I think I understand the plot: the indigenous people of Skull Island are not the bloodthirsty savages of the 2005 Peter Jackson King Kong movie; they're quasi-Buddhist in demeanor and appearance, and the only survivors of their tribe have lived for centuries in the hollow Earth. They call for help to Godzilla on the surface, because an evil giant ape - like Kong but minus the heartfelt melancholy - rules his underworld kingdom, has ambitions to wipe out the tribe and voyage to the planet's surface. An expedition heads down to investigate: Rebecca Hall is a scientist who has adopted the last indigenous survivor of Skull Island (Kaylee Hottle), plus Dan Stevens (Downton Abbey) cast against type as the rugged, wild-card ex boyfriend/giant ape vet/adventurer in a Hawaiian shirt, and Brian Tyree Henry as the blogger/comic relief.
Godzilla spends most of the movie on his way across the globe to attend the big battle in Act 3. His fights in Rome and Rio are terrific. They've done a better job of including him in his own movie, even if he's nowhere near any other principal characters until the end of the film. The continue to do a great job with the expressive face and body language of Kong, and he has a large role in his own movie, which should be obvious but isn't always true.
In 2014 I complained that the Godzilla reboot "ignores, flouts, and breaks the laws of physics, geography, reality, and time so frequently I was actively distracted" and that is still a problem. I am happy to ignore the impossibility of 600' tall animals. I can ignore the Hollow Earth business, in fact, I find it fun (and well rendered in CGI), but all the nonsense about the underground natives using giant quartz pyramids to generate power, and grant themselves super-strength by manipulating gravity, made zero sense to me, and I just felt bad for Hall and Henry when they had to explain it. They wanted an excuse for a zero-gravity extended fight scene between two good monsters and two bad monsters, while hopscotching between floating boulders. I might have preferred no mumbo-jumbo explanation at all.
The plot convolutions and nonsense science made it hard to enjoy this monster movie. Also, Rome and Rio are mostly destroyed in monster battles, and the filmmakers go to infinite lengths to avoid/ignore the massive loss of human life that must be occurring. I would guess tens of thousands of people die in this movie? Which leads to the next wet blanket- IRL our whole society was nearly crippled by a simple COVID pandemic. Are we supposed to believe that a civilization where giant monsters occasionally destroy large cities would just keep chugging along as if Godzilla attacks were no more concerning than a hurricane or tornado? Pacific Rim did a better job of integrating giant monster attacks into the world we live in - even if the result was a lot more depressing.
The only reason I am giving it a better grade than the 2014 Godzilla movie, is because the cast is more empathetic than then, there's no romance, and I love it when a big movie has only one white man in a leading role.
I can't recommend going to the theater to see this, although the battles are fun on a giant movie screen. C-plus.