Godzilla vs Kong

Rating basically for the epic battles in this movie, great special effects that blend perfectly with the environment accompanied by immersive sounds to rumble your speakers. Kudos to all those responsible for that. On the other hand, this movie does a poor job of character personalization and story plot. Had a lot of fake smiles and poor dialogues, did a poor job of making you feel for any character's situation and wanting more from them, it's like the movie pauses when scenes switch from the Kaijus to humans. Characters were introduced for no particular purpose or reason. Story was dull and uninspiring. Wouldn't recommend this movie for the plot or character performances but will recommend it for the epic Kaiju battles and CGI.

Oh, my was I disappointed with this one. I'm not sure what I want from a 'giant monster' movie, but this wasn't it - for the most part. I have a chequered past with the franchise. I hated the original 'Godzilla' as there wasn't enough of the monster (or Bryan Cranston) then the 'King of Monsters' sequel was little more than colours and noise before me, yet the - much maligned 'Kong: Skull Island' was quite an enjoyable romp.

Here we have a film about humans. A lot of humans. Occasionally a giant ape or lizard show up and punch each other. That's about it. It's like 2007's 'Transformers' film all over again. I know that focusing a story on either giant monster would be difficult, so humans would have to be a major part of it - I don't know - it's just it felt too centred around pointless stuff. If the main cast of humans wasn't enough, they feel the need to include a totally redundant sub-plot about Millie Bobby Brown leading a pair of other wise-cracking, yet still bland, sidekicks around a secret facility. This whole aspect could have been left on the cutting room floor and the movie would be all the better for not seeing this - supposedly - secret base. Yes, this is the most secure facility that just allows any old Tom, Dick or Harry to simply wander in and nose around.

And that's just one of the plot holes. I swear if a modern movie exists that has more leaps of faith in it than 'Godzilla vs Kong' then I haven't seen it yet. To even hope of enjoying this film you really can't afford to allow yourself to actually think too deeply about what you're watching, because nothing really holds up when put under any form of scrutiny.

The humans are annoying, but the monsters are - reasonably - cool. Yeah, even for a big budget film like this they're still kind of CGI-looking, but they at least do more than their human counterparts. Naturally, our titular beasties have to team up to fight some 'greater evil' - if you've seen 'Batman vs Superman' it's almost a play for play re-enactment and I kept expecting it to be Doomsday. Don't worry - it's not just the - obviously evil - human baddie in this film who wears a coat over his shoulder just to prove what a cad he really is.

It's a film. It's way too long. It's not terrible, but I got through it by not watching it at the cinema and therefore in the comfort of my living room I was able to fast-forward every time I saw Millie Bobby Brown come on.

We all know why we're here, don't we?

Of course - we want mindless destruction with awesome monsters and great visuals, and if it was only about that, this film deserves some praise, indeed. I very much liked the wrestling component of the fights, with some of the highlight moves being some of the most satisfying examples that ever graced the screen.

However, with all the monster madness there is something that most of these movies seem to get wrong almost every time: the overall plot and characters.

Now, I certainly don't expect grand drama and acting excellence from a flick like this, but GODZILLA VS. KONG is a remarkably bad example for both of these aspects. All characters were pretty bad, and the plot... oh boy.

Let me put it this way: when the movie is trying to be smart, it's pretty stupid. But when the movie is stupid, it's absolutely brainmeltingly stupid. The techno babble is annoyingly idiotic, down to a point where it completely took me out of the film, laughing hard at the audacity the writers had when typing these lines. The acting is at best alright, but Rebecca Hall's overacting and the astonishingly unlikeable attitude of Millie Bobby Brown's character ruined a lot of the already unbearably inept plot. Alexander Skarsgård's talent was pretty much wasted here, while all the others seem to come directly from that direct-to-video sequel to Roland Emmerich's Godzilla that never happened - for good reason.

All in all, I can only recommend this film if you're able to leave your brain far, far behind and to focus only on the action itself. This is basically a script from 1997, made with today's technical possibilities - a script that probably even Roland Emmerich might have thought was too stupid.

Also noteworthy: when the Tom Holkenborg score isn't the worst part of a movie, you know that something's off. Although, to be fair, this was actually a pretty decent score for our less talented Hans Zimmer clone.

Don't believe the hype though. Instead, get drunk before starting to watch this, and you might have a good time.

I liked the action but once again, The story and characters were unbelievably bland.

I guarantee 99% of viewers just wanted to see two titans go at it. Nobody cared about the humans in this movie. So why does WB keep trying to force humans down our throat in these movies? In an hour and 50 ish minutes were forced to watch people for 80 of those minutes. There's way too much time trying to make a plot here that I don't want to see.