
Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire
Every one of Legendary Pictures’ recent English language kaiju epics has been different, and “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire” keeps that streak going. This is a direct sequel to 2021’s “Godzilla vs. Kong,” itself a loose remake of Toho Studios’ 1962 film “King Kong vs. Godzilla” in which the big ape and big lizard fought each other before joining forces against a common enemy, a robot but rather than simply following the template in “The New Empire,” returning director Adam Wingard and his two co-writers opt for a more fractured and sometimes knowingly silly narrative, cross-cutting between lines of action taking place in locations around the world that all converge on a massive creature brawl.
In terms of artistry, this is the most hit and miss entry in the MonsterVerse so far, it lacks both the unity and distinction that made all of them work as individual movies, whether it was Gareth Edwards’ 2014 “Godzilla” (more or less “Close Encounters of the Godzilla Kind”), Jordan Vogt-Roberts’ “Kong: Skull Island” (a bizarro riff on Vietnam movies), Michael Dougherty’s “Godzilla: King of the Monsters” (the first team-up entry, with lots of mournful family melodrama stirred into its city-destroying slugfests), or Wingard’s own gloriously goofy original Godzilla-Kong movie, which owed an awful lot to 1960s exploration sci-fi like “Journey to the Center of the Earth” and ’80s Hong Kong/American action-thriller/buddy films where two big-name male stars have to fight each other before teaming up against an even more dangerous villain.
This time around, Rebecca Hall’s anthropologist Ilene Andrews is our anchor character, caring for her adopted daughter Jia (Kaylie Hottle), and trying to figure out what the connection might be between mysterious energy pulses that have been detected on Monarch Project monster-measuring tech and the frenzied drawings Jia’s been scrawling on school desks and scratch paper. The answer unearthed with the help of muckraker/conspiracy podcaster Bernie Hayes (Brian Tyree Henry), another character from the last film turns out to be another “Close Encounters with Godzilla” notion, positing that what they’re all experiencing is essentially a combined distress signal/warning about an impending catastrophe. As suggested by trailers and other promotional materials, there is indeed a secret civilization of giant Kong-like primates being held captive in an uncharted sector of Hollow Earth, plotting their escape and takeover of the surface world, their leader is a scarred, sadistic despot who oppresses his own kind in a mining operation located in a hellish volcanic cavern that looks like somebody watched “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” more than once.
As someone who has been a booster for this franchise from day one, I’m sorry to report that “Godzilla x Kong” is all over the place; it never really gets up much momentum before cutting away to something else, leaving “King of the Monsters” looking single mindedly on-message by comparison, and it’s even more stuffed with redundant and wooden “make sure everybody in audience understands everything that’s happening at all times” exposition than its predecessors. But when there are fights, they’re rousing and often brilliantly choreographed particularly the finale, a multiple-monster main event with lots of other creatures bustling around in background and most of live-action/motion capture performances are marvelous despite bum dialogue and Wingard’s tendency to rush through sequences whole relationships that might have been extraordinary had they been given patience elegance. Dan Stevens is nice but functionally absurd addition to cast.
The poetry-quoting ex-boyfriend of Ilene who is famous for being the first and only kaiju doctor so far, has come to extract an abscessed tooth from Kong’s mouth by rappelling down into it from a hovercraft. (I’m not sure if it was Shakespeare or Freud who said that a man with a toothache can’t be in love, but there’s another thing: a giant ape with a toothache can’t defend the surface world.) Stevens has real chemistry with Henry, whose dialogue often sounds ad-libbed even when it wasn’t, there are moments when they seem at risk of cracking each other up and blowing a take. But the film doesn’t make anything of this connection, it doesn’t build it into something truly memorable.
Kong’s relationship with the big-eyed little scamp of an ape he meets while exploring Hollow Earth is a much bigger missed opportunity, though what we do see of them is performed by motion capture performers and FX teams with imagination and care; the younger ape is essentially an abused child who behaves treacherously and selfishly because he grew up in a cult, but now he suddenly has a good parenting model courtesy of Kong, who is himself an orphaned single hairball living alone without any parent figures (that we know of) but still treating him with unearned patience and compassion which gradually primates him somewhat better. Adam Sandler has told this story many times. It’s also what’s happening between Ilene and Jia here one adoptive parent reconnecting her with her own roots, another growing sad as she might outgrow need for her two different sets of challenges for two different adoptive parents, same basic tale left underdone.
More things in the negative column. The creature skins made by the computer look more cartoonish than they have before. And it introduces its genuinely scary and charismatic villain, Skar King, too late for him and Kong to build and flesh out their antagonism, as Godzilla vs. Kong did with Kong and Godzilla’s friendship. Watching Kong’s value system slowly unveiling itself here is fascinating, it could not be more different from his evil doppelganger’s behavior, a preening swaggering rotter of a monster who looks like he was played through a time warp by Gary Oldman in the ‘90s. Kong should’ve had a cathartic triumph here a victory of decency over despotic cruelty rather than narrative box checking.
The movie needed more ape content overall; it’s what really lands. It doesn’t seem to realize how strong it is. A cannier-structured version might’ve focused on the vividly rendered and characterized apes and the humans that follow them around, possibly at the expense of Godzilla, who is treated here mainly as an intermittently mayhem-producing force to cut away to because “Godzilla” is in the title of this movie. (He has his moments though: using a pro wrestling suplex to slam an opponent, sleeping curled up in the Roman Colosseum like it’s the world’s biggest dog bed.)
If you’re still down for whatever ness after three chaotic movies’ worth of Legendary Pictures’ MonsterVerse franchise, you’ll find plenty to enjoy here too. But you shouldn’t have to look for it!
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