Wednesday, April 7, 2021

Kung Fu

The new CW reboot premiered tonight; the pilot felt a little exposition-heavy, and I was afraid that they were going to kill off the father played by Tzi Ma. But it's not clunkier than an average Supergirl episode, and the dead Shifu apparently will continue to give ghostly advice to Nicky. I was pleasantly surprised by Nicky's siblings who also wanted to help in the Tony Kang investigation. Will they be her team, like the team on the Equalizer? Anyway, the show clearly defined a mission for the season, to find eight magic weapons and defeat the villian Zhilan.

Meawhile I watched Godzilla vs Kong, and the fights were pretty good, though the plot was predictable once I saw the robot being constructed by Apex. I also found it hard to connect to the storyline of Benny and the kids even though I like Julian Dennison from Hunt for the Wilderpeople. I didn't know anything about Madison's backstory and I thought her group was on a HEAV going to meet the other plot in Antarctica; instead they were going on some kind of "pod" shipped by monorail from Florida to Hong Kong. Like, how could you construct that monorail, and why, if planes are available?

Meanwhile, the Kong team were brand new people, since it's been 40+ years since the 1973-set Kong: Skull Island. Apparently the habitat on Skull Island has become unstable somehow and some "storm" wiped out all the native Iwi people except for one deaf girl named Jia. Jia's adoptive mom is the Monarch scientist in charge, the so-called Kong whisperer. An old friend convinces her to transport Kong to Antarctica to find Hollow Earth. Why doesn't she need to get approval from someone else to participate in a non-Monarch expedition funded by the Apex guy? It's nice that Kong found a new home and a special axe, though I did wish that he might have found other apes like him to have a family with. I guess he just considers Jia his family; their special bond is a nice update on the classic movies always having Kong love some white woman.

Anyway, HBO Max has all the other Monsterverse movies, so I was able to stream the other movies to catch up on what I missed. Some things are still unexplained, though, like why Apex has the Ghidorah skull and not the previous eco-terrorist villain. And why is Dr Serizawa's son working for the Apex villain instead of for Monarch?

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