Review King Kong Vs Godzilla
Alexandrie Gallup
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I'd argue "You're Next" is in fact Wingard's best work to date, though The Guest is pretty great. Also I remember being real impressed by "A Horrible Way To Die" way back when it came out - no idea if it'd hold up for me now but early on in the 'mumblegore' world, he was one of the best ones.
There are so many Godzilla movies being produced right now that the titles themselves have started doing the math, though it\u2019s hard to say whether Godzilla Minus One plus Godzilla x Kong equals more than a lot of monster fights. Still, more than a little franchise fatigue has started to sink in with the Hollywood \u201CMonsterVerse\u201D pictures, even though iconic beasts with 38 (Godzilla) and 13 (King Kong) films made about them over the decades have proved their longevity. The five MonsterVerse titles got off to a promising start with 2014\u2019s Godzilla, which sputtered through the build-up before unleashing a third act where the revitalized predator stomped through San Francisco with awesome, fire-breathing, seat-rattling power. And that\u2019s been more or less the pattern with the subsequent entries: Half-written human characters, city-leveling monster fights.
Released during that stretch of pandemic when Warner Bros. was premiering movies in theaters and on HBO Max simultaneously, Adam Wingard\u2019s Godzilla vs. Kong improved slightly on its two predecessors in paying off the promised conflict between ape and lizard, especially in a climactic battle royale that pitted them both against Mechagodzilla. The new Godzilla x King: The New Empire wisely cuts back the number of relevant human characters to three or four, rather than hoping in vain that their conflicts will amount to more than a hill of beans in a world where monsters are ready to strike on and below the surface. All they can really do is contain them as best they can and hope they\u2019re not squished like scattered ants. We live in a reality where a bridge collapse is a major human tragedy; here, Godzilla stomps through several bridges without so much as breaking his stride.
The expectation, as with all Hollywood franchises, is that audiences have either just watched the previous film yesterday or that they didn\u2019t forget any of the storytelling beats from Godzilla vs. Kong. One scenario is unlikely, the other is impossible. Nevertheless, it doesn\u2019t take much time to pick up on the important details: Our Titan frenemies Godzilla and Kong have gone their separate ways, with Godzilla curling up for a nap in the Colosseum and Kong searching the monster-strewn underworld of Hollow Earth for more members of his species. When Kong proves a little too successful in finding them, the tenuous stability of the two co-existing worlds breaks apart, leading various human experts to intervene. These include Dr. Ilene Andrews (Rebecca Hall), the Monarch scientist who adopted a native Skull Island girl in the last film, podcaster/conspiracist Bernie (Brian Tyree Henry), and daredevil adventurer Trapper (Dan Stevens).
The reunion of Wingard and Stevens, the star of Wingard\u2019s best movie by far, The Guest, promises more fun than it delivers, but Trapper\u2019s wisecracking is more easily integrated into this nonsense than the drama around Dr. Andrews and her adopted daughter, who aches for her lost people like the mighty Kong. Godzilla x Kong is marginally worse than its predecessor, but they both operate in much the same fashion, with an excess of frantic and janky storytelling eventually giving way to satisfying WrestleMania-style effects showdowns with Godzilla, Kong, and an iconic Titan-to-be-named-later, among other beasties. Goodness knows these sequences should be easy to resist, given how quickly they\u2019ll be jettisoned from memory before the next MonsterVerse movie. But there are dozens of these things for a reason. \u2014 Scott Tobias
La Chimera, the latest film from Alice Rohrwacher (Happy as Lazzaro), takes place in an Italian coastal town in the early 1980s, but its true setting is a kind of hazy space in which the past and present bleed into one another\u2014 sometimes revealingly, sometimes heartbreakingly. It\u2019s a spot where millennia-old Etruscan artifacts can be found just beneath the surface, for those who know where to look, and music flows from family manors, even as they fall into disrepair. It\u2019s not the kind of place where those mired in the past by heartbreak should spend a lot of time, but it\u2019s where Arthur (Josh O\u2019Connor), an English archeologist, finds himself drawn anyway. He\u2019s lost Beniamina (Yile Vianello), the love of his life. And though in some ways he must understand that returning to her home and a family headed by Flora (Isabella Rossellini)\u2014a frail matriarch and music teacher with her own difficulty separating fantasy from reality\u2014won\u2019t bring her back, that doesn\u2019t mean he can resist its call.
That it\u2019s also a place where Arthur\u2019s strange gift for finding buried treasure using a divining rod is especially useful doesn\u2019t hurt. Reuniting with a merry band of outlaw tombaroli, a romantic-sounding name for grave robbers, Arthur descends\u2014literally and otherwise\u2014into a shadowy economy in which locals trade priceless items from the past to shady members of the art world (including a mastermind played by Rohrwacher herself). It seems harmless enough. After all, the items are just sitting there, even if those who left them would probably prefer they remain undisturbed. But it\u2019s an uneasy enterprise, one whose attraction to Arthur seems to be a need to get lost in the past in one way or another. It\u2019s an impulse put to the test by a burgeoning relationship with Italia (Carol Duarte), a student of / glorified servant to Flora whose vitality makes her a magnet pulling Arthur from the underworld. But whether it\u2019s strong enough remains an open question for much of the film.
Collaborating with cinematographer H\u00E9l\u00E8ne Louvart, who\u2019s worked with Rohrwacher for over a decade,who shoots La Chimera in a dreamy, aspect ratio-shifting mix of 35mm and 16mm, Rohrwacher builds a complete, beguiling world. La Chimera reveals only the barest details of Arthur\u2019s story, but each one matters, as do offhand moments that seem like they\u2019ll have no bearing on what\u2019s to come\u2014like one character casually mentioning hearing a baby\u2019s cries\u2014whose significance only becomes apparent later. She keeps a light touch, which proves to be a necessary counterbalance to Arthur\u2019s glumness. O\u2019Connor\u2019s half checked-out performance doesn\u2019t make him the most compelling protagonist, but it suits a character who\u2019s seemingly come to view life as a waking dream and now struggles to find a reason to wake up, no matter what consequences his slumber might invite. \u2014Keith Phipps
One example is watching a bombastic movie that gets me so amped up that it makes me finally dream of going to a movie theater again. And I'm absolutely shocked to admit that the film to test my patience the most in the past 12 months might very well be Godzilla vs. Kong, out today in theaters and on HBO Max. (Seriously, I am stunned to say this, after what I said about the last official Godzilla film.)
GvK gets off to a great start by wasting no time establishing the plot. Kong exists. Godzilla exists. Both are big and scary. Both are currently under some form of human control and understanding, albeit barely. And both seem agitated by some sort of mysterious presence on Earth. That's it. Wham, bam, thank you, Mothra.
This setup (which has a bit more substance, but only barely) whizzes by without wasting time, and it establishes a few central characters. Most are cookie-cutter lead characters with designs on doing the right thing regarding the film's unraveling monster mystery. The nicest thing I can say about them is that they don't waste time establishing likability, heart, and earnestness. They're mostly typical B-movie leads, and their job is to either be terrified by monsters or to set the stage for a child who establishes a special bond with Kong. They do both well enough.
Conversely, 2019's Godzilla: King of the Monsters spent much more time trying to convince us of its stupid plot, via stiff dialogue and acting, and far less having fun and moving things along. GvK appears to have taken those criticisms to heart.
I appreciated the film's cheesy foreshadowing moments worth cheering for, like when Kong decides to yank something out of the ground, at which point the audience sees this and screams, "I cannot wait for him to use that thing later." GvK has zero interest in subtly cluing viewers into what wild or stupid nonsense will soon follow, and its serviceable cast and nimble pacing do wonders to keep us hanging on.
Sadly, Warner Bros.' movie-preview service wasn't up to the task and produced too much compression-based artifacting and zero HDR tone-mapping, so I hope HBO Max's servers can withstand the brunt of thousands of film geeks piling onto this film simultaneously starting today. Me, I might just wait until vaccination and an ironclad mask can make it easier for me to watch this again in theaters.
At home, of course, I have the luxury of skipping to the most bombastic moments and reliving the scenes that legitimately made me shout, "oh $#!*" in my first viewing. But what really leaves me impressed is how this filmmaking crew stitched just enough humorous banter and awe-inspiring scenery together to keep me engrossed for a full two-hour runtime. Citizen Kane this ain't, but you've seen me nitpick painfully stupid films in my past reviews. Whichever screenwriter or script doctor cobbled this final script together knew what they were doing, as far as honoring the genre's silly-yet-passionate legacy goes.
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