Godzilla vs. Kong (Adam Wingard, 2021)

Have you seen Jurassic Park? Or War of the Worlds? Or San Andreas? Or The Day After Tomorrow? Ya have? Well, then, you've seen Godzilla vs. Kong too because all of these films tell the same damn story. The dinosaurs and aliens and earthquakes and global cooling are just an ideological smokescreen because the uncreatives behind these behemoths can imagine only one narrative path - that which ends in the reunification of the nuclear family. The slight difference with Godzilla Vs. Kong is that it takes this dictate of the Spielbergian concept film to hyperbolic depths. Brian Tyree Henry's wife is dead. Alexander Skarsgård's brother is dead. Shun Oguri's father is dead. Kaylee Hottle's entire family is (presumably) dead and Rebecca Hall has adopted her. Millie Bobby Brown is estranged and eventually separated from her father Kyle Chandler. Even Kong has a family he can get back to through some sort of portal in the Antarctic although, typical for such a shoddy screenplay, that idea is abandoned with no explanation. In this climate, evil father and daughter capitalists Demián Bichir and Eiza González are the villains precisely because their familial unit is intact. 

Fret not. Those two are dispatched and it's incumbent upon Skarsgård to make good on his kissing Hall early in the film (in front of a witness as all formations of the heterosexual couple must be) to form a de facto family at the end as the optics repeatedly demonstrate (see the final screen shot). As always, there's nothing inherently wrong with this narrative gambit. It's just an excruciatingly creaky one. Why can't Godzilla and Kong visit destruction on an artist collective? A cult? An apartment complex? Or if Hollywood drones cannot write human characters, then just get rid of them. Kong knows sign language now. He can teach it to Godzilla and bypass humans altogether. 

Grade: C (docked a notch for a sympathetic portrait of a podcaster espousing conspiracy theories)