he suddenly a duddering dipshit? I liked him fine in the last one, but hated his character here. It’s like he actually lost dimension.
Now on to what I did like:
They finally managed to do the thing Japan was smart enough to do 2 movies in: go full ridiculous. The amount of fighting in Godzilla x Kong was A+. And Pinkzilla was pretty rad.
Mothra. I’m always down with Mothra.
The delightfully stupid poster I chose to use as the cover photo for this post. It looks like a promo poster for a boxing match that nobody’s gonna watch. I love it.
That’s pretty much it as far as I’m concerned. The CG was a little off-putting to me in some spots (it looked a little unpolished). The design of Baby Kong, whose name I can’t keep in my head, so I’ll be calling Jeff. Jeff was a fucking mess. He was weird looking in a Son of Godzilla but somehow harder to look at straight on sort of way. Did not like.
I think I’ll probably just stick to Japan’s Godzilla movies, and America’s Kong movies. Keep the two separate. And pray for more Shin Godzilla.
