Adam Wingard
Godzilla VS Kong

Starting with a certain, moderate dose of style, with a narrative effort as appreciable as it is unnecessary (Edwards), growing with an adventurous aftertaste à la Conan Doyle (such Vogt-Roberts), passing through the sprawling and sloppy pseudo-environmentalist rhetoric and resulting photonic boredom (such Dougherty), the arc of Japanese monsters reimagined in Hollywood fashion comes to fruition accompanied by such Wingard.

Despite the title, the protagonist of the film is King Kong, who for some random reason is taken around the world while Godzilla runs rampant: inevitable, according to the screenwriters, that the two would end up slapping each other. That's all it takes to put together three immense set-pieces, two where the iconic monsters fight until they collapse, and a third which, affirming the optimistic American balance act, sees them battered and bruised fighting to the limits against a deadly common enemy.

Legendary's choice seems to have been quite wise: away with the baggage, the emotions, the nonsense stories of the various characters, away with verbosity, motivations. The humans, "villains" included, hardly rise above caricatures. Everything is reduced to a narrative framework that serves only as a pretext, exactly like in the most classic and reliable aesthetics of B-movies. The new approach, or rather, the exhaustive post-production work that followed the flop of the previous film, pays off. And delivers two hours of enjoyable and entertaining viewing, because almost everything works, is solid, doesn't bore; necessarily, such a linear and simple structure is hardly likely to collapse, and the diligent work of the production team and actors helps to bring home the 'little task' (so to speak: $200 million budget and almost half of it in net profit...). A lot of money, few tried and tested robust ideas, a directorial flatness that isn't even noticed, (most of the work is done by the storyboards, the conceptual artists, and the CGI), three or four scenes with the few human characters needed to link the furious monster duels. Need anything else? Apparently not, and all in all, it's better to have such an approach than unlikely as well as ridiculous pretensions of communicating something.

After all, we are talking about Legendary, not Toho. In Japan, Godzilla is a household name, a symbol that in over sixty years of honorable career has embodied inspirations, atomic and non-atomic threats, and entertained both adults and children. And the Japanese, when they chose to relaunch it, handed it over to one of the most visionary and capable artists available to them. Spending much less, with a conceptual approach that in the West we can only dream of, they restored an unsettling life to their precious and cursed atomic nemesis. You can't expect the same from Americans, they simply can't do it anymore. If King Kong is the diligent ape capable of communicating with humans, the US Godzilla becomes and remains a classic, albeit terrifying, threat to be eradicated at all costs. Gone is the radiation theme, the ambiguities have been abandoned, the role of the hero for kids set aside, the atomic lizard simply destroys what threatens it and does everything to harm King Kong, who obviously isn't just going to sit there and is trying everything to take it down. This is the obvious and only leitmotif of the film, and in this regard, the dynamics of the confrontations are undeniable; well-coordinated fight choreography, excellent lighting results, even if there's little epic and much arrogance, and the nighttime confrontation among the skyscrapers of Hong Kong, despite the echoes of Pacific Rim and a couple of nods to Shin Godzilla, sometimes gives the impression of a nightclub brawl between two beefy goons. The final battle, pumped and brutal just right, marks a decent peak of cinematic ignorance. Between one brawl and another, the visual team's great work is always appreciable, erupting in gravity-defying landscapes, making monsters appear at every corner, striving to demonstrate the proximity to humans and the empathy of the giant ape.

Godzilla has fascinated me since I was little because it's a curious pop parable that in its own way narrates atomic energy, its terribleness, hope, and the destruction it generates, and because I find it somewhat bizarre that a dinosaur puppet has made such an impression in the imagination of a complex society like the Japanese one. And so it saddens me a little to see it like this. Not so much feared, bombarded, punched, kicked, attacked with atomic axes and lasers, but rather reduced to a banal video game character, stripped of its ambiguity, its gloom. But all in all, Mr. Hollywood, from you I expect foolishness, entertainment, spectacular effects, cathartic city destructions, colossal weapons, pseudoscience, embarrassingly stupid characters, and little else. I expect, all things considered, Godzilla Vs Kong. So, from my side, a "thank you" is well deserved.