114 min | PG-13 | March 31, 2021 | Warner Bros. Pictures
Two titans get a title fight, and the movie knows it. Adam Wingard builds everything around the brawls and treats the humans as transportation between them. The monkey hits hard. The plot does not.
Godzilla rises from the sea and attacks a city without warning. Kong sits in a containment dome on Skull Island, studied and managed by the people who fear what he is. A corporation wants to weaponize the past and harness the power buried under the planet. The film is a machine built to stage one fight and then justify it long enough to stage a bigger one. Adam Wingard understands that the title is the entire promise and he delivers the collision without apology.
Rebecca Hall plays Ilene Andrews, the scientist who protects Kong and reads him as a creature worth saving. She grounds the Skull Island scenes with a watchfulness the script does not earn. Kaylee Hottle plays Jia, the deaf girl who signs with Kong, and she carries the only relationship in the film that registers as real. Alexander Skarsgard plays Nathan Lind with the flat competence of a man explaining a plot device. Brian Tyree Henry plays Bernie Hayes, a conspiracy podcaster, and Millie Bobby Brown plays Madison Russell, and their subplot exists to move bodies toward exposition. Demian Bichir plays Walter Simmons as a corporate villain with no menace underneath the suit.
Wingard directs the monster combat with clarity that most blockbusters abandon. The neon Hong Kong battle stages two giants against a backdrop of saturated color, and the camera holds wide enough to let the scale read. The script by Eric Pearson and Max Borenstein invents a hollow Earth and a journey to its core, and the geography makes no sense the moment you examine it. The film does not want you to examine it. Tom Holkenborg’s synth score pushes the fights forward with a pulse that suits the comic-book staging. The human scenes cut fast because there is nothing in them to linger on.
This is a film that knows exactly what it is and refuses to pretend otherwise. The monsters are the protagonists and the people are the delivery system. Wingard treats Kong as a character with grief and loyalty and gives Godzilla nothing but rage, and the imbalance is the point. The spectacle lands and the story around it dissolves on contact. It promises a fight and delivers a fight, and it asks for nothing more than that you watch two gods hit each other very hard.