Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire
Two monsters face off again, this time with less feeling.
Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire asks a crucial question: What if King Kong, Godzilla, and all the other monsters from Godzilla movies behaved as though they were professional wrestlers? The idea has the potential for explosive fun; we’ve seen it before in the movie’s predecessor, Godzilla vs. Kong. Unfortunately, Godzilla x Kong suffers from a lack of a compelling reason for the two titular monsters to come together. Instead of getting right to the action, the movie keeps circling the ring, dropping pieces of lore whenever the monster battles threaten to get too interesting.
It’s a shame, because Godzilla vs. Kong understood how to tell a similar story without getting in its own way. Godzilla vs. Kong was dumb, colorful fun; this new sequel is dumb and colorful, with some of the elements that made its predecessor so delightful, but they don’t cohere well enough to deliver the same snap as the previous movie. The question “What if two giant monsters hated each other so much they’d fight on sight?” can take a movie surprisingly far. Godzilla x Kong doesn’t manage to pull the same premise off a second time, nor does it know how to get out of its own way.
This is partly because the movie paints itself into a corner from the very start. Since the end of Godzilla vs. Kong, the two monsters have managed an uneasy truce by keeping to their respective territories. Godzilla reigns over the earth’s surface, while Kong makes his home in the primordial jungles of the earth’s hollow center. If one enters the other’s territory, the ensuing battle could mean the end of life on Earth. The détente is intended to raise the tension before the ensuing clash, but instead it just prolongs the amount of time spent waiting for the party to get together. There’s no good justification for the two to meet, revealing any attempts to bring them together to be obvious contrivances, motions that must be performed before we can get to the good parts.
Nor does the movie seem particularly interested in one of its two main players. Whenever Godzilla decides to level another city, the action is swift, shot in a steady middle distance without any of the awe or terror that such an encounter would create. These sequences feel like a low-magnitude earthquake; the movie is so eager to get on to the next scene that any time spent with Godzilla feels perfunctory. The bulk of the movie’s attention rests on Kong and his difficulty in adjusting to his new home. It turns out that Hollow Earth is a hard place to live when you’re the last of your giant ape kind.
Because King Kong is nonverbal and has been separated from his human interpreter Jia (Kaylee Hottle, reprising her role from the previous movie), the giant ape is left to express his loneliness through body language alone. The film trusts the audience enough to follow the silent action when Kong is unaccompanied, but whenever human characters appear on screen, they revert to narrating action we’ve already seen or else delivering exposition that takes extraordinary leaps to get to its conclusions. The film doesn’t trust its audience to follow its plot unaided. Nor does it seem to trust its lead actors (Rebecca Hall and Brian Tyree Henry each returning for another round alongside newcomer Dan Stevens) to be able to carry that action in a recognizably human register. All emotion is heightened, simplified, and obvious, serving only as thin connective tissue to get the characters from scene to scene. To be fair, this is a feature of the Godzilla vs. Kong script as well. But here, with the action stretched thin between sequences of technobabble, it feels like stalling for time.
The stalling is frustrating, given the fact that this movie is simply an excuse to watch giant monsters fight against colorful backdrops. The action, shapeless as it is, is framed like a major wrestling event. Each monster has a signature move; each monster roars before attacking, as though it’s talking smack. One monster even wears what appears to be a trophy belt, as though it’s the contender to beat. They are all colorful and distinct, but the battles are so swift and the CGI is so blurry that there’s not even any joy in watching the monsters clash, much less a chance to get a good look at them. A movie this dumb should at least be fun.
★☆☆☆
Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is in theaters nationwide now.