Review: “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire”

Any new Godzilla movie always has my expectations working somewhat against it. My younger brother watched and rewatched Roland Emmerich’s 1998 Godzilla so many times after it was released— almost daily— I’m surprised he didn’t ruin the VHS tape. But he also went back and watched several of Toho Co.’s original films (albeit the horribly dubbed versions, and the Americanized edit of the very first film that centers around television’s future favorite fictional attorney, Raymond Burr). They’re films that I grew up mildly annoyed to always have as the background soundtrack to my childhood, but have learned to appreciate and enjoy over time— even Emmerich’s, which I most recently rewatched with my family during lockdown and still find to be immensely entertaining.

However, any Godzilla movie released this year unfairly had another factor to contend with: the end-of-2023 American release of Godzilla Minus One, a Japanese production from Toho Studios set in post-World War II Japan. It’s the 37th movie in the decades-spanning Godzilla franchise and one of the best, merging some of the most impressively-mounted monster movie sequences ever committed to film with the thematic heft of the original (in which the giant lizard terrorizing Tokyo served as a stand-in for the destruction caused by nuclear weapons).

Unfortunately, if you look past the creature brawls and fantastic devastation of some of the most beloved monuments from around the world in Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, you won’t find any such thoughtful commentary on humanity’s current fears and concerns. And you won’t find much of the other thing that should be much harder to screw up in a movie whose main draw is big monsters smashing each other and their environment: entertainment. The newly-released fifth installment in Legendary Pictures’ MonsterVerse series (which has included solo films centering on both Godzilla and King Kong as well as 2021’s recent creature feature in which the pair collided for the first time) is somehow even more dour than its middling predecessors, a franchise of diminishing returns done in by a plot that manages to be both frustratingly convoluted and overly simple.

Truly, even as I was walking out of the theater, I could not have summarized Godzilla x Kong off the top of my head had I tried. So I am providing the following plot description with the aid of Wikipedia, which I’m just going to trust is right on this one. Three years after the events of Godzilla vs. Kong, the rival monsters peacefully rule over separate territories: Kong in Hollow Earth, Godzilla above ground, protecting humans from the Titans that emerge to terrorize the planet. Then, a Monarch observation post in Hollow Earth picks up a signal that might indicate a new threat, especially as it prompts erratic behavior in Godzilla and Jia (Kaylee Hottle), the last survivor of Skull Island’s (Kong’s homeland) Iwi tribe and the adopted daughter of Dr. Ilene Andrews (Rebecca Hall) to experience hallucinations.

From there, the plot becomes divided. A sinkhole that opens near Kong’s home leads him to an unknown world where a tribe of his same species resides. Meanwhile, Andrews enlists conspiracy theorist Bernie Hayes (Brian Tyree Henry) and vet Trapper (franchise newcomer Dan Stevens) to accompany her and Jia to Hollow Earth to locate the source of the signal.

If you think that sounds like this story doesn’t have much to do with Godzilla, you’d be right. Despite essentially being top-billed, our favorite atomic fire-breathing monster is really only an active figure in the film’s rollicking climax (although occasional cuts to Godzilla curled cat-like inside Rome’s Colosseum are quite cute). That wouldn’t be an issue if the rest of Godzilla x Kong delivered. Some of the stuff with Kong is fun, particularly the giant ape’s resourcefulness in battle (at one point, he swings a baby ape as a weapon. At another, he is given a nifty mechanical arm). But the bulk of the film centers around the human leads delivering a lot of nonsensical exposition that it’s hard to really care about. How this series keeps getting away with casting some of the most talented actors working in movies today and completely wasting them remains more mystifying than the secrets of Hollow Earth. Not even a gonzo performance from the always amusing Stevens livens up the proceedings; any effective comedic back-and-forth between him and Henry is hindered by poor writing that is clearly trying to force them to become A Thing.

There are some intriguing elements to Godzilla x Kong, such as the brightly-colored artificial lights and crystalline aesthetic of Hollow Earth, which lends those scenes a retro, almost psychedelic feel. It’s certainly a refreshing shift from the bland gray and beige scenery that dominates many of today’s blockbuster. But that artificial world is equally a hindrance; too much of this film is players interacting in realm that is so far outside of reality it’s hard to find much to grasp on to, beyond the struggles that Andrews faces as a mom contending with the fact that her child may not feel like she belongs with her, which grounds some of it. The scenes that are actually set in recognizable reality, meanwhile, rarely place the Titans against the human scale required to give those sequences a sense of grandeur. It doesn’t help that the visual effects— the character designs, in particular— adhere to a more cartoony look, just divorced from reality enough to dip into the uncanny valley (Kong’s big-eyed juvenile buddy is especially noticeably phony). Perhaps some of these flaws would be less noticeable or annoying had this film, again, not arrived on the heels of Godzilla Minus One, whose Oscar-winning visual effects (produced on a shoestring budget compared to Hollywood productions such as this) are impressively seamless. Sadly, Godzilla x Kong doesn’t have much else to offer to make up for that— both for fans steeped in the nostalgia and lore, and casual viewers just showing up at the theater in search of a good popcorn movie.

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is now playing in theaters. Runtime: 115 minutes. Rated PG-13.