The Stupid Film Where A Monkey Fights A Lizard And It Cost A Quarter Of A Billion Dollars To Make - I enjoyed it overall, even if it suffers from the excessive runtime that plagues a lot of blockbusters and there's a lot of superfluous scenes that could have been dropped, but having said that, it might have benefited from a few more scenes to flesh out the characters, because even by monster movie standards, these are pretty thin caricatures, and there's a whole bunch of people just milling about and I just have no idea why they're even there.
The makers do, at least, give some thought as to how the monsters move around the screen, because this is the first of these big paggas I've seen where you can actually tell what the kaiju are doing at any given moment, even through all the cgi screen clutter, and there's even some nice touches like when Kong smashes his dislocated shoulder back into place by slamming against a building and you can see loads of people falling to their deaths - or when Kong puts his giant monkey axe - which he retrieved from a giant throne at the Earth's core where it was charged by lightning - in the side of a building for safe keeping and when he pulls it back out, you can see where it's set the building on fire and loads of floors are engulfed in flames and people are dying by the dozens, some even jumping to their deaths in a recreation of footage of the September 11 attacks. Like I say, it's full of fun little touches.
I liked how Godzilla attacks from the water when he first challenges Kong, and how Kong attacks by jumping off buildings and swinging from things when it turns into a more stand-up fight and you think "ahhh - they are using the advantages offered them by their respective environments and now Kong has the upper hand!"
and then Godzilla just gets right up and curb-stomps Kong and makes him his punk monkey bitch so badly that it only stops when Godzilla literally gets bored with it and fucks off home. Best bit is when Godzilla is randomly trashing Hong Kong (although it had "Kong" in the name, so maybe he thought this is where he'd be hiding) and realises that Kong is at the center of the Earth fighting giant bats (as one does), so just sits there shooting Godzilla lasers at the ground
until he shoots all the way through the Earth to where Kong is, and then Kong looks into the hole on one side, and Godzilla looks into the hole at the other and screams (in Godzilla) "
FUCK YOU!" and Kong screams back (in King Kong) "FUCK
YOU!" and then he climbs all the way to China and they have a big fight. Whatever my criticisms of the state of what I will for the sake of argument call modern cinema, I must admit that yes, this is absolutely the kind of thing I want to see and would pay the better part of 20 quid to watch.
I know some people prefer the - ugh - gritty realism of the first Godzilla movie and lament the move towards cg spectacle, but I liked this one, where they go to the Earth's hollow core and fight giant zombie cyborg monsters and do clearly identifiable wrestling moves on each other. It's a completely, utterly, hopelessly stupid film that probably works better as a critique of capitalism, but God
zilla help me, I did enjoy that.
