Godzilla Vs Kong, Is This What The World Braved Covid For?

Godzilla Vs Kong

Starring  Alexander Skarsgård, Millie Bobby Brown, Rebecca Hall, Brian Tyree Henry, Shun Oguri, Eiza González, Julian Dennison, Kyle Chandler, and Demián Bichir

Directed by  Adam Wingard

Rating: **

Two  overgrown mechanical monkeys  battling it out against  the backdrop  of  crumbling (studio-created) skyscrapers against a  garish pinkish skyline that suggests  a  punk nemesis…is this  all it takes  for  the  global audience to come back to  movie  theatres?

The first  post-lockdown blockbuster is  high on spectacle  but extremely low on plot development.  Not that  there  is a  scarcity  of characters.  There are  two sets  of characters  hurling through the plot in hot  pursuit  of a way to stop  the film’s two heroes,  or rather  one hero and  the other anti-hero, King Kong and  Godzilla  from destroying what is left of the world after  the  mammalian  monsters are  done with it.

  There is   Dr Nathan Lind(Alexander Skarsgård) who teams up with  Dr Ilene Andews(Rebecca  Hall) and  a little  deaf girl Jia(Kaylee Hottle) who communicates  with  King Kong through sign language. The moments between Jia and Kong  take  a cursory  dip into tenderness before  rebooting into  a kind of  digital  grand safari where everything seems  larger than life and  unreal  and  not in any flattering way.

 The  film  packs  in way too much  human resources  without tapping into the  human characters  in any meaningful dialogue between Man  and Nature.The pretty Millie Bobby Brown  plays Maddison who  is interested in  Godzilla’s erratic behavior  .She  teams  up with  a podcaster Bernie(Brian Tyree Henry) who behaves like  a rapper strolling with swag into a global zoo,  and a teenager  Josh(Julian  Dennison) looks like Arjun  Kapoor  before his  weight-loss.

All these form  a  muddled melee of characters hovering around the plot trying to give it  a  humane  angle when  all that the film is really interested  in is the clash between Kong and  Godzilla .These are  staged  in the  final  15-20 minutes with much clanging  and  clinking  all amounting to nearly two hours  of furious combats between the two heroes who  don’t know they are  not enemies. When they finally do join  hands  the  plot  heaves to a halt like  a steamroller  mowing through a  vast landscape  of plunderous  possibilities  amounting to zilch. Or nearly.

 As for  the special effects  they are  nothing to write home  about.  The movie looks  like  a pile  of wreckage  waiting reclamation from powers that have gone  into deep thought on the course of action to be taken,   and are unable come up with anything worth  our while.