So for Carrie’s birthday we watched Kong vs Godzilla mainly (I think) because it is a movie I would agree to on no other night of the year.
These are my observations. Some mild spoilers are involved.
1. CGI still sucks. I seem to prefer puppets (see: Yoda, baby.)
2. Since apes are closer to humans than lizards, you’re supposed to empathize with Kong. He’s got a friend, after all, and facial expressions. But Godzilla has a few things going for him. First, he’s got a really nice smile. Second, he has a pleasant blue glow that’s reminiscent of old monster movies or a properly trimmed blue LED and not one of those eye-searing ones. Third, he likes to swim. Fourth, he has coherent motivations, which cannot be said of Kong.
3. Which brings us to our main plot device, humankind’s hubris. Except it’s really a shitty tech-bro version where they want to replace Godzilla with a robot that looks like a shittier CGI Godzilla with no smile, but has a WAY bigger carbon footprint, and needs a secret human inside it to work plus a bunch of underemployed secret humans offscreen. This isn’t even an allegory, this is exactly how artificial intelligence actually works. So Godzilla shows up at the beginning of the movie evidently to wreak havoc after being a “good guy” in the last movie (I did not see the last movie, but Carrie filled in a few details), but only blowing up a company called Apex Cybernetics. The plot hadn’t even started, but I’m thinking “let’s see, a lizard with nice smile and a pleasant blue glow blows up a company called Apex Cybernetics. I’m rooting for the lizard.”
4. Despite being several stories tall, Kong has the genital specificity of a Ken doll but they keep calling Kong “him.” I don’t know if this is meant as an illustration of Roland Barthes’ concept of exscription or Hollywood’s inability to do gender fluidity right.