Godzilla vs Kong Early Reviews Praise Monster Fights But Not Human Characters

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Early reviews are in for Godzilla vs Kong. The film is set to bring together the two Titans on screen for the first time since 1962 and culminates several years of storytelling. Legendary kick off the MonsterVerse with 2014's Godzilla directed by Gareth Edwards. Kong: Skull Island introduced the new version of Kong to the franchise in 2017, and Godzilla: King of the Monsters brought back Gojira for an epic battle. Now, the two are set to face off against each other when Godzilla vs Kong hits HBO Max and theaters on March 31.

Godzilla vs Kong already broke box office records with its international debut. The film earned $70 million in China alone on its way to a cumulative total of $122 million for the entire weekend. The film's box office take will look a bit different in the US, with theaters still operating under strict safety protocols. Godzilla vs Kong is also available on HBO Max. Still, early reactions to the film indicated that Godzilla vs Kong deserves to be seen on the biggest screen possible, and hardcore fans may make the trek to their local cinema to see the film in as big of a format as possible.

The review embargo has been lifted on Godzilla vs Kong, and it looks like most critics are saying the same. The latest MonsterVerse entry delivers the franchise's best action in years, with many praising director Adam Wingard's handling of the film's CGI centerpieces. Like the early reactions, critics find the human drama lacking, but most emphasize that is beside the point anyway. Critics seem to agree that Godzilla vs Kong succeeds where it needs to: the epic battles between the two monsters at the center of the film. Check out some of the reactions below and click through to read the critic's full thoughts:
 

When it comes to the monster lore and the fight sequences, Godzilla vs. Kong truly delivers. Godzilla's appearances are incredibly threatening and work to ramp up the perceived ancient tension between him and King Kong. The battle scenes are fantastic, with Godzilla and King Kong truly giving it all they’ve got when defending themselves against the other. There is, of course, plenty of destruction, with Godzilla vs. Kong taking the time to focus mainly on the creatures during their fight.

In the end, though, it’s all about the battles, and Wingard’s film offers some of the franchise’s best. That ocean-set face-off is a master class in coherent CGI extravaganzas that a) take place at dusk and b) often underwater. The action-packed final act is crammed with plenty of fan catnip — what is a Godzilla film without a nighttime battle set in a neon-colored city? — that maintains momentum and furthers the story with every big-pawed swipe. The tantalizing final frames hint at more to come, but Godzilla vs. Kong does something rare: It offers a satisfying story that can stand alone, even when its monstrous heroes demand more exploration.

Let it be said that the special effects are decently special — and frequently in broad daylight this time, as opposed to in the Monsterverse's last installment, Godzilla: King of the Monsters, in which nearly everything took place either at night or under water. In Godzilla vs. Kong, you can always see what's going on, whether its in daylight or neon-drenched night — even if it's a little disengaged from anything we'd normally regard as reality.

While stunning, the footage has that hyperreal-to-the-point-of-fake look, where everything is either moodily twilit or smothered in magic-hour honey. Granted, that’s an improvement over both Godzilla’s and Kong’s hokey lo-fi origins. Just because Warner Bros. is treating the adversaries as bona fide A-listers doesn’t mean the rock-’em-sock-’em extravaganza amounts to anything more than a dumb-fun B-movie. Nor should it. Considering the havoc a microscopic virus has wreaked on the past year, being caught between two 400-foot titans doesn’t seem so bad.

Ultimately, the real battle here is not between Godzilla or Kong, but between the two movies within the movie: a lovingly rendered, big-budget tribute to B movies of the past, and a crushingly mediocre, cliché-bloated sci-fi. Sadly, the wrong monster wins.

Godzilla vs Kong is exactly what its trailers and promotional and marketing material said it would be: a big, thrilling, dumb action movie that no monster movie fan should miss.

The seriousness in Godzilla and Godzilla: King of the Monsters has been completely jettisoned to make room for moments like the one where Kong rips another monster’s head off and then eats the goo inside, or like when Godzilla blasts his atomic breath straight into the ground until he literally burroughs into the center of the Earth. Godzilla vs. Kong is a film without pretensions. It knows exactly what it wants to do, and what it wants to do is have monsters smash buildings while they’re throwing punches at each other. It’s finally what this franchise has been building towards: a movie about monsters, not humans.

It’s an excessively simple movie, especially in its rousing second half, and it works as a Saturday matinee treat, a relic of a time before films like this were A+ mega-budget tentpoles. My kids are big fans of the previous MonsterVerse movies, and they enjoyed this one too. Godzilla Vs. Kong isn’t as poetic as Godzilla or as character-rich as Skull Island, but it gets the job done as straight-up IMAX-friendly rock-n-roll.

When the movie's monsters are pushed to the fore and thrust together, though, Godzilla vs Kong is a much better film. One exceptional sequence doesn't make any picture a masterpiece, but the luminous wrestling match that takes place against Hong Kong's neon-lit skyline is instantly gorgeous, impressively staged and reminiscent of Tron: Legacy's dazzling imagery. While the fact that the film's fights aren't messy, dim and frenetic to the point of being visually nonsensical shouldn't be as much of a win as it is, that's the state of big blockbuster action these days.

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Fortunately, it sounds like Godzilla vs Kong delivers on its central conceit, and that's exactly what it came here to do. Much of the criticism leveled against previous MonsterVerse films have involved the fight scenes being too dim or too chaotic for anyone to track the goings-on. Godzilla vs Kong seems to fix that, both with its well-lit fights and Wingard's tight direction, allowing those battles to be followed much more easily.

Naturally, and to no one's surprise, the most significant criticism leveled at the film involves its human characters, a consistent weak point of the MonsterVerse. Luckily, that's not the focus of the franchise. While it still faces an uphill battle with its day-and-date release in the US, it sounds like Godzilla vs Kong is shaping up to be a success. Even though Legendary doesn't have any more MonsterVerse films in the works at the moment, it sounds like a sure thing after the way the film is being received both by critics and at the international box office.

Godzilla Vs. Kong (2021)
Release Date: Mar 31, 2021