This movie was some zany shit.
I am a big Kaiju fan in general and I really enjoyed Godzilla (2014), King of the Monsters and Kong: Skull Island. But this.... this was silly. Kong's entire plot line was absolute nonsense. Not like plotholes (there were those too), but his entire story is based on a premise that makes no sense. I will get into that in a bit. The action was great as expected, although MechaGodzilla is barely there for the fighting. Which I guess was to be expected as the movie was Godzilla vs Kong, but MG was very underutilized.
The Godzilla vs Kong fight in Hong Kong is good, and I like that it was "realistic" in its approach to the fight. Kong is really just a very large gorilla, and outside of being agile and intelligent, he really doesn't have any special abilities. Meanwhile Godzilla's portrayal is in line with the previous two movies, where he is an unstoppable God of War with Atomic Breath. Kong knew damn well he couldn't face tank the breath attack.... so he didn't. He dodged, he deflected he outmaneuvered. Aaaaaand he got his ass kicked, which just makes sense with how the two have been presented in the universe thus far. Also it allows Legendary to continue to make Godzilla films as he has a huge stable of bad guys he can go up against, whereas this is the only direction they could really go with Kong.
That said, there are things about Godzilla I didn't like. Despite keeping his body plan in line with the redesign from the 2014 movie, Godzilla acted completely different. In the previous two movies, Godzilla was a relatively slow, plodding tank. The monsters he was placed up against acted in line with these expectations, and it grounded the movie in a bit of realism. In this movie, Godzilla is still his new chunky self, but he is fast and agile. Ludicrously so. I guess because Kong's only "special ability" is speed and agility, they had to make Godzilla able to keep up? It just looked weird, as Godzilla was literally flying after Kong like a rabid dog in some scenes. It was king of zany and it brought me out of the movie, as Godzilla had never been depicted to act this way thus far. But it allowed him to have give and take with Kong, so they went with it. Godzilla was still an unstoppable behemoth, but they decided to max all of his stats for this film so he was unkillable, spammed special abilities and moved much faster than ever before. Strange, very strange.
This movie was the embodiment of "The story needed the plot to happen, so it did". Godzilla's story made some sense; the psionics from the King Ghidorah head drew him in to fuck up the Apex facility to destroy the pieces of MechaGodzilla. Godzilla has to be the Alpha Titan, so he seeks out Kong to show him who is boss. This is in line with Godzilla accepting all the monsters bowing to him at the end of King of the Monsters, and with him simply putting Kong down and not finishing him off in this film. He is asserting dominance, and if you aren't a threat he leaves you alone. But then strangely in the opening credits they show all of the other Kaiju with the same "Defeated" tag as King Ghidorah and the M.U.T.O.'s who Godzilla had to kill. Did he suddenly decide that submitting to him as alpha wasn't enough, and he killed them all? Contradictory statements within the same movie.
Kong's story on the other hand was a fucking mess. Kong was the vehicle for the movie to "happen" so he went around the world doing stuff to give the movie a plot. Ignoring any of the nonsense about the Hollow Earth and the energy source and whatever else, Kong's story premise made no sense. Kong needed to get off Skull Island....because? He wanted out of his enclosure, because he outgrew it I suppose. But what was he going to do? Swim? Where was he going to go? The only thing that makes a modicum of sense, is that the facility kept Kong's presence shielded from Godzilla, and they were just protecting him. But Godzilla was woken up by nuclear tests in the 50's. Was Kong too small then to be a threat? What about Kong's parents, were they not large enough before they were killed? At what point did they feel the need to construct a facility to enclose Kong, where he surpassed some magical threshold that would cause Godzilla to seek him out. If that wasn't the reason, why even build a facility, Kong isn't going to swim across the fucking Pacific to find a new home.
Then you have the stupidity of them being able to airlift Kong THE ENTIRE TIME, but they wanted the carrier fight scene, so they decided to put him on a boat. This happened offscreen, so how did they tranq him and movie him onto the boat? Was it with those same helicopters? Why not just take him the whole way with them? Is it cheaper to ship Kaiju by Sea Freight? Its disappointing to have the monster parts of the movie be facepalm. I expect that from the human characters, not the monsters. With that said, the humans were there. Their writing was atrocious, with a couple characters being literal mustache twirling levels of evil, with no depth. I wasn't expecting depth, its a Kaiju movie, but Demian Bichir's daughter was a pointless and terrible character whose whole purpose was to act like an unbearable bitch until she is killed. Demian Bichir's character himself was literally giving a villain monologue when he was killed, the tropiest of tropes. But again, no one gives a shit about the humans and I didn't care that THEIR actions made little sense or weren't grounded in reality. It was them making Kong a vehicle for stupidity that really rustled my jimmies.
TL;DR: Give it a watch, the fights are enjoyable, but this one was almost offensively stupid. And I fucking love the genre and am pretty accepting of the campiness that comes with these types of movies.
Chukzombi
YES! 
