Is Godzilla vs Kong Good Bad or Just Bad Bad?

Godzilla vs Kong. Image courtesy of Warner Bros.

Warner Bros has been known to struggle when it comes to turning franchise-worthy IP into actually good cinematic universes. Certainly, we all know how they raced to get their DC universe up and running and in the process utterly ruined it. Universal did the same thing with their monster movie universe. The reasons are no mystery. Everyone wants to be making Marvel money, but without doing the slow, hard work of building the thing up from a solid foundation. And you know what? Audiences, by and large, might not have the most discerning taste in movies but they know when they are being force-fed crap in service of some studio executive’s 5-year cashflow plan.

But, for whatever reason, Warner Bros did take its time (kind of) with its monster universe. The first film in the franchise, Godzilla, was released in 2014 and placed in the very talented hands of Gareth Edwards who made a fantastic film. The follow-up, Kong: Skull Island, while suffering from lots of story and character issues, was still a pretty entertaining creature feature that delivered on its main promise: to show people fighting monsters on a primordial island. It also set the stage for an inevitable showdown between Kong and Godzilla, which has always been the only real goal this franchise aspired to.

Godzilla King of the Monsters descended into and ultimately drowned in full blown spectacle. The plot and the characters and the dialogue were absolute trash, just used as the thinnest of pretenses to string together scenes of monsters fighting each other. I still found some of that quite entertaining, but it does beg the question why the studio is not putting even the tiniest amount of effort into making these things good.

I guess it’s because they are betting audiences will turn out anyway just to watch CGI monsters fight each other. And that is exactly what Godzilla vs Kong is, a movie with laughably bad dialogue, characters and plotting that exists merely to fulfill Warner Bros desire to have Kong fight Godzilla. It is the worst of the four Legendary creature features, and makes no effort whatsoever to make any of the non lizard vs monkey portions of the film watchable.

And you know what? That is OK. It’s disappointing, but it’s OK. In these trying times just being able to see a film in the cinema and have some semblance of normalcy restored as a studio makes a big dumb movie about a big ape and a big lizard fighting each other, is perfectly acceptable. It would indeed have been nice if they put some effort, any effort at all really, into making the other parts of the film good but in the end they didn’t and since this movie is a creature feature and doesn’t aspire to be anything more than that, I’ll give them a pass. It’s the kind of movie that you can just chill out and let wash over you, and that is in some ways just the right kind of movie for the world we are currently living in.