Warner Bros, available now streaming

When Godzilla begins attacking cities apparently at random, Apex Cybernetics hatch a plan involving Kong to obtain a power source capable of fuelling a weapon powerful enough to take on the giant lizard.

Godzilla vs Kong is a film which struggles to really know what it wants to be. On one hand, it’s pure spectacle cinema, the way that the best types of monster movie are. It understands that its audience wants to see the big ape and the giant lizard knocking seven shades of snot out of one another and it delivers on that with epic fight scenes and FX the likes of which monster movie fans of previous decades such as myself could have only dreamed.

But on the other hand, it wants to insert itself into the Legendary ‘Monsterverse’ and that involves coming up with a convoluted set of plot threads to attach it to those movies beyond simply mentioning Monarch and having a handful of appearances of characters from previous movies. The end result of this tension between just having fun with the core premise and constantly trying to invoke this bigger, deeper narrative picture to it all is that the film comes off as Big Dumb Fun, though perhaps not quite in the way that it intends.

Despite the billing, what may surprise is that this is very much Kong’s film. Not only does Kong get the most screen time, and is presented for much of it as the ‘saviour’ of humanity, but also much of the narrative follows him sympathetically. Kong here is portrayed as a noble savage – a creature whose job is to protect humanity, symbolised here by the bind he shares with a small deaf girl from his island, whom he saved from some natural disaster or other which overtook all her people (offscreen).

The film also follows up extensively on the ‘Hollow Earth’ threads touched upon briefly in Kong: Skull Island. To its credit, it does so completely straight-faced, as the protagonists search for the place within the centre of the planet from which all titans apparently hail. These sequences form some of the most visually interesting and striking of the whole movie.

As to the actual fights between the two main players – while the first encounter makes interesting use of an environment not common for these types of scenes, the big end sequence battle in the third act takes place in the usual neon-drenched city scape (Hong Kong in this case) and although the visuals are still spectacular, it gets to a point where one wonders how there is any city left standing at all as the two are smashed through buildings, into skyscrapers and so on.

The twist – such as it is and already seriously hinted at by international trailers – is one that even absent that information you won’t struggle to see coming from about twenty minutes into the film. The subplot that gets it there is the part of the script into which Millie Bobbie-Brown’s Madison Russell is jammed, for no real reason other than to give her something to do.

Similarly wasted are Rebecca Hall as ‘Kong Whisperer’ Dr Ilene Andrews, whose job is mainly to stand around open mouthed as adopted daughter Jia communicates with Kong, and Julian Dennison as Maddie’s perpetually confused friend.

It’s difficult to argue with the notion that people don’t go to see a monster movie these days for complex plotting or human interest narratives. What’s unfortunate with Godzilla vs Kong is that it seems to want to have its cake and eat it in this regard, jamming in various human characters whose main mechanical job is exposition but then having aspirations at giving them stories and arcs as well, some of which are contradictory, others of which are just plain silly.

Additionally, the tension can’t be ignored between the sheer scale of the destruction and devastation wreaked by the central protagonists vs the tight focus on a handful of human characters who remain mostly unaffected by it. 2014’s Godzilla understood that the real impact of the destruction could be driven home by the way in which it directly affected the human cast. Godzilla vs Kong, by contrast, sees whole swathes of a city, half a naval fleet and various other vehicles, buildings and so on destroyed, presumably at massive cost of human life, but leaves its central human characters mostly isolated from any of it. As a result of this, and the film’s focus on Kong who is greatly anthropomorphised here, it’s difficult to really emotionally connect with what we see on screen in the city-based fight scenes, reducing them to just a spectacle thing of a big lizard hitting a big ape which feels more like it’s happening in a video game than in any approximation of a living, breathing world.

But elsewhere, when it’s just letting big monsters dominate the screen (which it frequently is) then it fairly sings, showing a visual depth and flair that few other entries in the genre can match. The Hollow Earth sequences are light years ahead of Skull Island’s dreary environs in which one new creature and no more would occasionally pop up to facilitate the next set piece, and there’s imagination here which outstrips most of its stablemates in the Monsterverse in many ways. It’s just a shame that the execution on the human character side never matches the ambition, and that so many plot points for the monsters are so very predictable.

Verdict: Turn off your brain and tune out the human characters and this is a decent enough monster romp. 6/10

Greg D. Smith