Godzilla vs Kong Is What It’s Supposed To Be

Godzilla vs Kong is everything it needs to be. It’s exaclty what you want and delivers perfectly on its premise. It’s a spectacle of big ass movie making where two giant monsters slug it out with all the roaring, punching, biting, smashing, pounding and stomping you could want.

In the best way possible, it feels like a child wrote the movie by smashing their toys together. What else were you expecting? It whips ass.

It’s Thicc Lizzy and Beeg Monke duking it out. Once. Twice. And then a third time! Plus some other great monster scenes and an expansion of this universe further into fantasy and wonder. Also wink wink ending wink wink.

Thankfully this movie is shot well. If it wasn’t it would die a death. Such a big part of the wonder of these movies is how well they’re shot and how intense the sound is engineered. There’s cinematography on display and some actual style. Director Adam Wingard did have a vision here and made sure you can understand it. They’re shot from far away to give you scale but in tight to keep things intimate.

They aren’t hiding these characters in darkness or rain. There aren’t cutaways to the humans reacting to things we don’t see happening. There’s no confusion during an action scene. This isn’t Michael Bay Transformers. It isn’t a bunch of visual mess.

When they fight at night you get them backlight by the neon lights of Hong Kong. It works excellently to illuminate every nook and cranny of Godzilla’s scales. It works perfectly in theme with Godzilla and his radioactive white-blue scales and breath.

Kong moves differently, fights differently and sounds differently. This all gives him is own character instead of just being Monster 2. He’s the hero character. This movie is as much about him than it is anything or anyone else. The humans can communicate with him and he can communicate back. He can smile and emote. Godzilla doesn’t do any of that.

Humanizing Kong relies on the best human character in the movie, Jia. She’s played by Kaylee Hottle and is the only human character that Kong can trust. They communicate using sign language and without her, Kong would never get on board or trust the humans enough to fight for them against Godzilla.

The humans are the human characters. You’ve got your conspiracy freaks, mad scientists, regular fellas, military dudes, evil business pricks and good folks. Are the characters deep? No. Do they need to be? Also no. Would it be better if they were? I don’t know. They don’t really do too much but they do help to move the plot along and serve the framework of a story as you take a breath between action scenes.

It’s Tyranitar vs Rillaboom. That’s why you’re watching. The human drama is always the downside to these movies but there has to be a plot to action along. The humans do the least this time out compared to the others and that rocks.

I won’t get too into the plot as it can easily become spoilers, but Godzilla is attacking science corporation military experiment bases. We don’t know why. Then we find out.

There is also some evil human plot about energy or whatever. Doesn’t really matter. It’s just an excuse to have the humans around to speak exposition and move the movie from setting to setting.

That’s how we get our fight on aircraft carriers on the ocean with boats and missiles. That’s how we get our crazy theme park VR ride where we see more monsters and the world expands into fantasy. It’s how we get to the night time fight and then the day time fight.

For the most part the humans stay out of the way. They’ve finally realized that rifles and F-22’s aren’t going to do anything to these titans. The humans do get their little victory moments but they are little.

We’re here to watch the Dragonzord fight Optimus Primal. The movie doesn’t forget that. This movie is far more sci-fi fantasy than it is realistic. That’s what I want, but I did appreciate 2014’s Godzilla because of how real world it felt. Kong in 2017 felt the same, relatively speaking.

But I don’t know how you do King of the Monsters and then this versus movie by keeping things so grounded.

My only complaint for this movie is that I wasn’t able to see it in a theatre. I bought it on demand, turned the lights off, turned up the surround sound and made a night in of it. But that won’t do this movie justice the way that a giant screen in a dark theatre with a booming sound system would. I’m going to keep my eyes open for a re-run showing of this in the cinema sometime.

It’s all this and a bag of chips in under two hours. There are no wasted scenes and nothing is drawn out artificially.

I don’t know how you could watch this movie and be unhappy with it. Did you not know what you’re sitting down to watch? Give me more monster movies. I’d love to see one of these with Guillermo Del Toro at the helm.

This movie isn’t playing tricks on you. Godzilla. King Kong. Wrestlemania.

Sit back and mark out.

@Adam_Pyde on Twitter, Adam Reviews Things on Facebook. CanadianAdam on Twitch.

Shazam! is Totally Awesome

Shazam! whips. This movie is great. I wanted to see more of this character and his adventures before the movie was even over. I’m already hyped for Shazam! 2. It’s the best movie this year about a character involving the name Captain Marvel.

It’s nice to have a made for kids live action super hero movie. Movies like Into The Spiderverse and The Incredibles also slap, but they’re animated films. This is way more along the lines of typical kids movie. It’s really corny and silly and tries its best to nail the kid side of it. It tickled parts of the Power Rangers fan inside me. Teenager with attitude gets super powers and has to learn to be a hero.

It’s almost a Disney flick like The Lion King. It’s a kids movie but its great for adults too. Big goofy kid stuff, but it also has its dark and spookies. And the dark and spookies are great as well. If the movie didn’t nail how fun and colourful the kid stuff was, then this dark and spooky evil bad guy stuff might have fallen flat. The contrast here is executed really well.

There’s something weird about horror directors taking over big action movies and knowing exactly what they’re doing. Who would have guessed that the guy behind Lights Out and Annabelle: Creation was going to do a great job with a child friendly character? David F. Sandberg did a great job, and he got to show his horror chops at points.

I guess it would be just that a good filmmaker is a good filmmaker, so they know how to make good film. Scott Derrickson did Sinister and an Exorcism movie before taking over Doctor Strange. Peter Jackson did a bunch of gory, bloody horror movies before Lord of the Rings. Sam Raimi and James Gunn have done this as well.

It might be the closest super hero movie in spirit and execution to Spider-Man 2002 that we’ve gotten in 17 years. Shazam is so corny. So corny. But its sincere. Much in the same way Aquaman was big and corny, but this is just done better. It takes itself seriously, but it isn’t a serious movie overall.

I love movies that know what they are and nail that tone the whole movie. The Fast and Furious franchise knows it’s a big dumb car movie series, and they act accordingly with it which makes it super awesome. The Deadpool movies get what they are and they take it and run with it. WWE is at its best when it understands how dumb wrestling actually is and goes with it, instead of trying to mimic UFC or boxing.

This movie knows exactly what it is: a lighthearted adventure comedy. A teenager, who is a bit of a jerk like any teenager, goes to a cave where an ancient wizard gives him super powers and doesn’t know what to do with them besides kid stuff: make YouTube videos, buy beer, skip school, busk for money, take selfies, see boobs, etc.

Oh, but also he has to fight demons. Sprinkle in a few cute shenanigans.

Mark Strong is awesome as the villain. In a movie where the main character is so corny, you need contrast in the villain to counter that. He’s such a straight shooting evil jerkoff who wants to be evil because being evil is power. It’s similar to Ronan in the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie, but Strong has more to do and thus can give a better performance.

This is a movie that I don’t think could exist in a pre-Guardians of the Galaxy world. I think that movie opened up a lot of opportunities for Super Hero movies to become more weird and silly and show that people still can take them seriously as long as they’re made well. I think it also helped to open the door for directors to have more influence in their vision of the project and I think it’s benefitted blockbuster cinema as a whole.

Zachary Levi and Asher Angel both do great jobs. I’m curious how much time together they spent on set because Levi is very believable as Asher as an adult-boy. There isn’t much dissonance at all between the two of them. It’s so refreshing that movies are finding kids that can act instead of using the producer’s nieces and nephews.

There is some excellent writing that really fits the characters. Jack Dylan Grazer is excellent as the fanboy+BFF+nerd. The siblings all get their moment and have at least a couple one liners or moments to shine. I don’t want to spoil it, but I really hope you laugh as hard as I did. It was also neat to see some completely unexpected cameos.

There are some neat little references that are just brief enough that they aren’t distracting, but are fun in the meta whether they’re about DC or just winks towards classic movies.

Part of the movie is stopping the bad guy, but the main arc of it all is How To Be A Hero. That sounds like the same thing, but the focus isn’t on doing hero stuff as much as what it means to actually be a hero. Kind of like how another teenage super hero needed to learn that with great power came great responsibility.

The bad guy vs hero plot isn’t the whole movie though. There’s great moments where this movie is quiet and would be great as a “learning about family” type movie. It’s a better movie about family than a lot of movies that try to shoehorn that in to pretend their corporate product has a deeper meaning.

Also, how often is a movie set in Philadelphia? Especially one that isn’t terrible?

It sets up for a sequel in a really non cynical way. There’s some great payoffs all the way through the movie. Even through the credits you want to keep watching. The credits sequence is fantastic and worth every minute you spend in the theater.

Overall, its just rad. This movie whips ass. Its fun and if DC keeps their efforts along these lines with Aquaman, Wonder Woman and emphasis on the good parts of the pre-soft-reboot-post-Justice-League then they’ll have a really successful universe that’ll have people ripping their pants off like they do for the Avengers. I’m honestly excited for Shazam! 2 and I want to see what happens when Shazam crosses over with Aquaman and The Flash and so on.

Get that, this DC movie is so good it made me want to see this character again before I’d even left the theatre.

@Adam_Pyde on Twitter, Adam Reviews Things on Facebook. CanadianAdam on Twitch.