Godzilla vs. Kong (2021)

We're Off to See The Lizard, the Marvelized Version of Kong

or

Four-Walling in the Time of Covid

Warner Bros. and Legendary Pictures have been making their own version of superhero movies for the past few years, starting with Godzilla in 2014, followed by Kong:Skull Island, and Godzilla: King of Monsters. The last movie teased a battle between the two movie-title monsters, now in the "Monarch" Monsterverse, referred to as "Titans" who usually hang out in the Hollow Earth, until we do something stupid to bring 'em out in the open. 

Personally, I think what brought out these movies was Guillermo del Toro's 2013 film of Pacific Rim, where he channeled his love of big monsters duking it out in big modern—vulnerable—cities. The filmed from a cell-phone version of Cloverfield (2008) might have had something to that...inspired as it is by Bong Joon Ho's The Host (2006) and Peter Jackson's remake of King Kong (2005). All that chance to use modern computer graphics and psuedo-technology to make a movie about big monsters fighting appeals to the child (and WWF fan) in all of us. If they didn't make money, they'd disappear into the sea with the setting sun— like Godzilla, but without the buzz-headache from hitting electrical lines.

So, here comes Godzilla vs. Kong, the mash-up of the two tent-poles in the "Monarch" Monsterverse, and "The Top of the Ticket" if one were to see this as an evening of boxing. It is a goofy affair, mixing up traditions of the earlier Toho films (with a much larger scale), a little Jules Verne mixed in for exotica, and a little "zhuzh" from the Marvel Universe to add merchandisable personality, and to keep the fights from seeming like endless slugfests. It also leeches any identifiable humanity out of its story, and, for that matter, The Earth, relegating people to "slow natives" status, and "chutes and ladders" to connect the big fights (of which there are four).

The film has four primary locations: Skull Island—home of King Kong—which is now encircled by a force-field enclosing the "King of the Beasts" from wandering into people's neighborhoods and eating their houses; Pensacola, Florida, where the APEX corporation is engineering A.I. technology with advanced robotics; the Antarctic, where a Monarch research station has made a foray into the "Hollow Earth" deep in the Earth (but wouldn't Skull Island be a more logical entryway, since that's where these beasties have come from?); and Hong Kong, where APEX has a vast engineering facility. With me so far? Good, because you'll get lost soon enough.

At Skull Island, Kong is being studied by Dr. Ilene Andrews (Rebecca Hall), the so-called "Kong Whisperer" who's a bit like Dian Fossey, except that her studies of The Big Guy are facilitated with the help of a native Iwi girl named Jia (Kaylee Hottle), a deaf-mute who can communicate with Kong. She is (evidently) the last Iwi tribesperson, her parents and everybody else being reduced to Skull-walker fodder or Kong toe-jam. Dr. Andrews has adopted the girl, and, as such, the whole movie would make damning evidence at a Child Welfare hearing.

She is approached by Dr. Nathan Lind (Alexander Skarsgård), a former Monarch scientist, and developer of the "Hollow Earth" theory (which conjectures that the Earth doesn't have a core so much as a hollow center, like a chocolate bunny, from whence all the "Titans" have emerged, and evidently has never heard of the term "lava". As we get to witness (sort of) Godzilla has gone "rogue" and attacked the APEX facility in Pensacola, and Lind asks Andrews to use Kong to get a powerful energy source that emanates from the Hollow Earth to use as a weapon against The Lizard, should he ever show up and attack again. "Sounds nuts, Nathan. Even for you," she counters and then agrees to take Kong and Jia, and shackle him to a transport for a trip to Antarctica. "I regret this already," she rehearses for her trial. But, not as much as she's gonna regret it.

What caused Godzilla to attack the APEX plant is unknown to the public, but it might have something to do with a power source that is being developed there under the jurisdiction of its CEO, the laughably hissable Walter Simmons (Demián Bechir), and it is he who has recruited Lind to find and contain the "Hollow Earth" "life force" because A) they can use it against Godzilla unless he wants to exert his "cancel culture" privileges on APEX, and B) he can use it to (dare I say it?) RULE THE WORLD. Elon Musk would have started a travel agency to "Hollow Earth" but, no, Simmons wants all the power he can, and he's not going to stop at voter suppression.

This is all suspected by wackadoodle conspiracy pod-caster (and former APEX employee) Bernie Hayes (Bryan Tyree Henry) who was stealing APEX secrets at the time of Godzilla's attack, and he has a big fan in Madison Russell (Millie Bobby Brown) who has seen Godzilla up-close (in King of the Monsters) and happens to have a Dad (Kyle Chandler) who's a research scientist—he invented the ORCA device in King of the Monsters—and a Mom who was killed by Godzilla in the same movie. But, she doesn't hold a grudge; she and school-pal Josh Valentine (Julian Dennison) steal his brother's van and seek out Bernie to help him in his investigations, looking for clues in the rubble of APEX. What they find is that APEX has another site in Hong Kong and faster than you can say "convenient plot contrivance" they find a convenient plot conveyance to get them to Hong Kong.

The doctors manage to get Kong to Antarctica, but not before the first of the battles between Kong and Godzilla, this time using Navy ships as both weapons and foot-falls, and to avoid any more meetings—Andrews keeps coming up with these little factoids ("Kong bows to no one," There can't be two Alpha Titans," "They have an ancient rivalry") like she was simultaneously Kong's promoter and ring-announcer, even though, she has as much knowledge (or psychological understanding) as the crazy podcaster does. They helicopter a sleeping Kong to Antarctica—Helicopters aren't all that good at high-altitude, cold mountain rescues, and their flights are under heavy restrictions in Antarctica, but, by this time, I've already thrown away any high expectations as dubious and abandoned my skepticism. It couldn't have come at a better time, as at that point, Kong, the docs and the kid with a bunch of APEX merc's all take a trip down the biggest rabbit-hole in the world and arrive at Hollow Earth...no molten core, no crushing pressure...it's a prehistoric paradise with a rocky ceiling for a sky.

And that's about where my "sense of wonder" died. The "Godzilla" have a rich history of fantasy, quirkiness and camp kitsch, evolving from a fantastical cautionary tale of messing with the ecological balance of Nature into forays of adolescent giddiness. This one is in the latter camp. The monster battles are CGI wonders—if one doesn't wonder about casualties—and even have their own humor imagining these behemoths planting haymakers like pugilists and slamming skulls into buildings like overgrown children doing battle in a room full of furniture. It's semi-amusing, even when one questions why the CGI department hedged on putting an atmospheric haze on distant objects, making the cityscapes look like actual models—of the type the Toho studios used to throw around their guys in rubber suits—and simultaneously paying homage to the past, while compromising their attempts at photorealism.

They're the "draw" of the movie, certainly the uninspired script isn't, with its undeserved aphorisms and its pointless reaction-jolts ("Oh, this doesn't look good!"), its transitions that happen just because they have to (how does Chandler's Dr. Russell get from Florida to Hong Kong so fast?) and techno-schtick without even an attempt at trying to explain what the hell is happening and why (besides "this is a science beyond our understanding"). What would be the point? One more haymaker or body-slam and it concusses right out of your mind.

And they give Kong a big glowing axe. Any reason besides Thor-identification? I couldn't see any. Godzilla can atomic breath a hole through the Earth's crust into Hollow World? News to me. And I'm still trying to wrap my mind around there being sunlight in "Hollow World" in the center of the Earth. But, the biggest question I have is...in the midst of a pandemic, THIS is the movie Warner Brothers decided to "four-wall" on multiple-plex screens? Whoever thought that up has cajones bigger than Kong's!

The actors are brave, saying their lines and keeping straight faces. But, they're completely unnecessary to this enterprise, as worthless as story-logic, and regarded just as less. They're mere grout—no, less than that, spackle to cover up holes in the fight-fest. They might as well be Ring girls holding up "Round" signs, filling up time between bells. The lack of character motivation except the cartoon variety indicates that in our entertainment, the beasts have won. With all the ruckus and rumble, who needs human beings?

The Siege (1998)

It should be noted that the film was made in 1998, three years before the attack on the World Trade Center. The review was written 2016.

The Siege (Edward Zwick, 1998) Creepily omniscient film made three years before 9/11 (notice the WTC in the poster) in which terrorism comes home to roost in America, specifically with well-timed, somewhat improvised suicide bombers blowing up buses, theaters, and populous areas in the heart of New York City. Zwick (and screenwriter Lawrence Wright, with dialogue tweaks by Zwick and Menno Meyjes) showed us something that Americans didn't want to see (and believed impossible): America under terrorist attack.

No one went to see the movie, and critics attacked it as being xenophobic and unrealistic. Viewing it after 9/11, however, it feels more like reality and a step away fromappearing on the Evening News. A worst nightmare-come-true, complete with overreaction. And one of the last films to feature radical Islamists as terrorists on U.S. soil. Now, studios shy away from such depictions because, in their "infinite bravery", they're afraid of reprisals.

But, here, they weren't, not even when the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee and the Council on American-Islamic Relations started picketing the theaters, for the film being offensive and promoting stereotypes of Islamic terrorists.

Evidently Al Qaeda didn't get the communiques. Might've helped "the cause."

And despite some lip-service to Islam and Arab-Americans being just as aghast at terrorist activities and giving their full cooperation with the investigation—and Tony Shalhoub plays a Islamic Arab on the FBI task force—one gets the distinct impression that some of the film's best friends are Arab-Americans.  

But, that's the sideshow.  

What the film boils down to is not who's doing what to whom, but in meeting the enemy and it being ourselves. New York becomes the target of accelerating attacks when a bus is hijacked with no demands—and no explosives it turns out, the passengers are merely splattered with blue dye. The FBI's lead investigator Anthony Hubbard (Denzel Washington) thinks it's more than a prank, or, as it's dismissed, "assault with a deadly color." He knows two things that worries him: "they" know explosives and "they" know the FBI's response time now.

Inserting herself into the investigation is Elise Kraft (Annette Bening), an NSA investigator who doesn't like to share information, as much as take it. She and Hubbard spar over jurisdiction and ownership. The FBI is new to the investigation and Elise has been at this for quite some time. "In this game, the most committed wins." While they're bickering and throwing down threats, another bus gets hijacked, and negotiations begin. But the results are different, attracting the Feds, especially the Army in the person of General Devereaux (Bruce Willis), who we have seen earlier overseeing the investigation of an Arab cleric (of whom the United States does not officially know the whereabouts). He's nosing around just to make sure that, although the NSA and FBI seem to bungling and out of their depths at this point, his operation isn't compromised. 

But, the atrocities accelerate and get bigger—The FBI's New York headquarters is attacked, resulting in 600 victims, many of them Hubbard's colleagues, and at that point, the President declares Martial Law. 

Despite his earlier protests in committee ("The Army is a broad sword, not a scalpel. Make no mistake, Senator. We will hunt down the enemy, we will find the enemy, and we will kill the enemy. And no card-carrying member of the ACLU is more dead set against it than I am. Which is why I urge you - I implore you. Do not consider this as an option. Trust me, senator - you do not want the Army in an American city.") Devereaux heads up the operation, cordoning off Brooklyn and gathering up all Arabic-speaking young men and detaining them in Yankee Stadium. Profiling isn't second-guessed, habeas is suspended, citizens are marched out to camps, and torture is the order of the day—specifically water-boarding.

Must have seemed pretty nightmarish (and xenophobic and unrealistic) in 1998. Now, that the "ethics" of water-boarding have been discussed endlessly by the cable-news pundits (to the point where I want to drown them), Guantanamo (or the more friendly "Git-mo!") has been holding prisoners for...how many years now?...we've been living with no-fly lists, and even gone to such silly extremities as taking off our shoes at airports (while "they" have gone the way of planting underwear bombs) over the last eleven...ELEVEN...years. And a lot of people have died, and Americans—loyal Americans—are coming back to a backlog of unanswered help, and we're now losing more of them to suicide (as we did in Vietnam) than to the actual war.

The crackdown will be televised

"We have met the enemy, and they are us." That was the message of The Siege and no one listened.*  And here we are, on the anniversary of 9/11, and the longest war in our history, and conflicts have not been resolved. They're only getting more complicated. The situation has gotten even more fractured, and the wars are internal as well as external, looking more like the Mexican stand-off that ends the film. 

Now, here we are, a dozen fifteen years after the fact, and there are folks amidst the current host of Syria-chatterers, who want to bomb Damascus, take out their leader, and replace him with the rebels opposing him, and in the glib words of Willis' commander "be back at base in time for the play-offs."

Trouble is, some of the factions among the rebels are Al Qaeda, who we've been fighting over these last dozen years and trillions of dollars. As the movie says "It's easy to tell the difference between right and wrong. What's hard is choosing the wrong that's more right." 

Orwell is in his grave...creating his own spin zone.

* Anthony 'Hub' Hubbard: [upon learning Devereaux's plans to torture Tariq] Are you people insane? What are you talkin' about?

General William Devereaux: The time has come for one man to suffer in order to save hundreds of lives.

Anthony 'Hub' Hubbard: One Man? What about two, huh? What about six? How about public executions?

General William Devereaux: Feel free to leave whenever you like, Agent Hubbard.

Anthony 'Hub' Hubbard: Come on General, you've lost men, I've lost men, but you - you, you *can't* do this! What, what if they don't even want the sheik, have you considered that? What if what they really want is for us to herd our children into stadiums like we're doing? And put soldiers on the street and have Americans looking over their shoulders? Bend the law, shred the Constitution just a little bit? Because if we torture him, General, we do that and everything we have fought, and bled, and died for is over. And they've won. They've already won!

General William Devereaux: Escort him out.