Hollywood, it seems, has empires on its mind. Last week saw the release of Ghostbusters: The Frozen Empire. This week brings Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire. There’s no Star Wars movie on the release calendar, but the Empire is apparently fighting back.
It’s not just about empires, though, it’s about records. It will hit theaters next month Monkey manfollowed quickly by Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. Add this week’s Kong entry and one thing is clear: viewers are in for a lot of monkey business.
The New Empire is the fifth film in the so-called MonsterVerse and the second to pair the titular characters. Like the one in 2021 Godzilla vs. Kong, this entry is directed by Adam Wingard, and like that entry, perhaps even more so, it is epically stupid. I’m not even sure I meant it as an insult: Godzilla x Kong it’s a saga of silly monkeys like you’ve never seen before.
Wingard’s innovation is to treat his pair of monster protagonists as just a pair of brothers, with normal, recognizable, sibling-type problems. When we first meet Kong, he’s hunting in the Hollow Earth (please don’t make me explain what that is) and tearing apart minimonsters and taking over his territory as a result. At the end of a long, tiring day, he takes a shower under a waterfall, then returns to his Kong cave to relax and watch Netflix… er, watch over his domain.
And it turns out he has a toothache.
Yes, the inciting incident in this great big monster beat ’em up movie is a giant ape with a toothache. This sets in motion a series of even sillier, sillier events that will eventually lead Kong and Godzilla to battle a common enemy. Forget The New Empire; the subtitle of this film should have been Tooth and consequences.
Godzilla, you see, has remained on the surface of the Earth trampling on petty monsters that threaten humanity’s major cities. From the glimpses we get of these fights, it seems that Godzilla is as furious as he is destructive, but either way he’s now kind of a good guy, walking the Earth like Caine in Kung Fu, defending the oppressed. This suggests a much better, or at least more intriguing, premise, in which Godzilla is reimagined as a devastating version of the skyline of The equalizer, traveling to a new location in each episode and inflicting vengeance of monstrous proportions.
Before television series moved toward complex, serialized storytelling, many were constructed by pitting the hero against a new villain in each episode—this type of unique narrative format was sometimes referred to as “monster of the week.” When will Godzilla get his own series?
Not soon enough. The large ornery lizard spends much of the film dormant, curled up and snoozing, like a dog, inside the Colosseum. It turns out that monsters like menI really can’t stop thinking about the Roman Empire.
But this only highlights the brotherly nature of the film’s titular big brutes. Kong spends part of the film bonding with a mini-Kong, a transfer son who shows up to energize the film’s big dad while the little guy tries to copy the father figure’s ways. Monkeys see monkeys do.
Meanwhile, Godzilla travels to the Arctic to empower himself by defeating the cold-water-dwelling energy monster Tiamat. Somehow this eventually leads to a story about preventing a new ice age. Ghostbusters sequel aside, perhaps this should have been called Frozen empire After all?
It’s tremendously silly, with occasional drops of lore designed to “explain” what’s going on. But exposition mostly makes things more incomprehensible. At one point, it is explained that there is an entire hidden human society that functions based on the control of gravity, and in the end, gravity is simply turned off. In Godzilla x Kongup is literally down.
Some of this, however, is funny, in a fairly juvenile way. At its best, the film pairs Kong and Godzilla together as some sort of giant-sized crime comedy – think 48 hours OR Turner and Hoochbut bigger, stronger and dumber.
Yet the film’s problems persist. For one thing, too much time is spent rehearsing incomprehensible stories about the lost ape civilization in the Hollow Earth, which, again, is just too stupid to explain.
Also, unfortunately this movie also has real people played by real actors. The less said about it, the better.
The film knows how disposable its human characters are: the ending turns them into spectators who barely have a part to play. The last 20 minutes or so are essentially a computer-animated wrestling match, complete with power wrestling moves, between Godzilla and Kong on one side and King Skar, a twisted, evil version of Kong, plus his enslaved Godzilla . like the servant, Shimo. This special MonsterMania event is loud, ridiculous, and… well, mostly just loud and ridiculous.
Godzilla x Kong it’s not a good film, but in its defense it doesn’t even pretend to be one. There’s a childlike, adolescent joy to the film’s huge brawls. If you’ve ever heard an eight-year-old explain the tradition of sandbox battles he’s staging with his action figures, you have an idea of what this movie is like. There are a lot of monkeys around.
If you’re going to see it, look for the biggest screen with the loudest sound system: Godzilla x Kong it largely operates on a “go big-or-go-home” ethic. Given the ridiculous results, viewers should consider the same strategy.