Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire

dir: Adam Wingard

2024

I thought it would be “funny” to review Godzilla Minus One, a ‘serious’ throwback take on the genre that reviewers treated like it was Important and Meaningful, and then Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, which no-one thought was important and meaningful, but does have no Japanese people in it and giant creatures fighting each other which totally don’t exist as a metaphor about scientific hubris or humanity’s place in the universe or anything, for that matter

I set myself these pointless little tasks because it amuses me, and it just makes my life harder for no good reason, but I stick to my pointless and arbitrary tasks, because someone has to…

So having watched the Toho - Japanese retro version, I am now set to review the ‘American’ version, which is from the Chinese film production company Legendary Films.

They could not be more different. I am sure such statements shock and confound the reader. This has far more scenes of giant creatures trashing and thrashing each other, killing probably hundreds of thousands of people, but that’s not a big deal anymore? In this world that they’ve put together, which initially mimicked the progression of the Japanese monster flicks by having Godzilla fight more and more monsters, instead has conjured a world where, yes, many of these so called Titans exist, but there’s also this supra-government entity called Monarch that tries to control or nudge the Titans depending on what they’re doing.

You might think their main task would be saving people’s lives but that wouldn’t look as interesting on the big screen, I guess.

And I didn’t really mind, to be honest. These Godzilla versus or Kong times etc flicks have zero regard for human life except for whoever the filmmakers put forward as the representatives of humanity, because tonnes of faceless people die, since the major punch ups always happen in populated areas, but it’s accepted as like the cost of doing business.

If all you want is to watch CGI Godzilla fight CGI King Kong, and then CGI other giant creatures, why would you care about the humans at all? Humans are like puny ants at the feet of these gods.

A bolder path for me would have been if they’d left out all the human bullshit, which for me adds little, and just told the story wordlessly with Kong getting to hang around with other giant apes in the Hollow Earth, and Godzilla somehow predicting plot points and doing what the story needs psychically, and going where he needs to go and killing who needs killing.

There is an advantage with Kong in that, despite being entirely CGI, his face, being a gorilla face on a grander scale, can be very expressive, almost human in its range of movement. Godzilla, not so much, but he can scream louder if he feels like it.

Kong goes on an incredible journey of self-discovery and advancement in finding new areas of his realm in the centre of the earth where more of his people seem to exist, but they’ve been enslaved by a giant orange ape called the Skar King, which is, yes, very dumb.

He has enslaved the other giant apes and forces them to mine things. Why? I have no idea. They have no one to trade with, and it’s not like they find pretty things for him to adorn himself with.

He maintains his iron grip on the monkeys because, get this, he enslaved a Titan that kinda looks like Godzilla but in white that breathes ice and caused the last ice age, don’t you know.

How? Well, with some fucking magic crystal or something…

Kong meets a young orange looking ape, and that little fucker does the dirty on Kong multiple times, leading him into danger, conspiring with others to hurt him, but Kong puts up with it all because… I think he’s just so glad to see other beings like him, and he ends up adopting the fucker.

Godzilla responds to some signal or some other bullshit and somehow realises that he’s going to be fighting the icy Titan, and that he eventually will have to go into Middle Earth or the Hidden place or whatever the fuck they call it, to fight with Kong for the future of humanity.

Or some crap like that. In between these sentences that I think of as a trenchant and economical summary of what happens, there is so much bullshit that I feel too superior to even mention. It’s so fucking spurious that if you weren’t in the right mood, you’d walk out of the cinema cursing the fact that you spent the last of your dole money on a ticket to something so silly.

There’s stuff about doing dental surgery on Kong, or latter on when they just happen to have a prosthetic arm for Kong to use, just because they knew such a thing might be required down the track. There’s an incessantly chattering conspiracy theorist played by Bryan Tyree Henry who has been in several of these flicks and is as pointless here as he was in those other ones.

There’s the surreal Trapper, played by Dan Stevens, who I like in other stuff, but here seems to be playing an amalgam of dozens of other characters from other flicks, and maybe has a pretty ordinary Australian accent, if that’s what they were going for? He has these strange scenes (admittedly entirely CGI) where he flies around in a space ship and plays rock tunes from the 1970s and you wonder whether the scenes were lifted from Guardians of the Galaxy?

He does a whole bunch of what we are meant to assume is improvised comedic dialogue which I think is only funny in Hollow Earth. It doesn’t translate into humour out here. He and Tyree Henry drop so many absolute clangers that I couldn’t stop myself from raising my hand at them, making that hand gesture for closing one’s mouth, and muttering “shush” at them a few times.

There is also a funny, to me, aesthetic choice which involves the use of neon colours, especially in the Hollow Earth parts, of a flick that contains so much CGI that’s it’s mostly an animated flick with some occasional real (alleged) people thrown in to the mix. It has the effect of rendering some trippy visuals very familiar if you’ve ever seen album covers from metal bands of the 80s like Judas Priest or Megadeth, with all that pink neon outlining.

It amused me, it might disgust others.

At this point it might be blasphemous to say so, but I actually enjoyed this flick, if that’s the word I’m looking for. Yes, enjoyed. This is the blasphemous bit: I enjoyed it more than Godzilla Minus One.

Godzilla Minus One is the better film, probably way better in innumerable ways. But I enjoyed this more. In the pantheon of stupid films that these ones represent, this one at least made more sense to me than the previous two.

Hold up, I’m not saying that this made sense, or is a sensible flick, it’s just that the other ones are so fucking stupid that my insides cringe just from remembering some of the stuff that happens in them. I didn’t cringe as much watching this one, and I was totally sober when watching it, so I can’t argue that performance or experience enhancing drugs might have tipped me over the edge.

I felt like I “got” the stuff with Kong and mini-Kong. I didn’t really care about the mute telepathic people known as the Iwi, and I definitely didn’t give a fuck about the scientist (Rebecca Hall) and her adoptive daughter, the last of the Iwi from Skull Island.

I liked seeing Godzilla curl up like a cat twice in the Coliseum, though I’m not sure how that makes any sense size-wise. Plus in his opening fight with another Titan I really wished he could have done the world a favour and completely eaten everyone at The Vatican before stomping it into nothingness.

I generally always like seeing Godzilla, here or anywhere else. I did find it a bit funny when Kong tries to shoutout to Godzilla from the top of the pyramids in Cairo, and Godzilla, irritated, answers back from atop the rock of Gibraltar, I did wonder if any of these people could have bothered to whip out an atlas, sorry, I mean used Google Maps to see what the distance between these two places would be, even for giant creatures. I mean, dudes, it’s the other fucking most western part of the Mediterranean, come on, that’s so fucking deliberately illiterate.

The big bad doesn’t really register that much, but who cares, he dies horribly, and I’m sure some other giant monkey or titan will come along in the sequels in order to keep Mecha-Kong on his toes, so he doesn’t get too complacent. It’s also always good for me to see Rachel House, even in bit parts, and she plays some goon within Monarch, but I’m always happy to see her, whether it’s as the principal in Heartbreak High or any of her many roles in Taika Waititi’s flicks.

Watch it if you’re trapped on a flight. Watch it if you’re travelling for work and it’s one of the only choices at the hotel. Watch it if you want your soul to leave your body for a little while, and travel the astral plane.

Otherwise, isn’t there something genuinely meaningful you could be doing with your life? Jeez…

6 times “extreme dentist” is a stupid career path doomed to failure out of 10

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“Wherever we go, whatever we do, we do it together. You are my home.” – I vote for the next one not to have humans talking at all - Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire