It was the headbutt that hooked me.
Not too long into Godzilla vs. Kong, the fourth film in the MonsterVerse series that started with 2014’s Godzilla, the two beasts of the title face off for the first time. As they grapple, Kong leans back and brings his head crashing down on the giant lizard’s face. It’s awesomely silly, but more importantly, it’s personal. And that’s what ultimately makes Godzilla vs. Kong work. Thanks to little filmmaking touches, Kong has real personality, which helps us come to care for his plight.
This is largely Kong’s movie. It opens with him in a Truman Show-like containment sphere, one meant to mimic the island from where he was taken. But he knows it’s a cage, something he communicates by fashioning a spear out of a giant redwood and launching it at the virtual “sky.” Later, after Godzilla has attacked Florida for reasons that aren’t immediately clear, the humans holding Kong decide to use him as a line of defense. But all he wants to do is find his way home.
Director Adam Wingard and his team of special-effects artists find potent ways to depict Kong’s predicament. When he’s dropped from a giant net that’s tethered to a fleet of helicopters, there’s a great point-of-view shot from his dazed perspective as the choppers fly away. Battling a dragon-like creature at another point (yes, the movie has more than two monsters), Kong gets wrapped up in its giant tail and then nearly suffocated by the beast’s translucent wing. Then there are nice little nods to the original, 1933 King Kong—as when he angrily flings the metal collar around his neck to the ground or pries Godzilla’s jaws open during another showdown.
Godzilla vs. Kong has enough details like that to carry you through the unnecessarily complicated plot (a plot the movie nevertheless hurtles through with breathless abandon). Wingard could have paused more here and there during the monster battles to draw out the suspense, which is something Peter Jackson mastered with the grand set pieces in the Lord of the Rings films. And the less said about most of the human characters—played by Rebecca Hall, Alexander Skarsgard, Brian Tyree Henry, and Millie Bobby Brown—the better. But much can be forgiven when you include a moment like the one in which Kong resets his separated shoulder, mid-bout, by slamming it into a skyscraper. Godzilla vs. Kong is a big movie, but it’s the little touches that count.
