Rebel Moon Part Two is a Marginal Improvement

A few months ago, I watched Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon Part One: A Child of Fire on Netflix. I wasn’t a big fan. The story and characters were paper thin, and I felt no emotional attachment to any of it at all. It felt like a tired rehash of everything from Star Wars to Seven Samurai. It had some decent action scenes but ultimately fell flat.

Netflix

But it had already been announced that there were two of these movies, so the sequel was already inevitable. So join me as we once again jump into the world of Kora the heroine, some tough army general guy, Kora’s boyfriend, a chick with ripoff lightsabers, another chick who looks a lot like Furiosa from Mad Max and who I actually forgot about entirely from the first movie, and Bronan the Brobarian. There’s also a robot with antlers and a cape who is voiced by Anthony Hopkins.

If you have no idea who any of these schmucks are, that’s fine. I hardly do either, and I watched both movies. I’m not going to rehash any of the story beats from the first movie because I don’t want to and most of it is pretty boring. Basically, our dull protagonists have returned to their home planet and they know that the bad guys are on their tail and they only have a few days to prepare for their arrival.

But before they do that, they spend a lot of time harvesting grain. If you are one of those people who really enjoy watching people harvest grain, often in slow motion, then boy howdy this is the movie for you. I am of course being sarcastic, because grain harvesting is extremely boring to watch and the grain harvesting scenes should have been half as long, at most. They do try to justify all this, since the Imperium or the Motherworld or whatever the bad guys are called want the grain they are harvesting, so the good guys harvest the grain and put bags of it around their village to prevent the bad guys from just blasting them from space with their death lasers. I suppose this makes a degree of sense but there is still no reason for the grain harvesting scenes to go on for as long as they do.

But before the big battle begins, director/writer/producer/cinematographer Zack Snyder seems to realize that all the characters are dull as dishwater and there is little to no reason to care about any of them, so there’s a lengthy scene where they sit down around a dinner table and tell each other their backstories. It is an extremely clunky and inorganic way of conveying backstory, and while some of their stories have some cool visuals, it does very little to make the characters more interesting.

I did kinda like General Titus, the tough army general guy, but that had more to do with the fact that he was played by Djimon Hounsou, who is a great actor and I always like the characters he plays. If I cared about any of the characters at all, it was thanks to the actors playing them being able to make something out of nothing and had nothing to do with any good writing by Snyder and the other screenwriters (because there isn’t any good writing in either of the Rebel Moon movies).

Meanwhile, the main bad guy from the first movie, who I think was called General Noble (usually I would look this up to make sure I got the character’s name right but I don’t care enough about this movie to expend the 30 seconds it would take to look up), has survived and is ready to wreak havoc on our oh-so-memorable heroes. He is also sporting a haircut that can only be described as the Space Hitler, or Spitler if you will (couldn’t help it). He and the rest of his minions wear uniforms that are very Nazi-like, making the comparison to Hitler (or Spitler) all the more obvious. Zack Snyder’s films are not subtle.

I also have to take a minute to gripe about Zack Snyder’s cinematography. I know nothing about cameras and lenses and all that, but I know when I see something that bothers me, and there are a few things I’ve noticed about movies for which Snyder was the cinematographer, including both Rebel Moon movies and Army of the Dead, which came out on Netflix a few years ago.

OK, let’s see if I can talk about this without sounding like a complete idiot. When I watch a movie, I like for the things I see on the screen to be in focus. I understand that it can be an effective stylistic decision to have some things be in focus and some things a bit out of focus, but in these Snyder movies it seems like in a lot of shots things on the outer edges of the frame are blurry. It’s like the center of the screen is in focus but as you go farther out things get more out of focus until they start to have this weird sort of haze to them. It always makes me think that either my TV is broken or I need to get my eyes checked.

It absolutely bugs the heck out of me. I feel like this must be intentional on Snyder’s part, and I hate it because it is distracting, which is the exact opposite of what good cinematography should be, right? I mean, isn’t the entire point to make you forget you’re watching a movie? Another annoying thing is that in a lot of shots the lights are too bright. Like, when two people are having a conversation in front of a window the light from the window is so bright it washes out the features of the people talking. Has anyone else who has seen these movies been bothered by these things? I’d love to know.

Getting back to the movie’s story (or what there is of it), eventually the final battle begins. The film’s second half is almost non-stop combat, and some of it is pretty cool. But Snyder overindulges in slow motion shots (a well-known tendency of his), and the overuse of slow motion sometimes seems like Snyder is trying to make individual moments more epic or cool than they really are. I think that slow motion would be more effective if used more sparingly, to give individual moments more impact. But Snyder overuses the technique and it frequently lessens the impact of those cool moments instead of emphasizing them.

The movie’s special effects are good, and there are some excellent explosions, which are important in an action movie. I enjoyed Kora’s battle with Spitler on Spitler’s Evil Spaceship of Doom (which I think was called the Dreadnaught). The ship has been sabotaged and is in the process of crashing and exploding during the battle, and that bit was good fun.

To no one’s great surprise, our plucky-but-forgettable heroes emerge victorious. But then something really dumb happens. For both movies, Kora has felt super guilty about assassinating some princess (I forget what she was the princess of or why this was supposedly significant), and after the battle is over, when she expresses her remorse over killing the princess, General Titus, out of absolutely nowhere, is like, “Oh yeah, that princess totally isn’t dead,” and then they all swear an oath to find the princess and the movie ends.

Wait, what?

Aside from being blatant sequel bait (Snyder has said he wants to make more of these movies), this makes no sense and comes completely out of left field. How in the heckballs does Titus know this? And why oh why did he not mention this earlier? He presumably knew beforehand that Kora felt bad about killing the princess, so why was he just sitting on this little nugget of information? It also completely fails to have any sort of emotional impact, since we barely have any idea of who the princess is supposed to be.

That was very annoying, but I’m probably overthinking it. Even though I’ve spent most of this post griping about it, I do still think that Rebel Moon Part Two is a very slight improvement over Part One, but it was a low bar to clear so that’s not saying very much. In the second movie it at least feels like there’s something at stake, as opposed to the first movie which entirely lacked tension or stakes, and the characters were somewhat more likable. Overall I found the second movie to be more enjoyable than the first, despite its MANY flaws. 

Both Rebel Moon movies end up feeling extremely derivative. Borrowing from other movies isn’t automatically a bad thing, but Snyder never does anything new or interesting with the DNA he swipes from other movies, and both Rebel Moon flicks end up feeling like a hodgepodge of other, better movies. I don’t hate Zack Snyder as a person or anything (he sounds like a pretty good dude), and I’ve enjoyed some of his other movies, but if he could tone down some of his more annoying tendencies as a filmmaker and put more care into creating something that feels truly unique instead of derivative, his movies would be much more rewarding.

Amazon’s Fallout is a Video Game Adaptation Done Right

Video games are infamously difficult to adapt. There have been many attempts, and many infamous failures. Some, such as House of the Dead and Super Mario Bros. are widely considered to be some of the worst films ever made. With regards to Super Mario, I’m not talking about the recent animated film, I’m talking about the live-action one from the 90’s starring Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo, which was a notorious flop. There are some video game adaptations that I enjoy, such as the Resident Evil, Mortal Kombat, and Tomb Raider movies. But even then, I enjoy those because I find them to be highly entertaining, not because they’re actually, you know, good. Mortal Kombat: Annihilation is another infamously terrible movie, but it can still be entertaining as a so-bad-it’s-good movie.

The point is that video game adaptations that are genuinely good are few and far between. It makes sense if you think about it: many modern games tell epic, sprawling stories that unfold over dozens of hours, and it is very difficult to condense that kind of story into a concise 90-minute or two-hour movie. But recently, we have been blessed with some truly excellent video game-based TV series. I’ve written before about Netflix’s animated Castlevania series, which up until recently I would have considered to be the best video game adaptation ever. But there are now two live-action shows competing for that title.

Those shows are HBO’s The Last of Us and Amazon’s Fallout, both of which manage to capture the essence of their source material. But before we get into those, I need to rant about the Paramount+ Halo show, because Halo makes a lot of mistakes that The Last of Us and Fallout manage to avoid. The biggest problem with Halo is that the creators of the show have spoken about how they haven’t played any of the games and didn’t care about them, and that they consider the show to be separate from the story of the games.

Which if you ask me is a pretty big problem. Why the hell would you adapt something if you have no intention of preserving the story of the thing you’re adapting? I understand that video games and film/television are different mediums, and that what works for one doesn’t necessarily work for the other. Film adaptations of books for example frequently deviate from the source material, and I’m okay with that as long as the adaptation still feels faithful to the spirit of the original.

But the problem that the Halo show makes is that it completely jettisons the story of the games and hardly feels like an adaptation at all. As a prime example, in the Halo games the main character, the armored Master Chief, always has his helmet on. Sometimes he takes it off at the end of the story, but you never see his face and that’s part of the mystique of the character. In the Halo show, Master Chief takes the helmet off in the first episode and rarely puts it back on. He’s got the helmet off for maybe 90% of the show. It would be like if the Harry Potter movies had taken Harry Potter, who has dark hair, glasses, and a lightning bolt-shaped scar on his forehead, and made him blond, given him contacts, and no forehead scar. The Halo show gets the most famous and basic characteristic of the protagonist wrong right off the bat.

Paramount.

Even though Pablo Schreiber is good as Master Chief, the damn helmet should stay on!!!

It also adds a bunch of extremely boring side characters that aren’t in the games at all and then spends far too much time on them. There are entire episodes devoted to these side characters, and I didn’t care about them at all. It also gives Master Chief a love interest, which is completely unnecessary and I don’t think fans of the Halo games were eager to see Master Chief’s bare ass (I mean, maybe some were but that’s what the Internet is for). The armor should stay on, dammit!

Everything I’m saying about the Halo show is based on the first season, I haven’t seen the recent second season but I have heard that it is an improvement over the first season. I could go on for much longer about the many problems of the Halo show, but I’m 700 words in and haven’t addressed the subject of this post’s title, which is Fallout. I was cautiously optimistic about Fallout because the trailers looked cool and the show comes to us from the makers of HBO’s Westworld, which was a sci-fi western that I (mostly) liked. Fallout is basically a post-apocalyptic sci-fi western, and it turns out to be a perfect fit for the Westworld creators (which include Christopher Nolan’s brother Jonathan Nolan).

Fallout (the show) tells an original story that isn’t directly based on any of the Fallout games. But unlike the Halo show, this isn’t a problem for Fallout. The story in the Halo games continues from game to game, so Halo 2 picks up where the first game left off, Halo 3 picks up the story from the end of Halo 2, etc. The Fallout games don’t do this, the story of Fallout 4 is not a continuation of the story of Fallout 3. They’re separate stories set in the same universe, and the Fallout show feels like another story set within the same universe.

The Halo show fundamentally changes the entire story, but Fallout doesn’t. HBO’s recent TV adaptation of The Last of Us also avoids the sins of the Halo show. The first season of HBO’s The Last of Us is directly based on the story of the first game, and, unlike the Halo show, The Last of Us keeps the story intact. It is a direct adaptation of the game, it changes a few minor details and condenses a few things, but the story hits the same beats as the game and the emotional core of the story, the relationship between the two main characters Joel and Ellie, is very much intact. As opposed to the Halo show, which often feels completely divorced from the Halo games.

So now we’re 1,000 words in and I haven’t talked about what Fallout is even about. Well…it’s complicated. I consider myself to be fairly well-versed in the Fallout game universe, since I poured 100+ hours into both Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 (Fallout 3 in particular is one of my top-ten favorite games of all time). But even then, it’s a bit hard to explain for the uninitiated, mostly because of how deeply, profoundly, gloriously weird it all is.

Amazon

Okay, so Fallout (and from here I am talking about the story of the show, not the games) takes place more than 200 years after nuclear war basically ended civilization. It follows the intersecting story of three main characters. The first character is Lucy, who grew up in a Vault-Tec vault. Basically, a vault is a really elaborate underground fallout shelter (the company Vault-Tec turns out to be extremely nefarious). Lucy is very naïve, having led a sheltered existence in Vault 33 that did not prepare her for the horrors of the outside world. She even says things like “Golly!” and “Okey doke!” and “What the fudge?” She emerges from Vault 33 to look for her kidnapped father, and the Wasteland has some very difficult lessons to teach her. She is naïve and clueless at first, but she turns out to be tough and scrappy. I liked her a lot.

Amazon

The second main character is Maximus, a rookie member of the Brotherhood of Steel. The Brotherhood of Steel is a paramilitary organization devoted to the collection and preservation of technology and is one of the most important organizations in the Fallout universe. They also wear extremely cool power armor. This is important because the Brotherhood of Steel power armor is iconic and is one of the most instantly recognizable images from the Fallout series. The makers of the show clearly understood the importance of the power armor to the look and feel of the show, and I am very pleased to report that the show’s version of the power armor is wicked cool. Like Lucy, Maximus is very much an underdog, and his story intersects with hers in really interesting ways.

Amazon

The third main character is The Ghoul. Ghouls are people who have been mutated by radiation exposure. Some have managed to retain their humanity, while others have become feral and are basically zombies. This ghoul in the show is a bounty hunter. His real name is Cooper Howard, and before the nuclear war he was a successful actor. His story bridges the gap between pre-war and post-war, and as a ghoul he’s more than 200 years old. I like Maximus and Lucy, but The Ghoul is the most fascinating character in the show. He’s played by Walton Goggins, a terrific character actor (with a name that is fun to say, say it out loud a few times) who deftly steals every scene he’s in.

Amazon

These three characters make for a compelling trio, and there are plenty of other wacky characters that show up. There are a lot of little details in the show that won’t mean much if you haven’t played the games, but if you’ve spent a couple hundred hours with them (like I have because I’m a nerd) you will recognize these little things, like Yum Yum Deviled Eggs and Blamco Mac and Cheese. Or the stimpaks, which in the games are the main thing you use to heal your injuries, which look exactly the same in the show as they do in the games. The costumes, environments, weapons, etc. are extremely faithful to the games, and I love the amount of effort that the makers of the show went to in order to get all those details right (take notes, makers of Halo show!).

The makers of the Fallout show clearly understood the assignment and they managed something extremely difficult. They made a show that tells an original story that still feels very faithful to the source material, and you don’t have to be a fan of the games in order to enjoy it. I think that being a fan of the games might enhance your enjoyment of it since you will pick up on the little details, but if you’ve never played any Fallout games you could still watch this show and understand it and enjoy it. It’s deeply weird and unapologetically violent and bloody, and it manages to capture the feeling of what makes the Fallout games special. It’s an extraordinary piece of work and I can’t wait for season two.

Monkey Man is a Bloodywood Song Come to Life

I listen to a lot of hard rock and metal music, and one of my favorite things about the metal genre is that it has a lot of reach around the world. If you’re at all familiar with the genre it probably isn’t much of a surprise that there are many excellent metal bands from Germany and Scandinavia, but something that I have discovered fairly recently is that there are a lot of metal bands from countries that for whatever reason I would not necessarily have expected to be home to kickass metal bands. One of those bands is an Indian heavy metal band called Bloodywood.

Their music is pretty ferocious, and I’ll admit that not all of their songs are really my thing. Some of it is a bit too intense, even for me. But they have some songs that have resonated with me a lot and are songs that I listen to often when I need a pick-me-up. When I saw the first trailer for Dev Patel’s new film Monkey Man, I thought that it would be awesome if it used a Bloodywood song. And I am thrilled to report that there is indeed a Bloodywood song in Monkey Man, and it is used during an epic climactic action scene, which is the perfect scene for a Bloodywood song. The film and the music complement each other perfectly. Bloodywood’s music is powerful, as is the film in which it is used.

Monkey Man is the directorial debut of Dev Patel, a hugely talented actor that I’ve been a fan of ever since his breakout role in Slumdog Millionaire in 2008, which is another movie I need to write about someday. Patel is the kind of actor who is so good that I will immediately root for any character he plays, and Monkey Man is no exception. Patel is terrific both in front of and behind the camera, and Monkey Man (which Patel directed, co-wrote, co-produced, and stars in) feels like a labor of love.

Universal Pictures

It’s easy to see the trailer for Monkey Man and think, “Oh, it’s Indian John Wick.” And while the John Wick films were undoubtedly an influence on Monkey Man, and Patel’s film even includes a direct reference to John Wick, the film is much more than a John Wick clone. It delivers sharp social commentary, brutal action, and compelling characters. It also feels steeped in history and culture. I think it’s a terrific movie, and a very impressive directorial debut from Dev Patel. When I first saw Slumdog Millionaire in college I never thought that the actor who played the main character would one day make a badass action film, but here we are, and we’re all better off for it.

We never learn the name of Patel’s character, in the credits he is simply called “Kid”, so that’s what I’m going to be calling him. The film takes its time introducing Kid and keeps the audience in the dark for a surprisingly long time about what exactly he is up to. It’s clear that he is planning something, and that that plan will involve violence. Kid is on a mission of vengeance, but the target of his revenge and Kid’s motives for seeking it are obscure for quite some time. We do eventually find out why Kid is doing what he’s doing, and I won’t go into too much detail but let’s just say that if something like what happens to Kid’s mother happened to someone I love, I would want revenge too.

When we first meet Kid, he is scrounging a living at a brutal underground boxing club, where he wears a monkey mask and basically gets paid to throw fights and get the absolute shit kicked out of him. Sharlto Copley, another one of my favorite actors, has great fun sleazing it up as the guy who runs the boxing club (he also gets his comeuppance later when Kid turns the tables on him). But the main subjects of Kid’s revenge are a corrupt police chief named Rana Singh and a spiritual guru called Baba Shakti, a man who is much less pious than he would like the world to believe.

Monkey Man is a film that pointedly contrasts the haves and have-nots, and Kid bridges the gap between the two. There are luxurious penthouses where the fabulously rich live lavishly right across the street from vast slums where people live in squalor. Kid moves back and forth between both worlds, in one scene he’s getting his ass kicked in a vicious underground boxing ring, the next he’s serving drinks and cocaine in a luxurious penthouse brothel.

The movie had a budget of only around $10 million, which is not very much these days, but it looks great. It vividly captures the neon-lit (and John Wick-esque) high society glamour and the dangerous, gritty streets. There are a lot of action scenes in the film, and they are quite brutal. This movie does not pull any punches, and some parts of it are hard to watch. If you don’t have a high tolerance for bloody, bone-crunching violence you should maybe give it a pass.

Universal Pictures

I have heard some complaints that there is too much shaky camerawork during the action scenes, at least in the film’s first half. One guy I like on YouTube said that it seemed like the first half of the movie and the second half were shot by different people, since the action scenes in the first half are more chaotic than those in the second half. Your mileage may vary but I didn’t find the camerawork to be too distracting. I also think there’s a thematic reason for it.

In the first half of the film Kid is flying by the seat of his pants. He’s completely alone and he barely survives his first assassination attempt of Rana Singh after it goes disastrously wrong. He also has to fight an axe-wielding pimp while his hands are cuffed together, and I mean, we’ve all been there, am I right?

Anyway, after barely surviving and escaping, he is saved by the keeper of a local temple, whose people are also being persecuted by Baba Shakti and Rana Singh. While he is with them, Kid undergoes a sort of hallucinogenic re-awakening and gets a really good training montage. He then returns to complete his vengeance with a renewed sense of purpose. The ferocious final battle is brutal and exhilarating. It’s also filmed with less shaky camerawork than some of the earlier fights in the movie, and I wonder if this was an intentional stylistic choice.

I mean, earlier in the movie Kid is angry and volatile, and the fights are more chaotic. Later on, he’s much more dialed-in, and the filmmaking reflects this. Monkey Man is also a very weird movie at times, there are some very bizarre sequences. But I love weird movies, and I love that there are movie studios willing to give filmmakers money to make weird movies. I’ve said this before, probably more times than I realize, but weird movies give me hope for the future.

It sounds like Dev Patel didn’t have an easy time making the movie, he broke several bones during filming. Monkey Man was originally going to be released on Netflix, but it sounds like Netflix didn’t really know what to do with it and it was almost dead in the water until Jordan Peele saw it and bought the distribution rights to put it in theaters. I’m very glad he did, Peele is a terrific filmmaker and his 2021 film Nope is yet another film on my ever-growing list of Movies I Need to Write About.

Monkey Man won’t be for everybody, its combination of brutal violence and sharp social commentary makes for an at-times challenging watch, but I mean that as a compliment. It’s an audacious directorial debut, and I have a ton of respect for Patel for making it. Patel said that he wanted to give the movie “real soul, real drama, real pain…And I wanted to infuse it with a little bit of culture.” I think he succeeded on all fronts.

Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire is a Smashing Good Time

I badly want to see Godzilla Minus One, but it is literally impossible. It isn’t in theaters, it isn’t streaming, and there’s no Blu-ray. This is utterly baffling to me, since Godzilla Minus One was released last year and was one of the most acclaimed films of the year, it was a box office hit and became the first Godzilla movie to win an Academy Award. But will I ever be able to see it? I honestly have no idea.

I am Captain Ahab, and Godzilla Minus One is my white whale.

That sound you hear is me banging my head against the wall.

Fortunately, Adam Wingard’s Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire is a good consolation prize. Godzilla X Kong is a sequel to Wingard’s 2021 film Godzilla Vs. Kong, and you might be able to guess by the titles that Godzilla X Kong is less about getting Godzilla and Kong to fight each other and more about getting them to team up to fight other monsters, which is just fine with me.

Apparently the lack of availability of Godzilla Minus One is due to some licensing deal between Legendary Entertainment (which produces the American Godzilla movies) and Toho Studios (the Japanese company that created and owns Godzilla and produced Godzilla Minus One). While this is something that I still find deeply frustrating, at least it means that there are more Godzilla movies in the world and the franchise may be at an all-time high, which as a devoted fan of monster movies is a good thing in my book.

Godzilla Vs. Kong and Godzilla X Kong are both highly entertaining movies that deliver exactly what the titles promise. If you go to see a movie with “Godzilla” and “Kong” in the title, you are probably expecting one thing: lots of monster action. And by God, that is what these films will give you. All the monster action and crumbling cities that you can handle. I do find it funny that even though Godzilla and Kong are theoretically the good guys, the monsters in these films have probably caused trillions of dollars of damage to major cities across the globe.

Okay, so in Godzilla Vs. Kong we learn that Godzilla, Kong and all the other monsters (called Titans in the movies) originate from Hollow Earth. Basically, Hollow Earth is the idea that the planet is, you guessed it, hollow. According to Wikipedia, this theory was definitively disproven in 1774, which is hilarious to me, as is the idea that some people in this day and age could still believe in it. But to be honest, I like the idea of Hollow Earth because I think it is good fun. It is an utterly ludicrous idea that is demonstrably false, but it makes for fun science fiction and as far as conspiracy theories go, Hollow Earth seems like a pretty harmless one. You never hear anything about the Hollow Earth theorists stirring things up, but don’t even get me started on the Flat Earthers, ugh.

Anyway, despite being complete nonsense the Hollow Earth stuff in these Godzilla movies is quite a bit of fun. There are a lot of Hollow Earth scenes in both Godzilla/Kong movies, and the special effects are dazzling. The Hollow Earth stuff also gives the movies a sort of old-school adventure vibe, like something Jules Verne or Edgar Rice Burroughs might have come up with after a cocaine binge.

Warner Bros.

In Godzilla Vs. Kong, the story was basically an excuse to get Godzilla and Kong to beat the crap out of each other, only for them to realize that they share a greater common enemy (in this case, Mechagodzilla), and team up to defeat him. If you’re wondering what the hell a “Mechagodzilla” is, it’s a giant mechanical Godzilla made by an evil sci-fi corporation. Theoretically made to give humanity a fighting chance against the Titans, it promptly goes rogue and starts causing chaos, and Godzilla and Kong have to set aside their differences to kick Mechagodzilla’s giant metal ass.

Mechagodzilla can be seen as a metaphor for mankind’s scientific arrogance, the kind of “they were so preoccupied wondering if they could that they didn’t stop to think about if they should” idea that Jurassic Park explored more than 30 years ago. But if you want, you can ignore that and just see Mechagodzilla as a giant robot Godzilla, and that’s just fine too.

At the end of Godzilla Vs. Kong Mechagodzilla has been defeated and Godzilla and Kong have gone their separate ways, and Godzilla X Kong picks up some time later. Godzilla is something of a Monster Sheriff, and keeps the other Titans in line. He has also, adorably, taken up sleeping in the Roman Colisseum, curling up in it and snoozing like a cat in a cat bed, which was one of my favorite things in the movie. It’s just so cute.

Anyway, some stuff happens and Kong and a small group of humans end up going on an epic adventure in to Hollow Earth, where we learn more about the history of the monsters and Kong meets more of his people, including a cute little mini-Kong that is apparently named Suko, although I called him Nunchuck because there’s an early scene where Kong picks him up and smacks another giant ape in the face with him, which was absolutely hysterical. Nunchuck (it’s a better name and you cannot convince me otherwise) is a bit of a little shit at first but he soon becomes endearing and I ended up really liking him as Kong’s unofficial sidekick.

The main villain of the film is another giant ape called the Skar King, a tyrannical despot who has enslaved the rest of Kong’s species. The Skar King wields the spine of some giant creature as an enormous whip, which was a very creative weapon, and is in control of an enormous ice-powered monster called Shimo. With Godzilla’s help (as well as an assist from Mothra, making a surprise return), Kong sets out to defeat the Skar King and free his enslaved people, basically becoming Kong Spartacus, or SpartaKong if you will (sorry not sorry).

The American Godzilla movies have taken some flack for not having very compelling human characters, which on the one hand is a fair criticism because the human characters aren’t that interesting (although I have heard that this is something Godzilla Minus One does very well). But at the same time, as I mentioned previously, most people probably do not go to a Godzilla movie for human drama. I feel a bit bad for the actors in these movies because, even though it must be great fun to be in one of these movies, you would have to be aware that viewers aren’t going to be seeing the movie because you’re in it, they’re going to see it because of Godzilla and the other monsters.

Warner Bros.

There are a lot of actors in these movies that I like, such as Rebecca Hall, Brian Tyree Henry, Millie Bobby Brown, Alexander Skarsgard, and others, and they’re all fine, but they’re mostly there to move the plot forward and be in danger during monster fights. I do have to specifically mention Dan Stevens, a hugely likable actor who in Godzilla X Kong plays a guy called Trapper who I guess is kind of a veterinarian for giant monsters (he replaces one of Kong’s teeth early in the movie) and is a cocky-but-likable hotshot in the vein of Han Solo or Star-Lord. Stevens is clearly having a great time and his enthusiasm is infectious. His taste in music also gives the movie a couple of fun musical scenes that reminded me of the Guardians of the Galaxy movies, which is never a bad thing (and it reminds me that I need to write about Guardians 3).

Godzilla X Kong also reunites Stevens with director Adam Wingard, who directed him in the 2014 thriller The Guest which I covered some years ago (it’s a good movie, you should see it). Wingard also directed the 2011 slasher film You’re Next, which I like a lot but haven’t written about because I think reading about it would traumatize my mom and I already traumatized her enough writing about people exploding in Ready or Not (sorry mom!).

I am a fan of Wingard’s work and his Godzilla movies are a lot of fun. Wingard has a knack for finding creative ways to film the action scenes, like a couple of first-person shots from Kong’s perspective while he battles Godzilla in Godzilla Vs. Kong. The monster battles in both movies are an absolute blast, although it did make me a bit sad to watch the pyramids get obliterated in Godzilla X Kong, RIP to another historical landmark. I was glad that the statue of Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro was spared, despite the destruction of much of the surrounding city. And the Roman Colisseum also (mostly) survives to be used as Godzilla’s cat bed.

Godzilla X Kong puts less emphasis on human drama than some of the previous American Godzilla movies, and there are lengthy stretches in which there are no humans at all, which is just fine with me (again, no disrespect to the human actors, they are all fine). The special effects are terrific and the expressions and body language of the monsters are so well done that it’s not hard to understand what is going on, despite the lack of dialogue except for monster grunts and roars (there is a LOT of grunting and roaring in this film).

I really enjoyed the Godzilla/Kong movies. They’re not particularly profound or enlightening, but they are a whole lot of fun and if you enjoy the sight of giant monsters smashing each other and their surroundings into tiny bits (as I do), you will get more than your money’s worth.

Hopefully I will be able to see and write about Godzilla Minus One someday.