Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire

Brash, loud, obnoxious and occasionally delivering what it promises, Godzilla x Kong – the fifth entry in Legendary Entertainments on going giant monster saga – throws every idea it has and then some into the blender but still struggles to create realistic stakes or characters to attach to.  The argument could be made that the monsters themselves are the foci everything should be circling around but aside from a few character beats they are as static and cliched as the humans they are supposed to be protecting Kong and his compatriots are a means to an end rather than the end itself.

And that end is destruction in some of the most cartoonishly absurd action set pieces ever committed to screen.  That’s a good thing.  At a certain point director Wingard simply stops bothering with the forms of narrative and gives over to totally to the ridiculous, trying to find just how far is too far.  Zero gravity monster battles?  Freeze dragons?  Pyramid battles and magic crystals?  It’s all here, and then some.

A few years after Godzilla and Kong’s titanic battle the two have retreated to their own independent realms; Godzilla to travel the world fighting other errant titans, and Kong to the subterranean Hollow Earth looking for any hint of his own kind to end his eternal loneliness.  When a rift opens in the cavern floor Kong abandons the Hollow Earth for the Hollower Earth, a larger prehistoric cavern filled with the missing Kong kind who had somehow been exiled centuries earlier when their leader, the Skar King, attempted to take over the surface world.  Faced with the mixed bag of getting what he wanted and finding it trying to kill him, Kong has no choice but to team up with his old foe the King of Monsters who has been gearing up for the titanic battle he can sense coming.  There is also a rock-n-roll giant monster vet, a mute psychic who can communicate with the monsters, a disgraced podcaster and a few more people who do not matter at all.

That’s not a criticism of Godzilla x Kong (well it is), just a statement of fact.  The early days of the series when the monsters might emerge from the shadows for just a few minutes while the cameras remain trained on the humans trying to navigate the chaos … those days are gone.  Gradually it has shifted, either to what it always had to be or what the producers at Legendary always wanted it to be … a Transformers-esque playground of destruction which uses its handful of human characters to relay necessary exposition and eat up the first hour of screen time because the visual effects budget won’t allow for 120 minutes of Kong and crew destroying things. 

It sounds nihilistic because in some ways it is nihilistic.  It is a literal boys’ toy room with children picking up their lizards and apes and smashing them into each other while making bang and crash sounds.  It seems like they’ve started with the idea of Kong riding Godzilla’s back to crash into evil Kong and evil Godzilla and left the rest to work itself out till they get there.  An argument can be made that’s all it needs to be, but that makes it all the more obvious what’s important in between as it sets up and sets up and sets up until Kong drops down a fissure and discovers his kin. 

As much as it goes through the forms of a narrative film – following Rebecca Hall’s Dr. Andrews as she tries to discover what is affecting her adopted daughter (Hottle) and making the decision to head down to Hollow Earth herself – it’s clear Kong is where the filmmaker’s hearts are at. He has real pathos in his loneliness and more when he discovers the only ones of his kind are giant dicks that he’s going to have to fight rather than love.  A full 30 minutes of the film is void of any spoken dialogue and yet as crystal clear in its character motivations as any action film ever made.  (And suggests George Lucas was right when he said dialogue was just soundtrack, not storytelling, in cinema).  Some of that is the simplicity of the characterizations themselves – Kong just has to re-enact any Eastwood western ever as he saunters into the layer of the bully to protect the child he has befriended.  Dialogue would cheapen it.

And it wouldn’t matter.  What matters is pink and purple skies and electric bugs and fights among the pyramids and giant monkey’s with robot arms.  Looking under the hood would be counter productive.  It just reminds you how much the human characters stand around saying why the monsters are doing what they’re doing – don’t ask how they know –  because no one has bothered to explain it (despite showcasing that they can do so), or how little use the film has for Godzilla.  He’s like a contractually mandated rock star, sleeping in his Italian apartment until it’s finally time to go on, doing his thing and then heading right back to sleep.

Like any piece of cotton candy, it evaporates and fades as soon as it touches the tongue.  There is a sensation, a memory of something wonderful but it existed to briefly to be significant.  It’s probably for the best; if the details were permanent it would be impossible to ignore how badly Godzilla x Kong has been slopped together.

5 out of 10.

Starring Rebecca Hall, Brian Tyree Henry, Dan Stevens, Kaylee Hottle, Alex Ferns, Fala Chen and Rachel House. Directed by Adam Wingard.