The obvious problem with refusing to take meaningful responsibility for your school age son and instead simply plonking him in front of YouTube is that he will inevitably gravitate toward mind rot which, in the specific case of my own unfortunate offspring, has recently meant brief clips from the stratospherically stupid Monsterverse movies. At some point, of course, the little nipper was always going to want to watch these somber monuments to the decline of the West in their insidious entirety, and so, in an effort to repay some kind of karmic debt, and by way of apology for my neglectful and inadequate parenting, I agreed to accompany him on his journey, in a textbook example of the cure being worse than the disease.
And, shockingly, 2021’s Godzilla vs Kong is considerably less IQ-diminishingly idiotic than I’d feared. In fact, to my immense surprise and my son’s consternation, the film’s near-two-hour running time does not consist solely in mindless mortal kombat between gigantic computer animated beasts while bit part actors from CSI: Miami futilely buzz around them in a transparent and half-assed attempt to secrete a paper-thin “human interest” element into a poorly conceived non-interactive video game. At times, in fact, the occasional diversion of oxygen into my prefrontal cortex was unexpectedly called for.
I have not (yet) had the pleasure of seeing the previous 27 entries in the Kongzilla Multiverse but, by the time this one gets underway, both titans are established and at large; one living in a Truman Show-style computer-generated greenscreen habitat with air conditioning and room service; the other patrolling the seas, dismembering three-headed dragons for laughs, and interfering with global shipping, though to a lesser degree than the US navy, I would wager. As always, the plot is driven by the bad guys, in this case fiendish megalomaniacal techbro Walter Simmons (Demián Bichir), who hasn’t slept a wink since humans were usurped as the biggest dogs in the evolutionary yard by the characters from Atari’s 1994 Streetfighter ripoff Primal Rage.
In an effort to restore humanity’s pre-eminent position atop the food chain, Simmons and his lackeys construct “Mechagodzilla” or “Megagodzilla” or something, and then enlist a bunch of improbably good-looking geeks to travel on a futuristic rollercoaster down to “Hollow Earth”, Kong’s Jurassic World-like domain at the centre of the planet, to harness its mysterious energy source and thereby power the dick-swinging of their remote controlled mastodon. Obviously the plan goes to shit – Mechagodzilla develops a mind of its own (which is more than we can say for most of the other characters in this film), breaks free of human control, and goes on a rampage, forcing the previously antagonistic Big Beasts to join forces and overcome the threat to what I am still, at the time of writing, inclined to refer to as “civilisation.”
But what’s genuinely interesting and even arresting about this Michael Bay-like monster mash is the underlying question; can we ever trust something as powerful and destructive as Godzilla? According to Walter Simmons, echoing the Neo-Realist school of International Relations theory, of course we can’t; the worst case scenario can materialise at any time, and in an anarchic world with no sovereign, we must relentlessly endeavour to enhance our own security, which can never be optimised if there’s a 100-foot nuclear dragon on the loose.
The hippie-dippy scientists, autistic teenagers, psychic children, and various other members of Kamala Harris’ electoral coalition disagree; they are Constructivists, for whom there is something inside the proverbial black box; Godzilla has a soul, a value system, an identity, and we must try to coexist with him because, after all, anarchy is what states (supermonsters) make of it. And proving, perhaps unfashionably, that even the colonialist oppressor is capable of redemption, Alexander Skarsgård’s white male hotnerd starts off in Kenneth Waltz’s camp, but transitions into Alexander Wendt’s, through the time-honoured combination of “social learning” and wanting to sleep with Rebecca Hall.
Maybe I am (characteristically) reading too much into this glorified Saturday morning cartoon, but I remain convinced that the makers of Godzilla vs Kong were aware of and consciously drawing on these scholarly traditions while conceiving their magnum opus. Ultimately, and as preposterous as this film is, it’s competently made, adequately acted, has a couple of interesting ideas, and it’s a shame that the same intellectual ambition didn’t underpin New Empire, though the six-year-old certainly enjoyed that one more because it’s shorter and more stuff gets blown up.
Rating: * * *