So I never thought I’d care enough about Godzilla vs. Kong to even watch it, much less to do homework and watch two old movies I dgaf about when they were released; but somehow, HBOMAX’s plan to release on streaming day one has me way more interested than I would have imagined possible. Go figure.

The good news is, this movie is actually pretty decent. I mean, look, let’s calibrate, it is a very stupid big dumb action movie. That’s baked in. If that’s not what you’re looking for, keep moving. But if you want one of those, this one at least delivers the pleasures of a very stupid big dumb action movie. The characters fly around to location after location to get a sense of a world in peril; there’s a shadowy quasi-governmental organization doing dodgy experiments; there’s Tywin Lannister as an eco-terrorist; there’s a storyline that has twists and turns but is fundamentally dead-simple enough that it takes no effort to follow and doesn’t insist that you memorize three tons of backstory to make sense of it; and most of all, there are monsters.

Lots of monsters. Because it turns out that this isn’t just a Godzilla movie. I thought this was the Godzilla intro to pair up with the King Kong intro of Skull Island leading into the big fight movie, but no: The 2014 Godzilla is part of this universe, and so this is a sequel to that and Kong, and is working to establish the larger Monsterverse, which it does by loading up on monsters. You want Mothra? You got Mothra. You want Rodan? Done. You want nameless giant spider things? Oh yeah. You want Kong? Well, he’s name-checked, but never actually shown, that one’s gonna wait for the next movie.

But most of all you have King Ghidorah, a three-headed hydra thing. It becomes clear before too long that the movie is really about the conflict between him and Godzilla for the title of King of the Monsters. And you might be like “okay but why do we care which monster is the king monster,” and the answer is revealed to be: Godzilla is kind of a Hulk-like figure, who destroys a lot of stuff because he’s big and strong and doesn’t always super-care about humans, but fundamentally he’s a protector. Whereas Ghidorah is an alien who came to Earth in dark aeons past, and seeks to destroy all life on Earth. So kinda a lot worse. To a surprising degree, the title character actually is the protagonist, and is engaging in the actions that will save the day; the humans have a part to play, no mistake, and they do stuff, but the day is won or lost on Godzilla’s efforts.

So anyway, yeah. Big dumb monster movie with so much monster fighting and giant screams and stomping around. I think there was a sub-bass rumble going for about 80% of the movie. (Which also, this was a movie that was really enhanced by the theater-like experience of the upgraded AV system. I think without the 5.1 sound — especially the .1 part of it — it just wouldn’t land in the same way.)

Lightly recommended iff you’re looking for a big dumb monster fighting movie.