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在线翻译:
szdaily -> Culture -> 
Godzilla vs. Kong
    2021-03-31  08:53    Shenzhen Daily

The predominance of CG spectacle over physical action has even more supremacy in this film than in its predecessors, “Kong: Skull Island” and “Godzilla: King of the Monsters.” And the dizzying speed of the mayhem can sometimes seem like sleight of hand to cover for a shortfall in character development and logic. Screenwriters Eric Pearson and Max Borenstein are smart enough to know what the customers want, stringing together the brawling set-pieces with a minimum of delay between each new round of destruction.

There’s a lovely new addition to the story’s human element in the form of Jia, played by Kaylee Hottle in a captivating screen debut. A deaf, orphaned indigenous Iwi girl rescued on Skull Island by Kong, Jia is being raised by Dr. Ilene Andrews (Rebecca Hall), an anthropological linguist working for U.S. government monster research organization Monarch. The child’s ability to communicate with the giant ape via sign language generates poignant moments throughout.

That connection supplies some heart, amplified by the enchanting expressiveness of the ape’s facial features. CG advancements make this arguably the big guy’s best performance to date. The very first glimpses of Kong — waking up from a nap with a yawn, a stretch, and a lazy scratch of his butt on the way to a waterfall shower — humanize the beast in ways that Godzilla is never afforded.

The prehistoric reptile has rarely seemed meaner, its beady-eyed glare and vicious snarl signaling a path of marauding destruction.

The film’s humor comes primarily from another new character, this one on the Godzilla side of the action in two storylines that never fully intersect, at least not beyond the smackdown of the warring monsters. Bernie Hayes (Brian Tyree Henry) is a wisecracking low-level engineer at cybernetics corporation Apex. A whistleblowing conspiracy theorist, Bernie hosts a podcast eagerly followed by teenager Madison Russell (Milly Bobby Brown). She and her more marginally featured father Mark (Kyle Chandler), now deputy director of special projects at Monarch, are holdovers from “Godzilla: King of the Monsters.”

Dishonest Apex CEO Walter Simmons (Demian Bichir) and his chief technical officer Ren Serizawa (Shun Oguri) have been conducting secret experiments that reawaken Godzilla three years after the creature was last seen, drawing the monster to the company’s U.S. base in Pensacola, Florida.

The resulting chaos leaves eight dead and the industrial site in wreckage. But Madison believes Godzilla was provoked by unseen forces. She teams up with her nerdy schoolmate Josh (Julian Dennison) to track down Bernie. More by accident than design, the three of them travel to Apex’s maze of laboratories in Hong Kong.

There’re a lot of plot, a lot of characters and a lot of different locations to keep straight in the establishing sections, and while director Adam Wingard and his writers don’t make things very clear for the moviegoers, it’s easy enough just to go along for the ride until the eponymous stars start to rumble.(SD-Agencies)

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