@wildvine: Bit of a late reply, but I just watched the movie last week and enjoyed myself quite a lot! You’re right about Skar King. He has arguably the most personality of any Monsterverse antagonist, with a sick, twisted sense of humor. Seeing him lankily sway and saunter around like a cocky, domineering douche was a real treat. Shimo was serviceable, but didn’t really get a whole lot of time to showcase herself. I hope and assume that’ll change in subsequent movies. As is, she was alright as the circus animal to Skar King’s ringleader. I had already called that this would be a cool dynamic, but I’m not sure how I feel about Skar King having a literal mind-control crystal.
I was also pleasantly surprised by Suko. I thought he’d just be the resident cute character, but he ended up being more than that. He was a feisty backstabbing little ball of furry fury. He honestly reminded me a bit of Gollum/Sméagol with how he’d keep trying to lure Kong into danger on their trek. Speaking of Kong, he’s great here. I do like him in the lead role, and his relationship with Suko was fun. I also liked how he basically shows up like the messiah for the subjugated apes. The size difference between them really helps to emphasize that. He feels like a giant warrior of legend, especially with the axe (which based on the trailers I honestly thought was gonna get destroyed by Shimo in that first encounter).
As for the Goji side of things, I liked that he was so tough, but beyond that he barely got anything to do. The small snippets and glimpses of character were fun though, like curling up in the colosseum, getting all riled up by Kong appearing, or his symbiotic bond with Mothra. As for the moth goddess, I was really pleasantly surprised by her appearance. An improvement design-wise and honestly a bigger and better role in the story, with more than a couple crowd-pleasing moments like webbing up the excess ape army, or saving our human leads.
Speaking of, I honestly thought the human story here was some of the best it’s been in the Monsterverse. They trimmed the number of cast members considerably, stripping it down to two pairs of the bare essentials. The oddball comic relief duo had decent chemistry and the emotional heart I think was solid, if a bit hammy. It’s no masterful character study or anything like that (see Minus One), but it gets the job done and has some okay themes about family and home that pair with Kong’s story nicely. Sometimes the bare minimum is okay, and frankly preferable compared to the overdone melodrama of the KOTM family dynamic. Still, I’d love to see some genuinely great character work in a Monsterverse flick. The closest they ever got was Bryan Cranston’s character in 2014, but of course they made the genius idea to off him about 40 minutes in instead of actually completing his character arc and his quest for the truth about his wife’s death. Serizawa was pretty cool too, with his sacrifice in KOTM being one of my favorite scenes in the movie, with some great meta-context as well as being a pretty good scene in itself.
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