Godzilla vs. Kong: A Fun Popcorn Film That Will Introduce the Mainstream to Director Adam Wingard

Quick thoughts: Godzilla vs. Kong is a wonderful popcorn film that does a lot in under two hours

Starting with 2014’s Godzilla, the Legendary and Warner Brothers produced Monsterverse films have steadily built towards a very fun battle royale. Godzilla vs Kong is a perfect popcorn film in that it features a fun final fight, likable humans (finally!), and a story that makes perfect sense if you don’t think about it. The best thing about the movie is that it packs in a whole lot of story in under two hours, which is a breath of fresh air because most blockbusters need 150 minutes to tell the same exact story. 

Directed by Adam Wingard (You’re Next, The Guest), and written by Eric Pearson (Thor: Ragnarok) and Max Borenstein (Godzilla: Kong: Skull Island) Godzilla vs. Kong focuses on what happens when people won’t let Godzilla do his thing. After saving the world twice by defeating the two MUTOs and King Ghidorah in Godzilla and Godzilla: King of the Monsters, the world’s government and Monarch still don’t trust Godzilla after he attacks a mysterious factory owned by the Apex company. Normally, saving the world twice would buy a gigantic monster some trust, but since the attacks are deadly, the world is put on alert, and nefarious plots are put into effect. 

Meanwhile, King Kong is tucked away inside a gigantic dome (built by Monarch) on Skull Island, that keeps him safe from battling Godzilla. After the Godzilla attacks, Apex CEO Walter Simmons (Demián Bichir) and his daughter Maia (Eiza González) hire Dr. Nathan Lind (Alexander Skarsgård), to travel to Skull Island, so he can convince Kong expert Ilene Andrews (Rebecca Hall) and her adopted daughter Jia (Kaylee Hottle), that Kong needs to travel to Antarctica, so he can enter the Hollow Earth to retrieve a mythical power source that can be used against Godzilla. From there, the two monsters fight, many things are destroyed, and Millie Bobby Brown, Julian Dennison and Bryan Tyree Henry find themselves trapped inside an underground rail system that travels from the United States to Hong Kong. 

The final fight, which has been well covered in the film’s movie trailers, is wonderfully coherent and makes logical sense (I’d love to write more, but I don’t want to wreck anything). Yes, there’s a wild amount of property destruction and death, but if you’ve been watching King Kong or Godzilla since 1933, you know that the two of them always leave messes in their films, so the final battle here isn’t anything different. In the end, it is one of the best giant monster fights of recent memory, and it stands alongside the best fights in Godzilla vs. Destroyah or King Kong (2005).

Godzilla vs. Kong is a wonderful popcorn film, and it hopefully will reignite talks of further sequels featuring the two likable heroes.