While my intentions were to tear down the positive reviews GVK has been accumulating from several apparently well-known cinema critics who are usually famous for their stance against depthless CGI flicks, I had to stop and rethink how I approach this review for a minute. Because I now realize that since the prelude of covid, GVK might have been the only title to drop in the big screens to give people a sense of normalcy in the last year or so. If you are vaccinated and now trying to get back to the life you had where you took your family to the movies every other weekend, this might be the first film you will watch. I think most of the critics too understand this and hence the tide of positive reviews. Besides that, I couldn't anyway justify dissecting two of my most favourite monsters I grew up dreaming about. And that's why this review will be full of potential bias, which one may or may not like.
GVK is apparently the fourth instalment to the monstervers films. I say five as the Kong skull island was supposed to be the sequel to Peter Jackson's King Kong. In any case, if you are someone who takes cinema for as it is, whatever you have expected from Godzilla Vs Kong might fall close to the ballpark. It presents and delivers itself nicely as a jaw-dropping, heart-pounding, stupendously scaled universe of CGI filled monsters. Actually, watching the two behemoths go at each other, destroying the cities filled with massive skyscrapers like they are dead and dry trees in a seasonal cyclone never gets old. They have been doing this for four movies, and it's still quite enjoyable. Getting to see water dripping from the millions of strands on kong thanks to the advanced VFX certainly presents a sense of upheaving grandeur. At least if you take your kids to watch the film, watching them having the time of their life is entirely worth it.
But the fun is limited to only when the giants occupy the screen. That is because there is absolutely no character development in the movie at all. And then the lopsided plot armours and lazy writing makes it ever so bland that at times you'll cringe at yourself thinking about how you are not cringing at the superficial storytelling. The story presents the concept of hollow earth hidden deep below the earth's surface near the core, from where all titans originate. You can see a glimpse of this in the previous instalment, Godzilla, king of the monsters. When the fight with King Ghidora pushes Godzilla almost to death. To save him Dr, Ishiro Serizawa devises a plan to nuke him as he feeds on raw energy. That is when they journey to the resting place of Godzilla, which is this giant temple. Such a wasted potential as GVK could have explored this idea of the hollow earth and let the viewers immerse themselves in flora and fauna of a land of fantasy that has been developing in pseudoscience for almost a few centuries now. Instead, they choose to waste it on poorly written dialogues which seemingly led to nowhere.
If you are a millennial and had the privilege of watching the animated Godzilla series in your childhoods, then you are very lucky. Before all this on-demand shit, we are being force-fed, once there was a time when our entertainment was only limited to our imaginative capacities. Every weekend when an episode of the show dropped, after watching it, for the rest of the week, we would fantasize about living in a world where a vicious yet warm-hearted monster is our friend and is the guardian of humanity. And so I can binge watch Godzilla and kong doing random stuff for hours. Those two diabolical creatures actually are the only two things I liked about the movie. And the rest are all a bunch of bullcrap. Even though I say all this, and whoever is reading this wants to watch the film, I would say to go for it. Because entertainment comes in all shapes and sizes. And to judge them from a random review without watching, in my opinion, is slightly idiotic. And besides, this is one of the fewest of major titles to drop this year. We, as mass consumers, are beggars. And beggars can't be choosers XDXD
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