Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire Review: Big, Silly, And Undeniably Entertaining
Adam Wingard's "Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire" isn't so much a feature film as it is a Joycean stream-of-consciousness ramble escaped from the mind of a sugared-up eight-year-old, his tongue stained with the remnants of Blue Raspberry Warheads, slamming action figures together, roaring to himself in destructive ecstasy. Whereas Wingard's previous Godzilla film — 2021's "Godzilla vs. Kong" — brilliantly embraced the inherent silliness of the monsters' late-'60s Toho entries, "New Empire" tilts full-bore into the realm of Saturday morning cartoons, presenting a brazenly toyetic and visually wild romp that will crack even the hardest of hearts. "Godzilla x Kong" may make a viewer measurably dumber, but golly, that viewer will be entertained.
"Godzilla x Kong" moves so fast as to make one dizzy, and the visuals are so busy that a large caffeinated beverage may be required to keep up. The film climaxes with multiple monsters, some equipped with energy rays, and with one of them sporting a Nintendo Power Glove, all fighting in a zero-gravity environment. There's no up, there's no down, there's just mayhem. In a previous generation, this sort of film would be laughed out of theaters. In 2024, one has to admire the studio's temerity in giving something this stupid a budget of $135 million. By contrast, Toho's "Godzilla Minus One" only cost about $12 million.
Know that an adjective like "stupid" can be used complementarily. Audiences just survived a decade of FX- and IP-driven blockbusters that required them to take notes and encouraged them to engage in The Discourse™. "Godzilla x Kong" is also FX- and IP-driven, but it merrily insists that we ignore insufferable concepts like "lore" and "worldbuilding" and instead revel in scenes of Kong picking up a miniature ape and using it as a club to thwack another ape in the face.
Kong in his Dad Bod Phase
One of the errors of Warner Bros.' so-called MonsterVerse movies, released steadily since 2014, is that they misguidedly attempted to affect a somber, adult tone. Gareth Edwards, in "Godzilla," eschewed monster destruction in favor of tragic, smoky human drama. It was misguided. This was followed by Jordan Vogt-Roberts' "Apocalypse Now"-toned "Kong: Skull Island." Michael Dougherty attempted to make things fun with "Godzilla: King of the Monsters" in 2019, but the result was boring and visually murky; why center your film on high-octane monster fights if everything is eschewed by smoke? I don't need realistic gravity and physics in a movie that stars Godzilla, King Ghidorah, Mothra, and Rodan.
It wasn't until Wingard made "Godzilla vs. Kong" that the code was cracked. In that film, the Earth was hollow, hiding a world where monsters lived. The Earth's surface was pocky with portals, humans flew high-tech UFOs, and King Kong was held captive in a massive holodeck. It's okay, I declare to be silly. That film ended with Kong retiring to the Hollow Earth to rule over the monsters that lived there. Godzilla was happy to stay far away from his foe up on the surface. All was right with the world.
In "Godzilla x Kong," Kong, now sporting a gray beard and a dad bod, is having a rough go of it. He's lonely, he's always being attacked by hyena-like rat monsters, and, worst of all, he has a toothache. Luckily, Dr. Ilene Andrews (Rebecca Hall) and her daughter Jia (Kaylee Hottle) are looking after the big guy, having enlisted the aid of a handsome, rock 'n' monster veterinarian named Trapper (Dan Stevens). Hall and Stevens are the film's biggest saving graces, as they can deliver the most absurd dialogue with the straightest possible faces.
Evil King Louis, Gibbon from Hell
Thanks to a wave of mysterious psychic energy emanating from a pocket in the Earth even deeper than Kong's realm, everyone's favorite ape treks into the catacombs and finds a tribe of evil Kong-sized apes that have been waiting for generations to conquer the surface world once again. These apes live in a volcano and are ruled by a red-haired, bone-whip-wielding gibbon nicknamed the Skar King. This potential usurper is also armed with an unexpected weapon that, weirdly, provides uncanny visual parallels to another recent blockbuster with the word "Empire" in the title.
Hall, Hottle, and Stevens trek into the Hollow Earth with Bryan Tyree Henry, the obnoxious podcaster from the last film, and a gruff Scottish guide (Alex Ferns) where other astonishing discoveries are made. The human-scale portions of the movie attempt to emulate an old-world 1940s afternoon-serial, but don't quite succeed; Wingard seems impatient with the human stories, editing them down to perfunctory exposition dumps. Wingard almost seems to face the human characters with a sense of weary obligation. It's clear that his heart lies with King Kong and the conflicts he faces when having to fight the Skar King.
And where is Godzilla in all of this? Less important. After battling a giant crab in Rome, Godzilla only wants to nap. There is an adorable scene wherein Godzilla curls up inside the Colosseum like a kitten and goes to sleep. Visiting Roman tourists get an eyeful. A mysterious force, however, "activates" Godzilla, and he begins drinking up nuclear energy in far-flung power plants and fighting sea serpents in preparation for an unnamed and inevitable monster mash. That Godzilla can be in France in the morning and Barbados in the afternoon is yet another whimsical display of the film's inherent illogic.
What a silly thing
As mentioned above, some have been comparing "Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire" to the films of Toho's Showa-era Godzilla movies, that is: the films made between 1954 and 1975. I would argue that "Godzilla x Kong" has less in common with the one-on-one monster battles as seen in Ishiro Honda's 1962 entry "Kong vs. Godzilla," and falls more in line with Jun Fukuda's supremely dumb 1972 film "Godzilla vs. Megalon." In that film, Godzilla teams up with a fan-created robot named Jet Jaguar to do battle with a big bad Beetlborg with drills for hands and his alien-controlled, semi-mechanical bird buddy Gigan. That film is cheap, campy, and ridiculous, even in the canon of Godzilla movies.
"Godzilla x Kong" is reaching for that classical level of camp. On that level, it doesn't quite succeed. It may be ridiculous, overblown, and — as stated — brazenly toyetic, but it's too slick and cinematic to be campy.
Indeed, the perception of Godzilla films as camp is somewhat fraught. Many American audiences saw certain Showa-era Godzilla films for the first time in edited-down, overdubbed edits, making otherwise straightforward monster dramas seem illogical and strange. Many of the Godzilla films were surprisingly thoughtful, often communicating facets of the Japanese national character. "Godzilla x Kong" is, weirdly, paying homage to a popular misinterpretation of Godzilla that persists in America to this day.
That said, "Godzilla x Kong" is infectiously fun, raucous, and, in the 8-year-old sense, awesome. One will not take much away from "Godzilla x Kong," but you'll leave the theater with a big damn fool grin on your face.
/Film Rating: 7.5 out of 10