As a day one ride or die Monsterverse bro this one was really deflating. It’s able enough to let the Monsterverse retain its title of best current cinematic universe, although this is more to do with how awful the output is from the competition than some high bar that GxK cleared. 

When it’s at its best it’s entirely because it’s working off the building blocks laid down by Jordan Vogt-Roberts and Michael Dougherty in their respective entries. The strength of the franchise has been how much cool and insane world building they can do to justify the cool and insane monster fights and I think it does a great job with it.

But I don’t know how the drop off became so steep, I liked Godzilla vs Kong well enough despite the clear executive interference and I was expecting Adam Wingard to have a better shot with Toby Emmerich jobless and being left to his own devices. But I guess he’s just not a good fit for this iteration of the world.

For all the complaints Gareth Edwards got over his characters being “boring”, I’ll gladly take a sullen Aaron Taylor Johnson doing his duty as he has to adjust to life as an orphan over the irritating and Reddit brained humans we get here. Dan Stevens plays Ace Ventura if he were played by Russell Brand and it’s exactly as annoying as it sounds. Bryan Tyree Henry returns as his equally annoying chronically online podcaster from GvK and their interactions start off as amusing but quickly become grating. Thankfully Rebecca Hall and Kaylee Hottle provide a strong emotional core for the film, I was genuinely invested in their stories.

Wingard makes the decision to treat the monsters as characters rather than concepts, which on paper is not a bad idea but what does happen is it goes full speed in killing any sense of scale and their mythical presence. All the sense of grandeur and scale given by Edwards, JVR and Dougherty is gone, in fact when the climactic action scene commenced in Rio De Jenero I’d forgotten the titans where supposed to tower over the cities.

I think maybe this could’ve better for me if it were a Kong solo film, firstly Godzilla is unimportant to the narrative to a profound degree. This is flat out a sequel to Kong Skull Island and Godzilla contributes nothing to the story he just shows up for the end fight.

I still had a good time overall, once the monster brawls started in earnest it was fun. But this was the first time I left the cinema after a Monsterverse flick excited at the prospects of where they would go next and in fact being pretty content if this was the end of it. Thankfully the Apple series is pretty good so it just seems isolated to Adam Wingard himself, he’s a film maker I like but I hope he decides to move on and make way for someone else.