2.0 out of 5.0 stars
Fresh off the heels of Oscar-winning “Godzilla Minus One,” the monster-movie genre is brimming with a newfound sense of potential. It is up to any director to capitalize on a possible revitalization, and Adam Wingard is seemingly up to take a chance with “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire.” Written by the trio of Terry Rossio, Simon Barrett and Jeremy Slater, this kaiju throwdown released March 29 for an Easter Sunday box office hit.
In terms of capitalizing on movie momentum, in spite of releasing on a holiday weekend, this film fails to deliver. Unfortunately for Wingard, the monster mayhem falls apart in many ways, some of which are too crucial to forget.
To start on a positive note, the cinematography for this film stands as excellent. Each monster fight is captured in a multitude of wide frames across a variety of iconic cities, giving each fight an epic sense of scale to be expected from the clash between two titans. Each shot is filled with splashes of vibrant color, never once leaving the audience without some sort of visual splendor. The futuristic technology possessed by human beings in this movie also provides a visual treat, operating and moving with constant fluidity. It presents a neat style that never fails to keep the audience engaged in fight scenes, where Godzilla and Kong unleash a flurry of moves in a team-up effort against the film’s villains. Unfortunately, those scenes are the only ones that possess enough substance to keep viewers locked on the film.
The story of “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire” is undoubtedly poor. It fails to hold the audience’s attention given how heavily it leans into the tropes of recent monster movies of the last 10 years. Our central characters in this film, much to the audience’s surprise, are not any human leads. Rather, Kong arguably stands as the main character of the film. He struggles across the hidden world of the Hollow Earth, located under the Earth’s crust, in search of his long extinct species. His journey — along with the conflict he has with the main villain known as the Skar King — is the only plot line across the movie that holds any interest for the audience, presenting a clear goal and hints at an arc for Kong.
Godzilla’s plotline has none of this, consisting of him simply powering up until the plot needs him to fight the movie’s villain. He essentially has no story around him: The movie’s secondary protagonist is nothing more than a plot device.
In terms of the plotline regarding the human leads, it is nothing short of a series of events strung together by a simple phrase: “and then.” Every major plot point on the human’s end is stumbled upon by pure coincidence, and the characters encountered by our main cast shouldn’t exist based on the movie’s own rules. Our heroes run into every solution to an obstacle mere minutes after encountering a problem, giving a sense of zero stakes.
Even the fight scenes, despite their visual splendor, possess the same quality as the main story. The stakes are low even with the scale as both Godzilla and Kong hold the power to defeat the villains as early on as the second act. Godzilla, as mentioned before, powers up enough to fight any character in the movie with ease, and Kong has no trouble dispatching the Skar King in their very first encounter. For a movie centered around the clashing of titans, their biggest fights hold very little climactic weight when they eventually begin.
The main actors fail to save the main story’s bland, convenient tone. The film sports a multitude of performances from actors who either overplay their role or give the feeling that they don’t even want to be on set. It’s an unfortunate cast where actors very rarely add anything to their characters with their individual performances. Of course, it doesn’t help that the script gives them barely anything to work with.
The potential for interesting storytelling presented by a Godzilla project last year has not been captured by the newest film in the MonsterVerse saga. If a moviegoer is looking for a hearty brawl between massive monsters, then “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire” is certainly a fun distraction. If they happen to be looking for anything regarding a strong story, a recommendation for another movie would certainly be in order.
