Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (2024)
Genre: Sci-fi/Action
Release Year: 2024
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Director: Adam Wingard
Content Warnings: monster violence
Overview
The COVID-19 pandemic squashed more than the entire economy; it also cleared out the movie theaters. Against all odds, Legendary Pictures released Godzilla vs. Kong (2021), the highly-anticipated rematch between cinema's greatest classic monsters, during this globally turbulent time—and reaped a plentiful profit.
Godzilla vs. Kong would become the pandemic's biggest opening weekend picture at the time of its release, grossing $474 million worldwide, defying expectations and mass theater closures. This clued Legendary in to a simple truth: their MonsterVerse made money, and Godzilla fans wanted more of these movies. Obeying the people (and their wallets), the studio produced GvK's follow-up, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (2024), to capitalize on another likely lucrative project.
Cool poster, Warner Bros. Pictures
Plot Recap
Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire continues the narrative of a monster-inundated Earth ruled by two bitter rivals: Godzilla, Japan's legendary lizard, and King Kong of red-white-and-blue citizenship. Despite their ongoing animosity, both Titans must join claws again to defeat a common enemy: Skar King, master of the Hollow Earth, and his pet ice monster, Shimo.
The Charp, the Dull, & the Recommendable
Godzilla x Kong (hereafter The New Empire, or Empire) puzzled me so much in the theater that I had to Google the plot for clarity. It created so many unanswered (or poorly answered) questions: 1. Who are these new characters? 2. Who, or what, are these magical indigenous people in the Hollow Earth? Are these the people the little girl, Jia (Kaylee Hottle), belongs to? Wasn't she supposed to be the last of her kind? 3. Why is Bernie Hayes (Brian Tyree Henry), the former film's conspiracy theorist, tagging along to the Hollow Earth? That's no place for non-essential people! 4. Why did he "comically" freak out when a tree monster kills a minor character? 5. Where did Mothra come from? Historically, she does respawn, but we're never shown that in the movie (to my memory); last we saw, she died in Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019)! 6. What is this gravity weirdness—what is everything—and why does all that happens onscreen require a narrated info-dump session befitting a teenager's debut fantasy novel?
Godzilla and Kong run, and it looks big cool, Warner Bros. Pictures
The New Empire is bad writing at its finest. Incoherent, messy, and so tangled up in random chaos that it may as well be listed under "nihilism" in the dictionary—nothing means anything in this computer-generated and written picture—this anti-cinema not-film marks just how far America's movie-making has fallen.
No earnest kaiju fan would scoff at this content because it's big, bold, and... fun? As a Showa series fan who loves the Godzilla films of old (the original saga from 1954-1975), my instinctive recoiling from Empire isn't because it's light-hearted; it's because it's light everywhere and doesn't have a heart.
“We big teammates, and that so cool”, Warner Bros. Pictures
Story? There isn't one. Message? Ha! Living, breathing characters? Leave that to the Showa pictures, like Terror of Mechagodzilla (1975) and Godzilla (1954). Visual appeal? The New Empire bungles that, too, draining its palette of its predecessor's occasional feasts of color, leaving a dull, drab husk of browns, grays, and washed-out tans behind. If Godzilla vs. Kong is a dead jewel bug, pretty but hollow and lifeless, its sequel is a month-dead cockroach baking in the back of someone's car.
The New Empire's worst offense is its utterly rambunctious emptiness. It desperately wants to draw the eye but consistently delivers such inconsequential action scenes—monsters only get hurt when it's plot-convenient, never otherwise—embarrassingly frail storytelling, nauseating VFX, soulless characters (excluding Jia), and tonal inconsistency (are we supposed to fear for the Earth or laugh at a guy who just died?) that it tears itself into an unintelligible mess.
“I big mean and big mad, and my name so cool—it Skar King! Raaaaawr!”, Warner Bros. Pictures
MonsterVerse fans will love this picture for its spectacle; everyone else will love it for its NyQuil effects. I didn't know what I was seeing on the big screen when I sat down to this a few months ago, and even after several plot readings, I don't understand it now.
And that's the point: this isn't a movie we're meant to understand. It's not a movie at all. It's an excuse to make more money and keep the U.S.'s unremarkable Godzilla attempts chugging along, while Japan creates critically acclaimed, memorable artistic ventures like Godzilla Minus One (2023).
The Godzilla/Kong duo movies never needed to be Minus Ones. However, like any worthwhile film, they did require these key creative ingredients: decent characters, a functioning plot, a theme/message, and imagination. These two films, especially the sequel, have none of those things and not a smidgen of the charm that separates "stuff" from art.
You can go to a movie like this, but it won't come back with you if you're anything like me. Like the average TikTok, it cannot follow you home, haunting your head and heart; it's too busy making its rounds and making cents to make sense.
Verdict:
Godzilla x Kong spares us political agendas and unwholesome content but also throws out storytelling altogether. Sucked of the vigor and vitality necessary for a supposed "Action/Sci-fi" flick and bogged down by unappealing effects, characters, and plot, The New Empire marks another tedious, overblown installment in a tiresome series that has quickly become the dullest Godzilla continuity to date.
