Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire review: A new world can’t make this sequel feel anything but stale
Adam Wingard’s latest “Monsterverse” flick is laughably absurd as it tries to anchor its beastly fights with any emotional resonance or narrative coherence
Film Reviews Godzilla
Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire is a mouthful of a title. And one that’s surprisingly hard to parse out on its own, especially as it suggests more of a brand collab between those famed cinematic monsters than anything else. Then again, that may well be the best way of understanding what’s happening in this fifth “Monsterverse” flick, directed by Adam Wingard (The Guest). While its predecessor, Wingard’s own Godzilla vs. Kong, announced itself as a thunderous clashing of the titans, this sequel bends over backward to turn those former foes into allies against a threat that (spoiler alert) may well destroy us all.
Since the events of Godzilla Vs. Kong, Monarch has been hard at work monitoring those titular figures: Godzilla now rules and protects the above world, while Kong is presumably cozying up in the Hollow World below. So long as each remains in their respective domain all will be okay. Or so Dr. Ilene Andrews (Rebecca Hall, reprising her role as “walking exposition who is now also a mother” character) tells us at the start of the film. It’s through Dr. Andrews that we learn how intensely Monarch monitors both Kong and Godzilla (and the other awakened titans all over the world)—constant surveillance is just par for the course, here.
It’s through that surveillance that Monarch keeps running into some radio interference that looks surprisingly similar to some drawings Jia (Kaylee Hottle), the sole surviving member of the Iwi tribe, keeps sketching in between dreamlike visions of impending doom. Several exposition-heavy scenes between Dr. Andrews and titan podcaster Bernie Hayes (Brian Tyree Henry, doing his best at livening up the proceedings with his dry humor) end up neatly explaining what’s happening: there’s a distress signal coming from Hollow Earth that may well announce the arrival of the kind of threat we’d seen when other titans first made themselves known to mankind.
That sets in motion a recon mission to Hollow Earth (the world underneath our own) that, wouldn’t you know it, includes Dr. Andrews, Bernie (with camera in tow), Jia (since she can communicate with Kong) and, because this film needed a new cast member, “Trapper” (Dan Stevens), a veterinarian who specializes in titans. Aptly described at one point as a hippie-dippie Ace Ventura, he also has a storied and romantic history with Ilene, of course. And so, with a gruff pilot in tow, our merry band of humans heads to Hollow Earth where the Monarch outpost, they learn, has been destroyed. Not by anything they’ve seen before but… by another ape-looking creature. (All while Godzilla goes on a global rampage tour with stops in Rome, Southern France, Cadiz, and later still Gibraltar and Cairo, where it seems he’s powering up to face what he must sense is a truly powerful threat).
Once the film moves to Hollow Earth and apes (no pun intended) the structure of a trip to Skull Island, where everything is a possible threat (even unassuming trees, as it turns out), you almost wish Godzilla X Kong could sustain such a wry mix of tension and humor. Stevens and Henry do their best at bringing levity to the proceedings but at every turn, the script (by Terry Rossio, Simon Barrett, and Jeremy Slater) keeps weighing itself down with increasingly complicated forays into a long-lost empire (that may explain the connection with Jia), a long-ago vanquished foe (that accounts for the Monarch outpost destruction), and a prophecy that feels like a flimsy attempt at giving some semblance of coherence to what we’re watching.
All such narrative strands feel decidedly arbitrary. They keep Godzilla X Kong waffling between dialogue-free scenes where the body language of an ape fighting off apes like him (including one the film insists on calling Skar King but which I kept calling Slim Kong in my head throughout) and of a loutish kaiju destroying well-known historical monuments (poor Rome!) are ground to a halt whenever Wingard requires Dr. Andrews to explain the latest plot twist in this needlessly complicated (and yet wildly simplistic) tale. By the time the final confrontation between various CG characters comes to a head, you’ll have been treated to a lost civilization aching to stay alive, an ape colony ruled by a fearsome villain, many a scene featuring a “mini Kong” who goes from foe to ally, and, improbably, a moment that no ’90s kid who grew up watching Nickelodeon will mistake for anything else than Kong getting slimed.
Tonally, Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire has cornered itself: the self-serious, humanely-driven kaiju story Gareth Edwards first developed with Godzilla (2014) was always going to be an odd fit to the more winkingly playful Kong: Skull Island (2017). If the clashing of these two films (and monsters) made for a somewhat enjoyable ride last time around, continuing to stitch together their mythology and their sensibility has resulted in a film that’s laughably absurd at times (Godzilla naps in the Colosseum after a day of destroying Rome! Kong suffers from a toothache and needs a canine extracted!) and yet wants to carry alongside it a probing message about lost empires, family belonging, and (in a bit of plot engineering that falls by the wayside completely) the moral need to avoid any U.S. government interference in the soulful and very important work done by Monarch.
As a collab, Godzilla x Kong arguably accomplishes its goals. No matter how much this film wants to flesh out the titan and Skull Island mythologies, you come to this place for convincing enough (and sometimes quite beautifully orchestrated) CG battles between its titular stars. In that sense, Wingard’s film delivers. There’s a zero-gravity fight toward the end of the film that, visually, at least, feels inventive enough to set it apart from what previous Monsterverse entries have offered. But so many of those fights—which flirt and yet never commit to the camp adjacent world they would seem to belong to—feel tired; there’s little that’s new here—whether such clashes are taking place amid the Egyptian pyramids, the lush greenery of Hollow Earth, or the beautiful beaches in Rio. This is a well-rebooted brand grasping at straws at staying relevant, perhaps no different than a kid who keeps replaying the same fights between its toys and action figures over and over again. It may well be plenty for a fun enough ride at the theaters, but ultimately this is an exhausting trip into this increasingly unwieldy franchise.
Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire arrives in theaters on March 29, 2024
74 Comments
So basically, it’s exactly the movie everyone expects it to be.
But not the movie it HAS to be. Gareth Edward’s Godzilla, Kong: Skull Island, Minus One, The Monarch TV show on Apple, all of these showed that you can actually make compelling movies where people care about the human characters. The Legendary Monsterverse just abandoned this at the time of King of the Monsters and never looked back (other than the TV show). Now it’s just big budget kids smashing their toys together.
Pull Minus One from this equation. It stands apart as a ‘whole other thing.’Great, yes, but entirely separate.
It’s separate in terms of not being from the same cinematic universe, but it still fits thematically what I was saying, as a recent Godzilla movie that places the emphasis on the human characters while still having lots of thrilling giant monster action. Given that it, along with the Apple Monarch show, are the two most recent pieces of Godzilla media that really landed in the U.S., pulling us back into the “smashy smashy” Monsterverse of Godzilla Vs Kong and KoM is a huge step backwards.
It feels like you’re not understanding that a completely unrelated team of people made Minus One. You say a step backward but like…. I don’t think these people knew those people were making Minus One. If anything I’d be pissed if I was on this team because Minus One definitely hurt this franchise. I loved Minus One. This film looks awful.
I do understand that. I guarantee that the Monsterverse team was aware of Minus One, but that’s irrelevant. It’s still a piece of Godzilla media and is representative of what Godzilla media CAN be when handled by competent people who want to make a good story with giant monsters. So in that sense it can be compared to the direction the Monsterverse has taken. I am fully aware that there are different studios and teams making these movies. I’m just saying one has chosen to make relatable, empathetic human characters the focus, and the other has chosen CGI smash fests.
Every Godzilla movie since the first has tried to put the emphasis on the human characters, with the problem that most are simply not very interesting. Minus One pulled off deeply relatable and sympathetic human characters and a lot of smashy smash.I’d agree the Monarch TV show has come closes to finding that balance, but the Monsterverse movies in general seem to fall back on the idea that in the end people are there mostly for the smashing.
Yes, we are saying the same thing.Except, I’d argue that the last three Monsterverse movies have not really even tried to put emphasis on human characters. Maybe KoM half-assedly did, but definitely not GvK and by the looks of it not this one either.
very sad to discover the comments were only temporarily removed from the site. I thought I was free from this hell.
They’ll never let us die!!Seriously, though. Is live to be a fly on the wall in the office so I could know what the hell is going on
I wasn’t surprised as other G/O properties have shut down their comments section, but I was surprised considering most of the writing and subject matter here is angled squarely towards driving people to fight in the comments.
Don’t worry! The site will soon have new corporate overlords we can complain about:https://www.thewrap.com/go-media-sells-av-club-the-takeout/
The only rational answer is that the A.V. Club is run by masochists who enjoy being insulted for their shoddy writing and editing.
Well, if you haven’t checked your almost namesake’s Twitter account, there was a major earlier this week.
Now that he’s gone, will you change your u/n?? ; )
Never!Probably. Eventually. I might go back to using Are You My Dad?
Aw, damn it. Welp, back to nitpicking Nu-AV Club authors’ terrible writing. It’s hard work, but no one has to do it.
This can only mean one thing: you’re going to get cancerAids
Of cock!Man it feels good
I figured we’d be on COVAids-24 by now.
No worries, the cure for cancerAids is Dawes. More Dawes.
Oh don’t worry. The AV-Club has been sold to Paste Magazine, which already bought Jezebel and turned the comments into a paid subscription model. So just like on Jezebel, very soon the comments section here is going to be dead, dead, dead.
Yeah, that brief glimpse of a healthy, productive lifestyle was enticing. Oh well…
I was bummed that it looked like there’d be no way to say goodbye, so, with the possibility that comments could disappear again hanging in the air, I’m going to take the opportunity now. You’ve all been one hell of a community, but in particular, thanks to folks like dirtside, Dr Emilio Lizardo (the real one; I think the troll imitator finally died on the way back to his home planet), ElectricSheep, Ugh, Killa K, The Gob Hoblin, Evil Lincoln (are you still around?), Bam Sarbanti, Franky Drinks Darjeeling Tea, and whoever else I’m forgetting.And since I’m in a wistful mood, I’ll fondly remember some of the long departed: Dikachu, Scrawler, Mrs Langdon Alger, Queef Latina, Milkproof Robot, Cappadocius, TJ Truffleberry, the list goes on…
Here here! And soon to be there there.
… and yet no love for ZMF?
I feel like there should be a separate list for the famous trolls of the Old AV Club: Zodiac Motherfucker, ElDan, Manimal, Gentle Herpes, recognitions. And then of course, the great gimmick accounts: Reposted Avenged Sevenfold Fan and the much missed Taco Bell Bell.
Those really were the good ole days. I remember even when it wasn’t necessary to register to comment it felt odd and old school; like AV Club resisted accounts for much longer than many other sites to the point it felt weird to be getting way with the randomness allowed. I’ve probably had this account name on here for close to 20 years? I miss my Super Dave Osborne avatar now more than I’ll probably miss this comment board someday soon.
The old non-registration days of course gave birth to the famous improvised episode of ‘Law & Order’ in the comment section.
The time to seek out and save your favourite comments is now.I have long since vaulted the greatest comment. This place will die, as will we all in time. But this place first.
I’e been stuck in the greys for about 6 months now after 20 years of commenting. I won’t really miss them anymore as the “best, most fun, intelligent” comment space on the ‘net has been gone for a long time now.
So AV Club sold to Paste and Takeout (no longer linked above) sold to another company. See you all on the other side. Maybe.Did they ever announce this here? I’d try the Search function but as we all know it sux.https://www.thedailybeast.com/go-media-continues-fire-sale-dumps-av-club-and-takeout
wait comments are back?Quick, Reposted Daily Mail Comments, tell us why Godzilla is woke!
And yet I’m still in the Greys. Or am I??I am.
you were, but i rescued you!
That was when you saw only one set of comments.
Iv’e been stuck in the greys for about 6 months now after 20 years of commenting. I won’t really miss them anymore as the “best, most fun, intelligent” comment space on the ‘net has been gone for a long time now.
Seems odd you mention 2014’s Godzilla, 2017’s Skull Island, and 2021’s Godzilla vs Kong, but not 2019’s Godzilla: King of the Monsters. I expect that film really informa a lot of subtle storytelling and nuanced character development.
now that’s the AV Club commentariat i know and love!
This morning when there didn’t seem to be a comments section I thought it was a sorry way for the AV Club comments section to go out. If this happens to be a short-lived reprieve, I just want to say it’s been a fun ride from finding the AV Club in a corner on the Onion’s web page, through whatever was before Disqus, and Disqus, and then Kinja. This was a really good place for a fairly long while.
Apparently it’s been sold to a new owner, so the Kinja comments might give way to yet another medium in the near future. And who knows, maybe the new owners can get some improvements through, too.
Your tiny flicker of optimism has been noted, and appropriate punishment will be forthcoming.
The AV Club was sold to the same company Jezebel was sold to. I looked at Jezebel’s comment section and it’s a ghost town. Of the very few articles that had any comments, they were bare bones —accounts had no avatars, and as far as I could tell, no threaded comments (then again, no article had more than one comment, so it’s inconclusive). My guess is that existing comments/accounts were not ported over when the sale was done.
You have to pay a monthly fee in order to comment on Jezebel. And, rightfully so, everyone seems to have decided: nah.
That would explain it, then. I guess that will probably happen to these comments, too.
Yeah, it’ll be a terrible move if they go the paid subscriber route for comments for AVC like they did with Jez. One of the main appeals of this place was an active commenting community. You could read quality writing but then jump into the comments in have useful discussions. Or you could just spout of endless Simpsons quotes. If it costs that much to run a system, the new owners should just bring back Disqus. It honestly wasn’t that bad, certainly lightyears better than Kinja
Fuck that. That’s $12AUD a month, or a Stan subscription. I like commenting here, but not for any money.
On the one hand, the new owners seem to realize the only writing on the site worth a damn is the comments.On the other hand, PAY to comment? Get right the fuck out with that shit.Oh well. As a hold-out from the pre-Disqus days, it’s been a hell of ride, all. I’ll miss you but maybe now I can finally grow up and stop living like I’m still in my… mid-30s.
“This was a really good place for a fairly long while”Those days have long since passed, anyways. Now we just get lazy, disingenuous, hack‐y nonsense here.
I can understand why they got rid of it, but I miss that pre-Disqus commenting system. It was amazing for one-off gimmick posts because it allowed you to post as a guest with any name of your choosing, no registration required.
At any rate, this website has been one of my favorites for over a decade and that’s almost entirely due to the comments. During the golden years, it was such a joy to see a new article and watch as the comments sections immediately populate with joke after joke after joke.If this is the end (or damn near close to it), I’ll just say it’s been a pleasure.
I will admit, the comment sections are not as big as they used to be years ago. However one of the things that kept me coming back was that here and IO9 for the most part was the least toxic when it came to commenting. I know the other places were were not as kind, but it seemed on AV and io9 for the most had the kinder comments section. Comments among each other, and not counting the criticism of the writers or the websites. I do miss how AV and Io9 had more reviews and recaps for movies and shows. Maybe they should let commenters to do those instead of open channels. Oh well. For the most part you can make some jokes, have some polite debate, and pretty much make a comment where responses are civil. Seldom did I find something that was offensive or crossed the line. Other websites with their articles have comment section that are just hateful for the sake of being hateful it seems. Yahoo, IGN, even collider back a few years ago.
I’ve been stuck in the greys for about 6 months now after 20 years of commenting. I won’t really miss them anymore as the “best, most fun, intelligent” comment space on the ‘net has been gone for a long time now.
The early “Monsterverse” seemed to really be trying to be realistic, or at least as realistic as such a movie can be. That lent a sense of gravity and seriousness, and grounded the action. It was easier to find the monsters scary when they were interacting with a realistic city, and were fighting a military that seems much like our own. The original teaser for Godzilla sums up the tone well:I’m not sure why they decided to depart so radically from that tone, which people seemed to like. The last one had weird flying hoverships flying through caverns in the Earth to arrive at a weird ape paradise.
Every single review said it was too dark and there weren’t enough monsters smashing each other.
The last one also dropped most of the weight and heft behind the kaiju movements from the first three, made the human characters as dumb as possible, made insane (even for the series) jumps in logic to set up set piece fights, and completely stripped basically any focus on the environmental impact of the kaiju. It was dumb fun not unlike the late Showa era stuff, but it felt like the people making it just watched 10 minute YouTube clips of the first three.
Call me crazy, but I’m kinda tired of all the Godzilla and Kong reboots over the years. Serious question, are either of these at the top of the list for most reboots? I think Hollywood always gets slammed for unoriginal material.
I say this as someone who is a massive Godzilla fan: these movies are utter garbage. Who gives a s**t about 100% CGI fight scenes? Not to mention the utter lack of imagination: if I’m understanding correctly, of all the cool monsters that could have been the antagonist, they chose… another giant gorilla? It wasn’t so long ago that the Gamera reboot was showing how a modern kaiju movie should be done. And yet, here we are…If Godzilla isn’t a guy in a rubber suit, I’m not interested.
In a post Godzilla Minus One world, what reason do these monsterverse movies have to exist?
So? Do they fuck?
They damn well better
What do you think “X” means?
No, seriously. What the shit does “X” actually mean here?
It means Godzilla multiplied by Kong.
I saw this last night and its awful. The special effects were weak, there really isn’t any story, and it is unbelievably boring. One thing I did find humorous is that they clearly didn’t care how many people were killed by the monsters. I mean entire populations were wiped out and its just kind of with a shrug of the shoulders. “Ah no big deal, let’s move on.”
The thing with Godzilla movies is that for me, normal standards of quality do not apply. Most of them are really shitty, but if a movie features at least five minutes of Godzilla destroying buildings, I automatically give it at least a B grade. Godzilla Minus One was a very good movie that had excellent Godzilla scenes, which to me automatically makes it the movie of the century.
This movie ruled!!!But your criticisms are valid.
All I see in the ads in an incoherent fustercluck. Why would I go to the trouble of driving to the theater, pay too much, and watch this mish-mash?
Godzilla Minus One butchered this film
oh… it was BAD. but it was not cheesy bad, just mediocre bad. :
they really thought they cooked with the introduction of Tracker, bafflingly set to some kind of 80s synth/drums, but the theatre was silent. in fact for almost all of the “jokes” the theatre was as quiet as a church mouse. speaking of music, they jammed in so many unnecessary old American pop songs (some of which only lasted like 30 seconds?), i swear they were trying to make up for this being an AMERICAN take on Godzilla instead of the (excellent) recent Japanese take on Godzilla. the camera did not stop moving most of the movie and i think i might have actually got some motion sickness. the story was bad and full of very badly misplaced ADR explaining things. i felt nothing for any human character at any point in the whole movie, and i laughed only twice: once at a well-timed punch out of nowhere, once at a particularly bad explanation of the situation by a character that was quite literally reading from a script and shouldn’t have known any of what they were saying.
toward the end of the movie, let’s just say kong gets a… power-up of sorts… and it should have been cool, and instead it was mediocre. the movie in in a nutshell, in other words.also why does hollow earth have sunsets
I’ve been a diehard Godzilla fan since I was 7. I can’t believe how unenthused I am about seeing this one.
“…apes (no pun intended) the structure of a trip…”No pun detected.“Writers” of the world: “Look! I used a word in a perfectly unremarkable sense, but the word has another meaning related to the topic!” does not a pun make. Stop praising yourselves for doing nothing.– Normally dormant guy who rises Titan-like every thousandth time a “writer” does the above
I was worried about Wingard returning since I was underwhelmed by GVK, but directing its sequel allowed him to learn from his mistakes. GXK is much more confident & playful. This is not trying to be a profound kaiju film. The title remains a bit misleading.https://mattthecatania.wordpress.com/2024/03/31/titans-multiply-in-godzilla-x-kong-the-new-empire/
This movie ruled. I loved it. The monster action looked great and it was nonstop.
File this under movies I saw only because I have regal unlimited and no life / movies that exist only because of the “cinematic universes” trend. Title is very rough draft, and it mostly continues in that vein. I should have at least gone stoned, I think that’s the way to enjoy it if you’re over 10. Oh well. Hey, there’s monsters and stuff in it! And an empire (I think?)