Godzilla vs. Kong (2021)

Rating: 1.5 out of 5.

Godzilla vs. Kong is paranoid, hyperthermic, impassioned, developmentally cheap and dispossessed, not just from buildings but from event-horizon, from the weight of unconscious bias. It suffers debilitating pill erotism—the perpetual reversal of gaze—disguised in jungle funk and architectonic monkey grease, likewise an impossible urban transcendence, softened and organized around the edges by two implacable Father-ideals; for this reason and some others, perhaps, it is mostly wretched gibberish under robotic preen. I am repelled by its premature and aftermarket cinematica, as it broaches and dehumanizes scene after scene, by its dumpy pro-institutional artifice and burgeoning chemistry; I reproach and reject its desperate, alternately nubile (visually lissome like a treasure map) and engrossed signalling, its nonsensical prevarication of idolatry and totemism, of veneration and masturbation. Pausing it halfway, I get the inebriate impression of having awoken roughshod from a nap.

Godzilla vs. Kong shakes down slavery and regurgitates only its most pitifully symbolic, smouldering aberrations, about whose humanoid fitness there is something archaic and comical, like it is guilty to wit, but not to effect, of special-effect minstrelsy. It straddles its monocular, game-theoretic globalization for all hell, and in its thrusting lunacy single-handedly despises the Family. And so dressed, it is stumped, embalmed in redundant techno-layers and vapid stimulus induction, lost in its acerbic axiomatization of elders and orders. Eventually I get the impression of two intensified and emulsified gradations of intolerant aquarium siblings, whose difference amounts to chronology, propelled to sardonic limits by nothing but the exfiltrate of death-drive, petrified of any misconduct except annihilation.