Movie Review: Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire
A movie featuring Godzilla and King Kong together on screen should not be boring, and yet, watching Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, the latest entry in the Monsterverse cinematic universe, I was consistently bored and underwhelmed. It is a movie that not only barely features Godzilla and King Kong fighting together, but barely features them on screen together, despite them being the titular duo. Instead, we get a movie that features the same issues this Monsterverse franchise has faced before in that there are too many uninteresting human characters and not enough action.
The previous film, Godzilla vs Kong, ended with Godzilla and King Kong teaming up to defeat Mechagodzilla, a robotic version of the giant lizard that was possessed by the spirit Ghidorah, one of Godzilla’s fiercest foes, to save Hong Kong and ultimately the world. Godzilla and Kong then went their separate ways, with Godzilla staying on Earth and King Kong navigating Hollow Earth, a newly found habitat inside the Earth that matches the ecosystem King Kong lived in on Skull Island.
Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire kicks off in Hollow Earth where we find Kong living his life in this newly discovered land. While he enjoys the ecosystem and habitat, which resembles his home of Skull Island, he feels lonely being the only one of its kind on the planet. While exploring the land, Kong finds other apes and monkeys on the planet. He discovers they are under the control of an evil monkey known as the Scar King, who must be defeated if the other monkeys want to be free.
Meanwhile, strange readings and activity start to come from Hollow Earth. Dr. Ilene Andrews (Rebecca Hall) and a crew of people, including her adopted daughter Jia (Kaylee Hottle), the only remaining person from the Iwi tribe that inhabited Skull Island and the only one who can speak to Kong, head to Hollow Earth to see what is happening. They discover more Iwi exist in Hollow Earth, which worries Dr. Andrews about losing her Jia to her kind.
And what’s Godzilla doing through all of this? He’s either swimming in any of the large bodies of water on Earth or sleeping in the Colosseum in Rome. Godzilla roams Earth as he pleases and only causes destruction and mayhem when he senses a threat. When he eventually senses a threat, Godzilla swims to the Arctic for a source of nuclear energy, which he then just naps in until he has absorbed as much power as he can take. He then joins Kong in Hollow Earth to fight the Scar King and an ice-breathing monster known as Shimo, all while the humans and Iwi just wait and do nothing.
Calling the movie Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is very misleading and frankly incorrect to the events that happen in the movie. Godzilla is more of a supporting character in the film, appearing sparingly until the final battle. This is a movie about Kong and, unfortunately, the humans and the themes of belonging and family work well with Kong and his journey, but I could not care less about anything that happens with Dr. Andrews, Jia, and the rest of the humans.
While Kong is prominently featured throughout the film and gets the most do as far as action and story go, Kong x Godzilla: The New Empire has far too much human activity in the movie and not nearly enough Godzilla or monster mayhem and action, which is all this movie needed. Just show us non-stop monster-on-monster battles and leave the humans out of it. The final action scene, where Kong and Godzilla finally team up, is awesome. It is just four monsters beating the hell out of each other for twenty minutes and this is what the entire film should have been. If the filmmakers had focused on Godzilla and King Kong fighting other insanely big and menacing monsters the movie would have gotten a positive review from me because at the very least, the title would have been correct, and the action would have been fun chaos. Instead, we get a bunch of uninteresting humans reciting exposition and trying to add useless emotion to the film and less monster fighting and the result ends up being sluggish and stupid (and not in the fun way).
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