My expectations are always partly set against any new Godzilla film. It’s surprising that my younger brother didn’t damage the VHS tape because he viewed Roland Emmerich’s 1998 Godzilla so many times after it was released—nearly every day. However, he also rewatched a number of Toho Co.’s original movies (even though they were terrible dubbings and the Americanized version of the first movie, which stars Raymond Burr, the fictional lawyer who will become television’s favorite in the future). These are movies that played on repeat in my childhood, which always annoyed me a little bit, but with time I came to appreciate and like them—even Emmerich’s, which I recently rewatched with my family during lockdown and still found to be incredibly hilarious.
The unfair competition for any Godzilla film this year was the American debut of Godzilla Minus One, a Toho Studios production from Japan that is set in post-World War II Japan, at the end of 2023. This film, the 37th installment in the multi-decade Godzilla franchise, is among the best, fusing some of the most visually stunning monster movie scenes ever attempted with the emotional resonance of the original (where the enormous lizard terrorizing Tokyo acted as a stand-in for the devastation caused by nuclear weapons).
Unfortunately, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire doesn’t offer any such deep reflection on the anxieties and fears that modern mankind faces beyond the animal fights and amazing destruction of some of the most cherished monuments from around the globe. Furthermore, you won’t find much fun, which is something that ought to be much tougher to go wrong in a film whose primary attraction is large creatures destroying one another and their surroundings. The fifth entry in Legendary Pictures’ MonsterVerse series, which debuted recently, is somehow even more gloomy than its mediocre predecessors. The franchise of diminishing returns is hampered by a plot that manages to be both frustratingly convoluted and overly simple. Previous entries in the series have included solo films centered on both Godzilla and King Kong as well as the most recent creature feature in which the pair collided for the first time.
I really couldn’t have come up with a better synopsis of Godzilla x Kong even as I was leaving the movie. Using Wikipedia as my guide, I am presenting the following plot summary, which I will just assume to be accurate. Three years after the events of Godzilla vs. Kong, the two antagonistic monsters live in peaceful coexistence on different lands: Godzilla rules above ground while Kong guards Hollow Earth from the Titans that occasionally surface to terrify the earth. Then, a signal detected by a Monarch observation post in Hollow Earth may be a sign of a new threat, especially since it causes Godzilla to behave strangely and causes Jia (Kaylee Hottle), the adopted daughter of Dr. Ilene Andrews (Rebecca Hall) and the last surviving member of the Iwi tribe on Skull Island (Kong’s home territory), to have hallucinations.
The plot then splits into two halves. Kong is transported to an uncharted world where a tribe of people who share his species live when a sinkhole appears close to his house. In the meantime, Andrews recruits veteran Dan Stevens as Bernie Hayes, a conspiracy theorist, and veteran Trapper, a franchise newbie, to go with her and Jia to Hollow Earth in order to find the source of the signal.
You would be correct if you believe that this story doesn’t really relate to Godzilla. Even though he is essentially the star of the show, our favorite fire-breathing atomic monster is barely seen in the film’s hilarious climax (albeit there are nice little cuts where Godzilla is curled up like a cat inside Rome’s Colosseum). That wouldn’t be a problem if Godzilla x Kong had more to offer. A portion of Kong’s adventures are entertaining, especially when it comes to the enormous ape’s cunning in combat (he once uses a newborn ape as a weapon). He receives a cool mechanical arm at another. However, the majority of the movie focuses on the human characters giving a ton of pointless information that is difficult to care about. More mysterious than the mysteries of Hollow Earth is how this series manages to cast some of the most gifted performers in the business and then completely waste them. Not even a crazy performance from the typically entertaining Stevens brightens the proceedings; in fact, bad writing that blatantly tries to make them into A Thing gets in the middle of any funny back-and-forth between him and Henry.
The crystalline style of Hollow Earth and the vividly colored artificial lighting in Godzilla x Kong are two intriguing aspects that give those scenes a nostalgic, even psychedelic vibe. It’s definitely a welcome change from the drab backdrops of gray and beige that characterize many of today’s blockbusters. However, that made-up world is also a barrier; far too much of the movie features characters interacting in a world so disconnected from reality that it’s difficult to find anything to connect with, aside from Andrews’s struggles as a mother dealing with the possibility that her child doesn’t feel like she belongs with her, which forms the basis for part of it. In contrast, the scenes that are genuinely situated in recognized reality hardly ever put the Titans in relation to the human scale necessary to lend those moments a feeling of grandeur. It doesn’t help that the character designs—especially the big-eyed juvenile companion of Kong—adhere to a more cartoonish style that is just sufficiently far from reality to fall into the uncanny valley. If this movie hadn’t come out right after Godzilla Minus One, which featured astonishingly smooth, Oscar-winning visual effects while being made on a much smaller budget than this one, perhaps some of these errors wouldn’t have been as apparent or bothersome. Unfortunately, Godzilla x Kong doesn’t have much more to offer to make up for it, not to casual audiences seeking a fun popcorn movie at the theater or those immersed in the memories and lore.
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