Fresh off the Oscar-winning Toho production Godzilla: Minus One, the ongoing Legendary Pictures-based Monsterverse brings the legendary kaiju back to the big screen. Not to fight Kong this time, but to team up against a set of bigger bads. Directed by Adam Wingard, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is more of a Kong story than anything. Godzilla occupies most of the B-story, with his evolutionary journey mostly chronicled through his Monarch counterparts. There’s not much to say about that other than he’s pink now. So yay, new toys!
After getting evicted from Skull Island in the 2021 predecessor, Kong relocates to the ungentrified world of Hollow Earth. Kong initially lives like an isolated emo college student who only steps out to eat until he meets a cute, corporately marketable baby giant named Suko. And without spoilers, there is a brief visual gag during Suko’s introduction scene that has to be the funniest 10 seconds of all time. Home to a cascade of building-size predators, Hollow Earth has a strict hierarchy. At the top of the food chain stands the villainous Skar King, a disfigured Kong-sized super ape that enacts his savage abuse of power through a mind-controlled giant ice lizard. Don’t worry, it’ll make sense when you watch the film.
The human cast has very little to do with this film, but the scenes that featured them were fun. Collecting a hopefully fat franchise check, Oscar nominee Brian Tyree Henry returns as a scientist-turned-conspiracy theorist and Skull Island expert Bernie Hayes. Meanwhile, The Guest star Dan Stevens reteams with Wingard for the character of Trapper – who’s basically Crocodile Dundee for giant monsters. Both are undeniably schlocky roles, but Henry and Stevens bring enough camp and self-awareness to make their segments easier to swallow.
Expanding upon the Hollow Earth mythology, a tribe called the “Iwi” resides in the planet’s core. In the Fala Chen-led Iwi, Kong’s deaf human bestie, Jia (Kaylee Hottle), feels a familial connection to the tribe. This connection interrupts the cartoonishly sterile relationship with Jia’s new adoptive mother, Ilene Andrews (Rebecca Hall). As a parallel to Kong’s homesick story arc, Jia’s subplot is the sort of surface-level emotional conflict that doesn’t distract you from the monster thrashing. However, it does pay off in the film’s glowing butterfly-filled climax.
Umm, what else? Oh, Kong gets a new glove. That’s pretty cool. Also, before their official partnership, we did get an exciting Godzilla vs. Kong square-off in the pyramids. All of the over-the-top, massively destructive monster fights are pretty exciting. Just don’t even think about a casualty count with some of these sequences because we see entire cities like Rio de Janeiro leveled by the end of the picture.
I was most impressed by the fact that I didn’t hate this movie. Wingard manages to muster up enough compelling CGI monster fades to make the two-hour film feel worthwhile, especially in IMAX. I legitimately think watching it on a towering IMAX screen added a much higher level of appreciation for this movie than I would’ve had otherwise. It’s a mammoth-sized rock’em sock’em spectacle that surprisingly spends more time with the Titans than the humans. If I were an eight-year-old, this might’ve been one of my favorite monster movies of all time!
Rating: 6.5/10