Remember when Big Summer Movies that weren’t about superheroes were a thing? Where there was lots of over the top action, and they were really fun and kinda silly but who cares because they’re fun and not taking themselves too seriously and also somehow nobody is a superhero?

So yeah, that’s what this is. But it’s a really good one of those. The action isn’t just over the top, it’s way over that. Like, when it looks down, it can barely even see the top. The sound design is such that my subwoofer was in “intense rumble” mode for like probably 2/3 of the running time. It’s the kind of movie where if “see it in the theatre” were possible, I’d tell people to see it in the theatre, because it would benefit from that theatrical environment (as in fact, it benefited from the damn-near-theatre-quality setup that I’ve got going after this Year Of Nesting).

But what really makes it stand out is the story. No, come back, hear me out on this. Because the thing is, you can imagine the boring story that leads you to have Godzilla fight Kong, right. Blah blah evil army shit blah blah, Kong and Godzilla fight, blah blah, team up to defeat the bad army guys. It’s the story I expected and how I fully thought the movie would play out. And okay, yes, there’s a degree to which that’s the basic skeleton underlying the movie. (When your movie starts out with Godzilla, universally seen as a good guy after the previous Monsterverse movies, coming out of nowhere to attack a facility owned by Apex Cybernetics, you don’t even need to think real hard about how “Cybernetics” might be the most evil single word in TV/movie company names to guess that there’s some shit going on.)

But there’s so much more glorious weirdness to the movie than that. It really leans into the whole Monsterverse mythos, and all the ancient Titan stuff, and it’s taking all the elements that were set up by Skull Island and King of the Monsters and delivering the payoff. It’s no Infinity War (heck, it’s not even an Avengers), but it’s doing that “capstone of a series” thing.

Which tbh is maybe the biggest criticism you can make of the movie: Skull Island was aggressively mediocre, and King of the Monsters was only decent, but in order to really get the impact of this movie, you need to have watched both of them. Is it worth watching two meh action movies to see this very good one? That’s a hard argument to make, but I guess the good news for me is that my basically-indefensible decision to watch those movies as prep for this actually, shockingly, unexpectedly has paid off by giving me a great cinematic action movie experience.

Recommended, and highly recommended to anyone who’s seen the previous movies in this series and/or has giant subwoofers that need exercise.