2024 | PG-13 | starring Rebecca Hall, Dan Stevens, Brian Tyree Henry | directed by Adam Wingard | 1h 55m | 2 1/2 out of 5 stars |
As contemporary franchises go, The Legendary Monsterverse series has been one I’ve enjoyed and respected. They aren’t cranked out every year and when they are they have mostly gone the Alien sequel route – hiring different directors to apply different styles and genres to each entry into the series. 2014’s Godzilla reboot was a meticulous beautifully crafted Godzilla film, Skull Island was a nutty 70s island adventure film, King of the Monsters was a dreary end of the world disaster movie and Godzilla vs. Kong was a contemporary neon Kaiju beat-em-up that leaned into a more Michael Bay/Transformers tone while not turning the action into an over-edited visual mess. It’s disappointing that Legendary chose to bring back GvK director Adam Wingard for this entry, not as a slight to Wingard who manages to hold all the strands and demands of the team-up film together beautifully while adding and indie sense of visual cleverness to it, but as a sign that the studio has picked a style and decided risk time is over, we’re going with this.
The Monarch project is in full swing with Titans tagged and subdued all over the world. Kong is happy in his home in the Hollow Earth and Godzilla resting inside the Roman Colleague when not taking out titan threats. But Kong is lonely and one day on his journies he encounters another race of giant gorillas, lead by the Skar King. A single sent from the Hollow Earth peaks the interest of Monarch’s Ilene Andrews (Rebecca Hall), Titan vet Trapper (Dan Stevens) and conspiracy-fact podcaster Bernie (Brian Tyree Henry), who venture into the Hollow Earth to learn the source of the signal, Godzilla’s latest agitation and the connection between young Skull Island refuge Jia (Kayle Hottle) and the natives at the center of the world.
The movie with the impronounceable title, Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire, delivers basically more of the same from Godzilla vs. Kong both in look and tone. It’s a notch above a Michael Bay beat-em up with with Bay’s wacky sidekicks, one-liners, government conspiracies and pension to trot the globe and destroy it’s landmarks retrofitted with some style, weight and a bit of imagination. The opening Godzilla fight in Rome is terrific and an example of why these movies are a cut above the other franchises. These movies also do a decent job of making the human characters integral to the story, serving as our entry point into its various new worlds and discoveries.
Once again, this is very much a King Kong movie, with the most humanoid of monsters being given an arc of loneliness, a young baby Kong to bond with, a new mecha weapon to fight with and a villain straight out of a Planet of the Apes sequel. Godzilla is smartly not humanized but a weapon to be steered. The film ratchets up it’s stakes and Skar King’s powers while waiting to deploy Godzilla. It all plays out like a mis-matched buddy cop movie with Kong persuading Godzilla to fight alongside him as best he can in this movie’s version of the They Live ally fight scene against the Egyptian pyramids. The Skar King isn’t a particularly formidable foe so weilds control of the ice-breathed Godzilla Kaiju Shimo to keep everyone in line.
As a franchise entry, the movie doesn’t jive with the Apple TV series Monarch: Legacy of Monsters which proposes that being in the Hollow Earth experiences the passage for time very differently than it does on the surface. Nobody told Wingard that was part of the lore now because time runs parallel below and above the Earth in this movie.
There is a lot going on here and a lot to set up and payoff, that Wingard manages pretty smoothly – and in under 2 hours. This is the silliest, dumbest and least weighty entry to the franchise – in none of these latest movies do we get the sense that the world is actually being threatened. The action scenes grow repetitive, the characters are paper thin, the lines are weaker than ever. It’s watchable, with Hall delivering the much needed grounding in the human world, but it’s more of the same in a franchise that thrived on variety.