For willing to meet again with the boy who marveled at King Kong and Godzilla.
Direction: Adam Wingard Cast: Alexander Skarsgård, Millie Bobby Brown, Rebecca Hall, Kyle Chandler Original title: Godzilla vs. Kong Country: United States Year: 2021 Release date: 3-26-2021 Genre: Fantasy Script: Eric Pearson, Max Borenstein Photography: Ben Seresin Synopsis: Kong and his protectors travel in search of their home, but along the way , an enraged Godzilla cuts them off. This first battle takes us on an adventure that seems to have its heart in the very core of the Earth.
The best: the total spectacle, visual and sensory, which are the fights between the titans.
In 1977, a spectacular poster invited us kids of that time to enter that fantastic territory that was (and still is) a movie theater to transport us to a spectacular fantasy world. The poster (the poster: an irretrievably lost art) was that of Journey to the Center of the Earth, the internationally blockbuster adaptation (very free) that our Juan Piquer made of the Jules Verne novel. The poster was quite a statement of principles and one of those little lies that every good movie poster should be: the highlight of it was the imposing figure of a gigantic gorilla, unmistakably King Kong, not for nothing recently that the film had been released. wonderful version directed by John Guillermin and produced by Dino de Laurentiis, whose poster also had a bait: Kong squeezing in one of his hands what looked like a rocket to the kids at the time! and that it was only part of one of the fighters that attacked the ape in the final climax over the Twin Towers. Godzilla vs Kong is that poster from Piquer’s film (with his saurians who are children of the Japanese Gojira) and the one about King Kong who discovered Jessica Lange. Although what this blockbuster really is, signed by Adam Wingard away from his hipster impostures, is a time tunnel that takes us back to that 1977, to that neighborhood cinema that took us to universes beyond imagination and that gave us back the innocence that we had as spectators.
Godzilla vs Kong is indeed a journey, to the center of the Earth, yes, as is. That whoever theorizes about it and is the (human) guide for the protagonists is called Lind (an Alexander Skarsgard born for adventure) is still a precious nod to Otto Lidenbrock from Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth. Like that (seen and unseen) character in the Monarch installations played by Lance Reddick is called Guillermin, a tribute to the King Kong handyman of 1976 and its vindicable sequel, King Kong lives, a decade later: Kong’s transfer in the ship, the relationship with the deaf-mute girl … Adam Wingard’s film is not only an act of love (and a manifesto in favor of cinema as a great show) to the most pulp and naive adventure (Michael Crichton’s Congo and Frank Marshall is also cited), but a skillful and loving collection of slides, photochromes (many of them part of the cinephile memory of our childhood or adolescence) that unite the original Japanese legacy of Toho, producer and mother of Gojira and company, with this MonsterVerse from Warner and Legendary Pictures. I will not reveal the surprise that is the appearance of one of the totems of the original Japanese films, most of them under the direction of Ishiro Honda, and that this makes us dream that its replica will appear soon. But hey, that’s because seeing Kong flown by helicopters anticipates the imminent arrival of a King Kong escapes, the jewel of Honda from 1967.
Experience, then, as a fan, Godzilla vs Kong already has its two titans fists in Dolby Atmos and the big screen after 40 minutes of footage, reserving an amazing second round in Hong Kong as the climax of a film that is a fight session free of childish (not childish) mythological scope (Kong on his throne with an ax like Conan, the Barbarian, or like Thor … Isn’t that Walter Simmons played by Demián Bichir an echo of Walt Simonson, cartoonist and screenwriter of the superheroic Norse god of comics?). In the background (and in the background they are) little matter the human beings that swarm through history and its small or big dramas, or its moments of nerdy comedy (the conspiranoic and the podcast of him, the hacker’s apprentice …). In the poster of Journey to the Center of the Earth by Juan Piquer, they were below everything, mere spectators of the dithyrambic fantastic creatures. And like here, as in Godzilla vs Kong, our innocent eyes only fixate on them and the promise they announce when we travel to a hollow Earth and arrive in a world of wonders … When we enter a movie theater. This movie brings all of that back to us.
