Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire

Godzilla x Kong - The New Empire is a colorful spectacle, but it is so ape-centric that they might as well have called it ‘Kong Plus One, Or Two, Or Frankly Loads Of Other Apes’ and be done with it.

That’s not a criticism per se. Before Godzilla vs. Kong (2021) the Monsterverse was made up of two Godzilla movies - Godzilla (2014) and King Of The Monsters (2019) - while Kong had only Kong: Skull Island (2017) to show for. So a kind of reciprocity was definitely in order.

So if it’s apes you want, it’s apes you get. There’s Kong of course, who gets a new tooth early and a new arm later on. 

There is a fabulous looking mini-Kong and I kept waiting for the moment that Kong would say ‘Mini-Kong, you complete me.’ But alack and alas…

There is the fearsome Skar King, who is the villain of this particular story. And there are lots of other apes to make up the numbers. So kudos to Warner Bros for getting this movie out to the public before Disney’s Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes in early may.

Godzilla is used more sparingly by director Adam Wingard, who returns to active duty after the (mainly) positive reception of Godzilla vs. Kong and its cumulative worldwide gross of 470 million dollars and change. 

At the beginning of the movie Godzilla is let loose on Rome, but after his early rampage there he goes into hiding for reasons that have to do with the plot, but when he returns he has ‘supercharged’ himself. And there are some other Titans too, you just have to wait a while before the movie gets to them. 

And then there’s the human element. Rebecca Hall is back as Dr. Ilene Andrews, who leads a team into Middle, sorry, Hollow Earth, for reasons that have, once again, to do with the plot.

Besides herself, the team consists of her adopted daughter Jia (Kaylee Hottle), an animal handler called Trapper, who is played by Dan Stevens in a way that would suggest he is channeling Matthew McConaughey from ten years ago, a sort of wild card annex added value element. The team is rounded out by pilot Mikael (Alex Ferns) and by the blogger and wannabe documentary maker Bernie Hayes (Brian Tyree Henry), who played an important role in the previous movie and, who knows, might play an important role in this one too.

Per the official synopsis, the new installment in the Monsterverse puts the mighty Kong and the fearsome Godzilla against a colossal deadly threat hidden within our world that threatens the existence of their species and our very own, as well as diving deep into the mysteries of Skull Island and beyond. Delving straight into the origins of Hollow Earth, this film will explore the ancient Titan battle that brought man and monster together forever.

I think Rebecca Hall is a great actress, and as the team leader she quite often takes center stage. She has some touching scenes with Jia, where they communicate through sign language. But too often her Ilene character is used to explain what the movie is about. The movie is filled to the brim with exposition, and because the story is never allowed to flow freely, it never develops a rhythm that really takes you inside the movie. 

The best scenes are the ones without dialogue, in particular the one where Kong and mini-Kong have a wander through Hollow Earth. Also good is the one in which King and Skar King tough it out and really go for the jugular.

But the special effects are a mixed bag too. Really good when it’s about the creatures, less impressive when we’re talking about the action scenes that are too reliant on CGI - a problem shared with a lot of recent superhero movies.

And in a way, Godzilla and Kong are presented as superheroes too, while you can also compare these movies to Aquaman (the threat to the surface world) and even more obvious, to the Jurassic World movies.

Once again, that’s not a criticism per se, but it’s a crowded field out there in blockbuster country both artistically and in a commercial sense. And yeah, even though the movie offers up a colorful spectacle, and will probably do enough box office to warrant another one, it’s once again a three star movie for an audience that after the unexpected delight of Godzilla Minus One may actually deserve a more artistically ambitious movie.