The Big Picture
- The MonsterVerse films range from exploring deep themes to showcasing giant creatures fighting.
Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire
embraces absurdity, for better and for worse.- The film focuses on Kong's journey to find family, balancing over-the-top action with limited character development.
Both Godzilla and Kong are characters that have existed for the better part of a century, with dozens of films under their combined belts. For the most part, these franchises can be broken down into two categories. One is films that attempt to explore deeper issues or themes under the guise of a monster movie, like 1933’s King Kong, 1954’s Godzilla, or last year’s Godzilla Minus One. The other sillier category relies on just watching these gargantuan creatures fight each other for little reason other than that it’s sort of fun to watch giants cause massive destruction and get into large-scale brawls.
When the recent MonsterVerse started, it at least thought it was in the former category, with the dour Godzilla in 2014 from Gareth Edwards, and Kong: Skull Island, with its look at a post-Vietnam War world. But like so many of these series, the MonsterVerse began as something deeper, then quickly fell into the easier second category, where the wreckage and huge-ass kaiju overcame any semblance of a deeper meaning. Films like Godzilla: King of the Monsters and Godzilla vs. Kong threw a bunch of colossi at each other with the thinnest of stories (because, really, who needs a strong story?), which has become the direction for this mash-up of a cinematic universe. The latest installment in this MonsterVerse is Adam Wingard’s Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, which fully embraces this direction with both arms, in what is easily the most absurd film in this universe—which is both a strength and a weakness.
Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire
Kong and the fearsome Godzilla face off against a colossal undiscovered threat hidden within our world, challenging their very existence – and our own.
- Release Date
- March 29, 2024
- Runtime
- 1h 55m
What Is 'Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire' About?
In the wake of Godzilla vs. Kong, these two behemoths have stayed out of each other’s way. Godzilla stays on the surface, where he protects humans from other monsters and has taken to sleeping in the Colosseum when he’s not in battle, while Kong’s domain is the newly-discovered Hollow Earth. While Godzilla is stomping around protecting humans (also destroying countless iconic landmarks and probably killing thousands in the process), Kong is mostly on his own in Hollow Earth. As seemingly the last of his kind, Kong is lonely, and to make matters worse, he also has a toothache. :(
Dr. Ilene Andrews (Rebecca Hall) keeps an eye on Kong in Hollow Earth, while her adopted daughter, Jia (Kaylee Hottle)—the last existing member of the tribe who lived in harmony with Kong on Skull Island—has been seeing visions, a call for help that seems to be coming from Hollow Earth. With the help of Trapper (Dan Stevens), a doctor of Titans, and Bernie, (Brian Tyree Henry), a podcast host/conspiracy theorist/savior of the world from the last film, Dr. Andrews and Jia go to Hollow Earth to find out what’s going on, what these signals Jia is picking up on means, and discover a creature that could be a threat to everyone and everything.
But in actuality, Godzilla x Kong has a story that solely exists to get Godzilla and Kong on the same side against an even bigger potential threat, and every step of this narrative is building towards that eventual conflict we all know is coming. However, this is also primarily the story of Kong, as we follow his journey to find his own family, in a way that seems heavily inspired by the recent Planet of the Apes trilogy. Godzilla vs. Kong attempted to humanize Kong a bit more and make him the character we root for in this fight, and The New Empire expands upon this to make the eventual fight have at least some stakes—which is a nice change considering the films that have come before this.
The MonsterVerse Still Struggles With Creating Interesting Characters
Yet the MonsterVerse still struggles to make its human characters interesting. These people exist primarily to set up the oncoming battle and become little more than exposition machines for explaining the things that Godzilla and Kong can’t verbally state. There are several times when characters know something simply because the plot requires it, despite there being absolutely no reason why they should have that information. Everything is incredibly convenient and inherently goofy because of this. For example, when Kong is blasted by a burst of ice from a new monster, he returns to the humans for help. But it’s a good thing that within the Hollow Earth, humans have just so happened to have created a robotic arm for Kong that has been left behind and is only a quick plane ride away!
At least putting the humans on this journey gives them a bit more agency than they’ve probably had since Kong: Skull Island. Hall is essentially the expert that every one of these types of films needs, and she does that well, while Henry is having fun as the audience surrogate, wowed by everything that he’s seeing in the Hollow Earth. However, most curious is the inclusion of Stevens’ Trapper, who seems to be the MonsterVerse’s attempt to give this series its own Star-Lord. Not only does Trapper start flying around in a ship that looks straight out of Guardians of the Galaxy, he’s got a breezy attitude, a Hawaiian shirt that evokes Ace Ventura (and is even called out as such), and every time he shows up, he seems accompanied by classic pop-rock needle drops. It’s a role that Stevens plays well, but it seems a bit too obvious what this film is going for.
'Godzilla x Kong' Shifts This Franchise Into Big, Dumb Action
And while the last few films in the MonsterVerse have struggled with making the transition into a goofier direction, Wingard shifts this universe into the simple monster-on-monster action that this series was trying to avoid but now seemingly wants to latch onto wholeheartedly. Godzilla x Kong is an extremely dumb movie in many ways. This is a film in which Godzilla fights Kong, giving each other DDTs while destroying pretty much every Great Pyramid. This is a world where we have allowed Godzilla to “protect” us from oncoming threats, despite causing untold destruction and deaths in the process. This, again, is a film that conveniently has a robot arm to give Kong just in case. At a certain point, there’s not much to do here but give in and accept the stupidity of this world that Wingard is giving us, for better or for worse.
In comparison to Godzilla: King of the Monsters and Godzilla vs. Kong, The New Empire’s shifting into this new tone is much smoother and more sensical. Before, these films were fairly bland, uneventful affairs mindlessly leading to a third-act conflict. That’s still the basic structure of what’s happening here, but there’s more to enjoy on the way to that endgame. With a screenplay by Terry Rossio, Simon Barrett, and Jeremy Slater (from a story by Rossio, Wingard, and Barrett), Godzilla x Kong manages to make this feel more like a story than just a whole lot of setup—even though that’s exactly what it is. The journey of Kong trying to find a family in Hollow Earth is a solid choice and at least gives this monster something to do that isn’t walking around, waiting to fight in the final half-hour of the film.
Meanwhile, Wingard’s direction knows that the audience wants completely over-the-top action, and succeeds in providing that. These monsters traverse the world, destroying everything in their wake in several absurd fights that are good ol' dumb fun. It can at times feel like Wingard smashing his toys together against these landscapes, and there is some joy to be had in that ridiculousness. But in the wake of Godzilla Minus One, it all feels like a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing. Wingard makes this a film perfect for shutting off your brain and watching these two giants knock each other out using wrestling moves that they’ve somehow discovered in their worlds. For a series that tried to be something more in the beginning, with Edwards’ more serious approach to Godzilla, the path to this goofy inclination is fairly disappointing. Like so many other films in these two franchises, it starts off as trying to be about something more than just a monster movie only to eventually slide into the easy direction of amounting to little more than that.
Godzilla x Kong is a vacuous de-evolution into monster-on-monster action but also arguably the best possible version of that transition. There’s no doubt that this is fairly moronic, but it still manages to be an improvement over what we’ve seen from the last two installments in this cinematic universe. If this is where the MonsterVerse wants to head, Wingard is doing a decent job of making this into an absurd monsters mash, but given where this series started, and how these characters have thrived when attempting to be about something more than just action (and recently!), it’s a shame that Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is little more than Godzilla and Kong DDTing each other into pyramids.
Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire
Adam Wingard's Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire embraces the silliness of monster movies for better and for worse.
- Adam Wingard gives us the best possible version of big, dumb monster fights and gargantuan destruction.
- Giving Kong an actual story is a smart choice that makes us care about more than just the upcoming fight.
- The action isn't the only thing that's mindless here, as the narrative is extremely convenient and stupid in distracting ways.
- There's still very little reason to actually care about the human characters.
Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is now in theaters in the U.S. Click below for showtimes near you.
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