Godzilla vs. Kong: One Will Fall - The Art of the Ultimate Battle Royale is a pretty great book. While it’s informative, it’s another reminder that although the MonsterVerse films, like any film, contain ideas and concepts not contained in the film, the MonsterVerse home releases have always been void of any substantial deleted scenes. However, with Godzilla vs Kong, this book becomes a valuable resource because it’s the only place where things that should have been in the film and deleted scenes can be found. This isn’t the first such occasion that this has happened, however. For example, in “Godzilla The Art of Destruction” from 2014, it was the only way one could see an official still photo of the much publicized Akira Takarada deleted scene (and to this day still never seen even though it was supposed to be on the film’s home release). While the film was a fun time at the movies, there are things in the book like information on Apex’s background (rather than them just showing up in the film), which would have really fleshed things out a little more.
Now, all that aside, this is a WONDERFUL book. The concept art looks amazing and it’s great to see the design process progress. Much like “The Art of Godzilla King of the Monsters” by Abbie Bernstein, author Daniel Wallace brings a level of excitement to the text. It’s great to read because it reads like he’s super excited about the subject-especially with the chapter titles. There are a couple of small errors, however. One is on page 57 where a photo of a Monarch vehicle is seen being blown up, there’s no caption for context as to what’s going on in the scene. It’s just there. Another error (more of a nitpick really) is on page 60 where a rather detailed description of the creation of Kong’s chains in the battleship sequence is written. While informative, there’s no visual component to accompany the text so the reader is left in the dark as to what the VFX people are referring. While there is a concept art shot of Kong on the ship in the picture above the text, there’s nothing for the reader to go on for context.
There’s some really cool looking concept art in this book and it’s interesting to see and read about the Osprey crash site - a scene cut from the film. Since there are, for whatever reason, no deleted scenes on the home release, this is the only way to get information about it and it’s pretty interesting! There’s also a “deleted” monster, “Shimidah”, which looks pretty cool and would have been nice to have seen it in action. MechaGodzilla gets quite a few pages dedicated to the background and evolution on his design which I really enjoyed seeing. The final portion of the book goes into how the Godzilla and Kong (and later MechaGodzilla) battle would play out complete with storyboards and more cool concept art. This was all awesome to see and you could spend hours just pouring over everything.
So, while I highly recommend this book, it does make me wish that more care would be going into the home releases in terms of deleted scene content. I haven’t been happy with any of the MonsterVerse film home releases in that regard and I don’t feel that fans should have to look to ancillary media such as this book when it could be just put in as a bonus feature. For the book, I really feel that fans will enjoy it! It’s a great read and all the set photos and concept art make for some awesome, if not informative visual candy. |
