Monster movies are rarely filled with complex characters. There is usually the evil monster out to destroy humanity, and the heroic characters trying to stop the monster. Legendary’s upcoming MonsterVerse feature Godzilla Vs Kong seeks to add a bit of depth to the iconic battle between the two titular monsters. According to producer Alex Garcia, both Godzilla and Kong have legitimate reasons for getting into a fight in their new film.
“Neither of them is an antagonist per-say… What’s cool about this movie also is that it’s the first time we see Kong leave Skull Island in our mythology. There’s a lot that comes with that. He’s now sort of coming to terms with this new reality, and what does that mean? And similarly, Godzilla is frantically trying to defend his own power structure. And it’s not like Godzilla is a tyrant, but he is trying to maintain this bigger balance that he feels is under threat, and he sees Kong as potentially being one of those threats.”
In past MonsterVerse movies, Kong was shown to be living a life of contentment on Skull Island, indifferent to the larger world that exists outside. On the other hand, Godzilla was the unquestioned leader of the rest of the world’s monsters. Now, it seems that since Kong is venturing outside Skull Island for the first time, the two alpha predators are driven by a desire to protect their territory by trying to destroy each other. Their emotions are further heightened by mentions of an “ancient rivalry” between their species said to date back several millennia.
At the center of this titanic struggle rests the survival of all of humanity. You would think that the humans would side with neither monster, but the trailers have shown that Kong was specifically brought in to fight Godzilla by the government. Garcia goes on to explain that humanity is simply trying to minimize the damage by siding with whichever creature would do the least amount of damage to society.
“It depends on how you’re looking at [Kong and Godzilla]. I think they’re both characters who are fighting for something, which is distinct to them. And those things happen to sometimes be what’s good for us, but they don’t always align. Neither of them is inherently evil, but they’re also not inherently good, right? And I think that’s where the complexity of us, of mankind, and our relation to them really come into play.”
It will be interesting to see how this three-way fight between the giant lizard, the giant ape, and humans plays out. Especially once another giant monster Mechagodzilla, created by humans, enters the fray and threatens to lay waste to everything in its path.
Directed by Adam Wingard and written by Eric Pearson and Max Borenstein, Godzilla vs. Kong stars Alexander Skarsgard, Millie Bobby Brown, Rebecca Hall, and Brian Tyree Henry. The film arrives in theaters and on HBO Max on March 31. This news originated at Cinemablend.