Every one of the recent English language kaiju epics from Legendary Pictures has walked a\u00a0different path, and \u201cGodzilla x Kong: The New Empire\u201d continues the tradition. This one is a direct sequel to 2021\u2019s \u201cGodzilla vs. Kong,\u201d a simple movie inspired by the 1962 Toho Studios film \u201cKing Kong vs. Godzilla\u201d that pitted the big lizard and the big ape against each other before teaming them against a robot foe. But rather than just repeat the template in “The New Empire,” returning director Adam Wingard and his two co-writers offer a more fragmented and sometimes knowingly\u00a0silly narrative, cross-cutting between lines of action in multiple locations that all lead to a\u00a0huge showdown with a lot of creatures.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Artistically it\u2019s the most hit-and-miss entry in the current MonsterVerse, lacking the cohesive and distinctive vibe that powered all of the others, whether it was the 2014 \u201cGodzilla\u201d (basically \u201cClose Encounters of the Godzilla Kind\u201d), \u201cKong: Skull Island\u201d (a bizarro riff on Vietnam movies), \u201cGodzilla: King of the Monsters\u201d (the first \u201cteam-up\u201d entry, with lots of family melodrama stirred in), or Wingard\u2019s original, gloriously goofy Godzilla-Kong flick, which owed quite a bit to 1960s exploration sci-fi like \u201cJourney to the Center of the Earth\u201d and 1980s Hong Kong and American action thriller\/buddy films where the two main guys have to have a fistfight before they team up against a dangerous villain.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Rebecca Hall\u2019s anthropologist Ilene Andrews is the main character this time, tending to her adoptive daughter Jia (Kaylie Hottle), and trying to figure out the connection between mysterious energy pulses detected on the Monarch Project\u2019s monster-measuring tech and frenzied drawings that Jia has been scrawling on school desks and scratch\u00a0paper. The answer\u2014uncovered with help from muckraker\/conspiracy podcaster Bernie Hayes (Brian Tyree Henry), another character from the last movie\u2014is a return to the \u201cClose Encounters with Godzilla\u201d notion, positing that what they\u2019re all experiencing is a combination distress signal and warning about an impending\u00a0catastrophe. As intimated in trailers and other promotional material, there\u2019s a secret civilization of giant Kong-like primates imprisoned in an unexplored portion of Hollow Earth, plotting their escape and a takeover of the surface world. Their leader is a scarred and sadistic despot who enslaves his own kind in a mining operation in a hellish volcanic cavern, a set that confirms the filmmakers have seen \u201cIndiana Jones and the Temple of Doom\u201d more than once.\u00a0<\/p>\n
As somebody who\u2019s been a booster of this franchise from the beginning, it\u2019s my sad duty to report that \u201cGodzilla x Kong\u201d is all over the place, barely working up a proper head of steam before cutting to something else. It makes “King of the Monsters”\u00a0seem single-mindedly on-message.\u00a0And it\u2019s even more larded with redundant and wooden \u201cmake sure that everybody in the audience understands everything that\u2019s happening at all times\u201d exposition than the previous films. The showdowns are rousing and often brilliantly choreographed, particularly the finale, a multiple-monster main event with lots of other creatures bustling around in the margins. The live-action and motion capture performances are mostly marvelous, despite the bum dialogue and Wingard\u2019s tendency to rush through sequences and whole relationships that might\u2019ve been extraordinary had they been presented with patience and elegance.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Dan Stevens is a pleasant though functionally absurd\u00a0addition to the cast. He plays\u00a0a swashbuckling, poetry-quoting\u00a0ex-boyfriend of Ilene who’s\u00a0famous for being the first and so far only\u00a0kaiju veterinarian, and\u00a0is introduced extracting an abscessed tooth from Kong\u2019s mouth by rappelling down into it from a hovercraft. (I don\u2019t know if it was Shakespeare or Freud who said that a man with a toothache cannot be in love, but this movie offers a corollary: a giant ape with a toothache cannot defend the surface world.) Stevens has real chemistry with Henry, whose dialogue often sounds ad-libbed even if it wasn’t. There are times when they seem like they\u2019re at risk of cracking each other up and blowing a take. But the movie fails to take advantage of their connection and build it into something truly memorable.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Kong\u2019s relationship with a big-eyed little\u00a0scamp of an ape that he meets while exploring Hollow Earth is a much bigger missed opportunity, although the bits we do see are performed by motion capture performers and the FX teams with imagination and care. The younger ape is essentially an abused child who is treacherous, selfish, and cowardly\u00a0because he grew up in a cult. He suddenly now has a good parenting model courtesy of Kong, a hairy, burly single dude who lives a solitary existence, is an orphan himself, and had no parent role models (at least not that we know of), yet still treats the younger ape with patience and compassion even when it\u2019s not earned, and makes a decent primate out of him. Adam Sandler has told a version of this tale many times. As presented here, it\u2019s a mirror of\u00a0what\u2019s happening between Ilene and Jia\u2014the latter reconnecting with her own roots and Ilene growing increasingly sad at the possibility that the girl might outgrow the need for her. Two adoptive parents, two different sets of challenges, but the same basic story:\u00a0so much could\u2019ve been done, but wasn’t.<\/p>\n
More for the minus column:\u00a0The computer generated creature skins\u00a0look more cartoony than in previous entries. And the screenplay introduces its genuinely terrifying and charismatic villain, Skar King,\u00a0too late to\u00a0give him and Kong a chance to build and flesh out\u00a0their antagonism,\u00a0as the preceding movie\u00a0did with Kong and Godzilla’s relationship.\u00a0It\u2019s fascinating to watch the slow revelation of Kong\u2019s value system and realize how starkly it contrasts with the behavior of his evil doppelganger, a swaggering, preening rotter who seems to have been played via time warp by Gary Oldman in the ’90s. Kong’s triumph here\u00a0should have felt\u00a0cathartic:\u00a0a victory of decency over despotic cruelty rather than narrative box-checking.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Every one of the recent English language kaiju epics from Legendary Pictures has walked a\u00a0different path, and \u201cGodzilla x Kong: The New Empire\u201d continues the tradition. This one is a direct sequel to 2021\u2019s \u201cGodzilla vs. Kong,\u201d a simple movie inspired by the 1962 Toho Studios film \u201cKing Kong vs. Godzilla\u201d that pitted the big …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[36,35,51],"class_list":["post-1134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-action-movies","tag-action","tag-adventure","tag-science-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1134"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1134\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}