Movie Review: ‘Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire’

Director: Adam Wingard

Cast: Rebecca Hall, Brian Tyree Henry, Dan Stevens, Kaylee Hottle, Alex Ferns, Fala Chen, Rachel House

Plot: Whilst Godzilla protects Earth from Titan attacks, Kong roams the Hollow Earth. Kong’s loneliness leads him to explore deeper, where he discovers a long dormant foe. Back on the surface, Monarch begins tracking an increasingly powerful Godzilla.

Review: If you liked the previous film, and felt like it could’ve leaned a bit more into the silliness, this is going to be a movie for you. Wingard has taken the right lessons from the previous adventure, which was an absolute hoot, and tweaked it enough to keep it interesting. How long will this method be sustainable? It doesn’t matter, because we’re having fun here.

We start the movie with Kong, the more sympathetic of the monsters, and he is dealing with the crushing loneliness of his existence and a sore tooth. We appreciate the ‘show, don’t tell’ approach here, the character is straight-forward enough and woks as the heart of the film. Godzilla, meanwhile, was described as a giant, horrible cat. The models for both characters are really great and increasingly expressive.

The basic outline is that Kong explores deeper into the Earth and comes to an addition subterranean level populated by (among other beasts) a primitive community of giant apes. The human cast of all-round science expert (Hall), cocky adventurer (Stevens), comic relief (Henry) and precocious child (Hottle) follows Kong down after tracking an unusual signal only to find a missing tribe from Skull Island who have a prophecy about Godzilla being unable to defeat this ancient foe. This invasion of the surface comes to fruition when Kong is attacked by the apes and their pet Frostzilla, with Kong (now equipped with an robot punch) having to work his Godzilla to fight alongside each other.

If you are a stickler for realistic science in your cinema, you are going to be deeply unhappy with this movie. In the previous film we got a good look at the Hollow Earth, and now it’s been double-downed on with another hollow layer under that one. With bigger monsters and a vicious army of giant apes, a tribe of humans hiding behind a forcefield thing and controlling gravity with crystals, also they’re psychic…this has shaped up to be a pretty wild universe.

Everything moves along at a solid clip, with three distinct factions to switch between. We get Kong on his adventure bonding with a new sidekick and a dangerous foe with their own magic weapon. The human squad explore some jungle and find stuff. Finally, there’s various Monarch people excitedly following Godzilla around as he kicks over cities and obliterates giant crabs and stuff. None of these encounters goes on as long as we’d like, but they also never outstay their welcome. Plus we then get Godzilla curling up and having a nap in the Coliseum of Rome, and that gets this movie an extra star.

There’s plenty to nitpick if you want to go that route. The characters are all pretty simple and mostly carried by the surprisingly talented trio of Hall, Stevens and Henry. They usually do more complex characters, but the simplicity doesn’t stop any of them from charming her way through. Logic is largely out the window at this point, and there’s many contrived plot beats involving a giant robot hand being readily available and Godzilla absorbing some different energy to tweak his design. By the time that we’re layering hollow Earths while a giant crab attacks Rome, those nitpicks don’t matter.

Every studio under the sun tried to kickstart a new Cinematic Universe after the success of The Avengers, I certainly didn’t predict that the one that succeeded would grow outwards from the 2014 Godzilla movie. It’s recently found it’s voice and we’re still here for it.

Rating: SEVEN out of TEN