The Movie Minute

By Joanna Langfield

For a movie made by the special effects team, this one isn’t half bad.

A surprisingly top flight group of actors has collected to play second, or maybe third fiddle to the real stars of this production, you know ‘em , you love ‘em, ladies and gentlemen in this corner, it’s Godzilla vs Kong! There’s a little bit of a story here,  but basically, the filmmakers know who we’ve come to see and we get to see plenty of the impressively computer generated monsters who, of course, are at one another in a go for broke effort to save the world.

Like the other high profile superstars versus one another recent picture, Allen v Farrow, this is a pretty one sided affair. I think there was some mention of why Godzilla is godzillaing, but the weight here goes to the mighty (or is he?) Kong. Turns out Kong speaks sign language and, underneath all the stomping and howling and scary stuff, he’s just a guy who wants to find his family and go home. So, of course, we feel for good ole Kong, when he’s strapped up and transported to the steady string of places he’s forced to go to. And we worry when he looks like he’s about to go down for the count, after taking on not just his archest enemies, but the city of Hong Kong as well.

For the record, the real life actors, including Alexander Skarsgard, Millie Bobby Brown, Rebecca Hall and Brian Tyree Henry, try to actually act, at least in the first half of the movie, when they’re still allowed dialogue, not just reaction shots. And they do handle their tasks well, even if I did giggle every time they would earnestly refer to “Kong” or “Godzilla” with the same gravity they brought to the rest of their lines.  But this is not a movie about the actors or the people they play. You can feel the special effects department going wild, telling everybody to basically step aside and let us have fun with what we and a few thousand computers can do. They do have fun. And, if this is your thing, you just might, too.