Found Family
Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (2024): 7 out of 10: After two Godzilla movies that were much better than they had any real need to be Godzilla: King of the Monsters and Godzilla vs. Kong, or as the latter is perhaps better known, the one with Mechagodzilla, we may have finally hit a little bit of a speed bump.
Not a wall, mind you. Not a ditch. Not one of those moments where you wonder if anyone involved had ever seen a motion picture before. Just a speed bump.
Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is not a bad film by any means. If this had come out in 2016, when the American kaiju landscape was a little more barren and expectations were still mostly “please let the monster be visible,” it might have been considered semi-brilliant. The problem is that it now has to compete not only with its two immediate MonsterVerse predecessors but also with what Japan has been cooking up with Godzilla over the last five or six years. That is not a gentle comparison.
The story, such as it is, finds Kong living in Hollow Earth, still searching for others like himself, while Godzilla is up on the surface doing Godzilla things, which apparently includes destroying Rome to kill a giant lobster. Eventually, a new threat emerges from beneath Hollow Earth, which means Kong needs help, Godzilla needs radiation steroids again, and the humans need to stand around explaining things we are already watching happen on screen.
So yes, there is a plot. But let us be honest. We are here for giant monsters punching other giant monsters while famous cities discover the limits of their zoning codes.
The Good
The best part of Godzilla x Kong is that it understands, at least much of the time, that the monsters are the movie.
This is much more of a Kong movie than a Godzilla movie. Godzilla is not quite a bit player, but he is certainly not the focus. He shows up early for one of the better scenes in the film, where he destroys Rome in order to deal with a giant crustacean problem. This is the kind of municipal disaster response I can support. Later, he has a somewhat less well-thought-out Arctic sequence where he fights a pink dragon so he can get charged up on radiation again, because he senses a big bad coming and apparently the King of the Monsters has a pre-fight supplement routine.
Kong, meanwhile, gets the actual movie. He is wandering through Hollow Earth, doing his Koko the gorilla routine with sign language, getting his tooth looked at, and searching for other apes. The movie starts from the position that there are no other apes and poor Kong will never find anyone like himself. Anyone who watched the trailers already knows that, spoiler alert, there are absolutely other apes.
Apparently below Hollow Earth there is Hollow Earth 2, which is a bit of a disappointment because it looks a lot like Hollow Earth 1. This feels like a missed opportunity. If Kong had gone beneath Hollow Earth and found Middle Earth, I would give this movie a 10 out of 10 just for gumption. Kong fighting orcs while Gandalf tries to negotiate with Monarch would be cinema.
Instead, we get the Skar King, a scarred ape who is bad because he has a scar, lives in volcano land, is mean to other apes, and runs what appears to be a giant ape fight club. Not a Fight Club fight club. More like a Mortal Kombat fight club, though not the Mortal Kombat movie, which somehow managed not to have enough actual Mortal Kombat in it.
As a villain, Skar King is no Mechagodzilla. I am still a little unclear why Godzilla felt he needed to get roided up to deal with him. According to cave-drawing exposition, Godzilla already defeated him once and trapped him in volcano land, which seems like the sort of thing Godzilla could probably handle again after a light breakfast and maybe one nuclear power plant.
But the Kong material works. The scenes with Kong and the little ape, Suko, are extremely well done. Suko is a bit of a brat, Kong is surprisingly patient with him, and the movie finds real emotion in their relationship without needing everyone to stop and explain what the feeling is supposed to be. The other enslaved apes, the hierarchy of the underground world, the visual storytelling of Kong trying to understand this new society, all of that is genuinely effective.
The reason it works is simple: there is no dialogue. That is not a small thing in this movie. In fact, it may be the entire key to the kingdom. When Godzilla x Kong shuts up and lets the monsters tell the story through movement, expression, fighting, and body language, it becomes a very entertaining giant-monster adventure. The little monkey is cute, surprisingly expressive, and honestly one of the better actors in the film.
We also get Mothra, which is always a plus. We get Shimo, a cold-breathing lizard who is kind of cool. We get Rio de Janeiro getting destroyed. We get Cairo getting destroyed. We get lots of monster fighting and lots of buildings being destroyed. For a certain kind of viewer, and I am one of them, that covers a multitude of sins.
There are also a couple of human beings who come out of this with dignity intact. Dan Stevens, as Trapper, is somehow charming. I should probably find him annoying, but I do not. Even as a straight male, I cannot quite help myself. Think Glen Powell in Twisters. It should not work as well as it does, and yet there he is, grinning his way through the movie and making everything slightly more tolerable.
Kaylee Hottle as the mute Jia also works, and yes, the word “mute” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. That is not a knock on her. Quite the opposite. She gets to express herself visually, and in a movie where the dialogue frequently lands like a tranquilizer dart, not having to say the lines is a considerable advantage.
The Bad
Before getting to the real issue, there are a few minor nitpicks. First, the music. I like the songs they use. I just do not always understand why they are suddenly there. They are non-diegetic; they do not really fit the moment, and they make the whole thing feel a little silly. Again, I like the individual songs. I am just not sure they belong in this movie in quite this way.
Second, there are clearly scenes designed for the kids in the audience, especially when Kong starts splitting monsters in half and getting covered in goo like someone on a Nickelodeon game show. It is silly. It is also probably intentional.
Every once in a while, I have to remind myself that Godzilla is, and has often been, a kid’s movie. If I can watch a 1960s Godzilla film with a straight face while a small child in short pants spends 40 minutes yelling about turtles, I probably should not get too huffy about Kong getting slimed in 2024.
The real problem, though, is the humans. Now, to be fair, most monster movies do not have great humans. This is not a new issue. The Godzilla franchise has been wrestling with this since roughly five minutes after the original masterpiece ended and someone realized they had to make more of these things.
But there are levels. Give me Japanese women dressed as space aliens in tight outfits. Give me Japanese mobsters with a land deal subplot. Give me a man and his photographer assistant having an affair together. Give me something, anything, to hang a hat on. What I do not need is a little kid in a lighthouse wearing short pants for 40 freaking minutes while I continuously look at the DVD cover, which clearly promised me Gamera.
To this movie’s credit, it does not give us the short-pants lighthouse kid. The only real kid figure who matters is the little monkey, and he is a darn cutie. Unfortunately, the adult humans are another matter.
Brian Tyree Henry returns as Bernie Hayes, the comic relief podcaster/conspiracy guy. He is not the worst comic relief I have ever seen. He is nowhere near as bad as the comic relief in Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid, where Morris Chestnut appears to have been sentenced to be unbearable by a cruel court. Bernie is not that bad. But he is a lot.
He never shuts up. It is not that comic relief is inappropriate in a Godzilla/Kong movie. It absolutely can work. The problem is the volume. There is simply too much of him, and in a movie already drowning in exposition, giving the loudest human even more room to talk is not ideal.
But that is nothing compared to the Rebecca Hall problem. I feel a little like Crow T Robot watching Time Chasers and declaring, “No, this can’t be the hero of the film, can it? Movie? Movie! Can I see your supervisor, movie, this will NOT stand!”. I do not doubt that Rebecca Hall is a talented actress. One would have no idea just from watching this film. She got a haircut that did her no favors, and she was not exactly radiating movie-star charisma to begin with. To make matters worse, she is burdened with the worst through-line in the movie and she is on mandatory exposition duty…In a movie about giant monkeys.
Her character, Ilene Andrews, is raising Jia while also apparently running a large portion of Monarch. Monarch, of course, is still under attack from those darn politicians who get upset when monsters do things like destroy Rio de Janeiro, Cairo, Boston, Washington D.C., and whatever else happens to be in the way. The giant monsters are just misunderstood, apparently. Godzilla ends the movie sleeping in the Colosseum in Rome, which is adorable if you ignore the staggering implications for insurance rates.
Ilene’s emotional arc is that she is worried Jia may leave her to join her original people in Hollow Earth. That is not a bad idea. It could work in a different film. It might even work here if handled with some grace. The problem is timing.
“I am afraid my daughter may leave me because she seems so happy here” is a conversation you have over spaghetti dinner with some family members. It is not the emotional centerpiece you foreground in the middle of a giant monster fight involving Mothra, Godzilla, Kong, and a cool ice lizard thing.
The movie wants to have its cake and eat it too. It wants the awe and absurdity of giant monster wrestling, but it also wants us to pause for domestic custody anxiety in the middle of the apocalypse. That is a tricky balance, and this movie does not land it.
The Ugly
The great sin of Godzilla x Kong is that it keeps explaining things we already saw. This is where the human story goes from weak to actively irritating. Jia wakes up Mothra. We see this. Then Ilene explains that Jia wakes up Mothra.
Kong needs to bring Godzilla to the center of the Earth. We see this. Then Ilene explains that Kong needs to bring Godzilla to the center of the Earth.
The cave drawings tell a story. Then someone explains the story. Then someone explains what that explanation means. At times, Rebecca Hall’s character is doing play-by-play for a fight she is not even attending, based on wall art and vibes.
If this happened once, fine. Big monster movies have exposition. Someone needs to say “the oxygen destroyer” or “Hollow Earth energy signature” or whatever the nonsense phrase of the day is. That is part of the social contract.
But it keeps happening. Again and again, the movie shows us something cool and then has a human explain the cool thing we just watched. It is like sitting next to someone in a theater who keeps whispering, “That’s Kong. He is angry now.” Yes. Thank you. I had gathered from the giant ape punching the other giant ape through a building that emotions were running high.
This movie would work so much better with 80% less dialogue. Possibly 80% fewer humans as well.
That is not because all human characters are useless in kaiju movies. They are not. The original Godzilla needs its human tragedy. Shin Godzilla is practically a bureaucratic procedural. Godzilla Minus One has a stronger human story than most prestige dramas. Humans can matter in a Godzilla movie.
But when the monsters are already doing the storytelling, the humans need to either deepen the meaning, raise the stakes, or get out of the way. Too often, these humans get in the way.
That is the one sin I have trouble forgiving. Even the kid in short pants with the turtle obsession knew better than to stand between the giant fire-breathing turtle and all those doomed people.
Let the turtle go, turtle.
In Conclusion
Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is a fun, kid-friendly, brightly colored monster bash that works best when Kong is wandering through underground ape society, Godzilla is preparing for a title fight, Mothra is being Mothra, and cities are being renovated by blunt force trauma.
It is not a great Godzilla movie. It is barely even a Godzilla movie for long stretches. It is much more a Kong adventure with Godzilla as the world’s angriest special guest star. But the Kong material is strong enough, the monsters are entertaining enough, and the sheer amount of kaiju action is satisfying enough that the film remains perfectly good entertainment.
The problem is that buried inside Godzilla x Kong is a much better mostly silent monster movie, one where Kong, Suko, Skar King, Mothra, Shimo, and Godzilla carry the whole thing through action and expression. Unfortunately, the movie keeps cutting back to humans explaining the movie we would rather be watching.
Still, I had a good time. It is a speed bump, not a disaster. It is a lesser entry after two stronger MonsterVerse films and a much weaker beast than Japan’s recent Godzilla output. But if what you want is monsters fighting, buildings falling, Kong being oddly lovable, and Godzilla using Rome as a cat bed, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire delivers. Just maybe with about 80% too much talking.
