Godzilla v. Kong is a 2021
American monster film directed by Adam Wingard. A sequel to Godzilla: King of
the Monsters (2019) and Kong: Skull Island (2017), making it the fourth film in
Legendary 's Monster Verse . It is also the 36th film in the Godzilla franchise,
the 12th film in the King Kong franchise, and the fourth Godzilla film to be
completely produced by a Hollywood studio. The film features stars like Alexander
Skarsgård, Millie Bobby Brown, Rebecca Hall, Brian Tyree Henry, Shun Oguri,
Eiza González, Julian Dennison, Lance Reddick , Kyle Chandler,
and Demián Bichir .
In the film, Kong clashes
with Godzilla as humans lure the giant ape into the Hollow Earth to retrieve a
power source for a weapon to stop Godzilla's mysterious rampages. In the United
States and Canada, Godzilla v. Kong was initially projected to gross around $23
million over its five-day opening weekend, compared to debuting to around $68
million in a pre-COVID marketplace. It
made $9.6 million from 2,409 theaters in its first day, the best opening day
figure of the pandemic. After grossing $6.7 million on its second day, five-day
projections were increased to $30–40 million. Playing
in 3,064 theaters by Friday, the film went on to debut to $32.2 million ($48.5
million over the five days), the best opening weekend of the pandemic.
Collider attributed the
film's box office results to "positive word-of-mouth." The film
grossed $13.3 million in its second weekend, remaining in first and becoming
the highest-grossing domestic release of the pandemic (passing Tenet 's $58.5
million).
But there are still some Bad
critics to this particular Monster film. Although, This sci-fi extravaganza
touches on all the movie concerns of the immediate pre-COVID-19 period: the
threats posed by alien beings, artificial intelligence and civic chaos, Entertainment
Weekly's Leah Greenblatt was less positive and also criticized the use of the
human characters, saying "the human stuff is just extra." She notes
that some characters, like Brian Tyree Henry and Julian Dennison, were utterly
wasted, and that the humans were just used to fling nonsense story exposition
that doesn't actually help move along the plot of this "hectic" film.
But Greenblatt admits that the monster film delivers on its promise of
monstrous action. Matt Donato from WhatToWatch has similar critiques to those
mentioned above. He notes that Godzilla vs. Kong under-develops its fleshy
characters” and abandons any “grounded”
plot points. But again, like we’ve seen before, he praised the smashy-flashy
Kaiju throw down” for its epic action. The problematic nature of the
film even extends to the main casting choices: Godzilla and Kong's voices are
both digitally generated. Why were they not voiced by actual giant monsters?
Instead, some overpaid audio engineer collects a paycheck while two more
perfectly qualified animals are out of a job.
They are also good critics
concerning this, according to Metacritic, which assigned a weighted average
score of 59 out of 100 based on 57 critics; the film received "mixed or
average reviews". Audiences polled by Cinema Score gave the film an
average grade of "A" on an A+ to F scale (the highest of the MonsterVerse
), while PostTrak reported 86% of audience members gave it a positive score,
with 74% saying they would definitely recommend it.
Richard Roeper of the Chicago
Sun-Times gave the film 3 out of 4 stars, writing: "Godzilla v. Kong is
the kind of movie you can pretty much forget about almost instantly after you've
seen it — but it's also the kind of movie that makes you forget
about everything else in your life while you're watching it." Jamie Graham of Total Film gave the film 3 out
of 5 stars, writing: "Watching these famous monsters share the screen for
the first time since 1963's King Kong v. Godzilla, in a series of expertly
choreographed battles, packs real wallop, even if you can't help wishing that
screen was 30ft high at your local cinema."
Alonso Duralde of the The Wrap
said that the franchise had "given up on everything but the monster
fights" and wrote: "Yes, obviously, no one goes to these movies for
the deep human characters or for plot machinations or even for the metaphors
about the environment and industrialization. Here's the thing, though —
they come in handy to fill in the gaps between the monster battles, and you
miss them when they're not there. And since even those battles are somewhat
perfunctory, what are we even doing here?" John Nugent of Empire gave the
film 2 out of 5 stars, writing: " Godzilla vs. Kong mostly delivers on its
promise of a big monster fighting another big monster. It just depends whether
you're willing to sit through the toe-curlingly bad set-up that surrounds
it."