Score: 2 / 5
Oh boy.
Maybe the most disappointing viewing experience I've had in a cinema in years, the bafflingly titled Godzilla x Kong doesn't stop its confusion at the title. How do you even say it? Godzilla times Kong? Godzilla ex-Kong? Should it be an ampersand? And what about the subtitle, The New Empire, which makes even less sense the more you unpack it. Godzilla was previously touted as King of the Monsters, but now he's an emperor? Or is Kong the emperor of Hollow Earth? Is it "new," really, and who exactly are their subjects after they've killed so many other titans?
And we haven't even gotten to the film itself yet.
The latest installment of Legendary/Warner Bros's MonsterVerse franchise crashes and burns in a way I feared but did not expect from this series. I've been a fan all along, from Gareth Edwards's Godzilla -- which, contrary to popular opinion, did the whole "focus on the humans, not the monsters" thing a full decade before Godzilla Minus One -- through the stylized romp of Kong: Skull Island, the soaring epic religio-fantasy of Godzilla: King of the Monsters, and even the fabulously pastiched escapist mess that was Godzilla vs. Kong. Then, when the Monarch series launched on Apple TV+, I binged that and then did again because it's so much fun.
But Adam Wingard helms the latest and seems insistent on embracing schlocky nonsense over gritty pseudo-realism with his committee of screenwriters, at least two of whom should know better than to churn out this trash. Much like the absurdity of Godzilla's fiery radiation breath drilling a hole through Earth's crust to the Hollow Earth exactly into Kong's throne room (disregarding the film's own internal logic of a gravity well and inverted physics to get there and back), Godzilla x Kong throws its own dignity out the window in favor of cartoonish balderdash with about as much sense as Saturday morning shows under the influence of acid.
I won't waste time trying to recap any plot here, because there isn't a worthwhile one. A few familiar faces return, namely Rebecca Hall and her adopted Iwi daughter (an older Kaylee Hottle) and their friend, conspiracy podcaster Brian Tyree Henry. A new character, played winningly by Dan Stevens, is such an artistically bankrupt creation that I can only hope they paid him well; the character (I won't use their names because who can remember them when they matter so little) pops in to save the day as a titan veterinarian and engineer, replacing injured teeth and using Iron-Man like technology to mobilize a frostbitten hand. His deus ex machinas appear almost at whim, and you really have to wonder how and where and why but you can't because the breakneck pacing forces us to just accept it and move on. Suspension of disbelief should be the result of flawless internal fictional logic, not the result of necessity due to aggressively fast storytelling.
The endless plotholes, of which the titan vet's tech only scratches the surface, are not the film's only faults, though perhaps should be explored further. I still don't understand the dimensional portal to Hollow Earth, nor how there is sunlight down there, among many other issues. The film's insistence that the dual landscapes of Hollow Earth aren't enough space lead it to invent yet another secret, "uncharted" realm (as if most of Hollow Earth wasn't indeed uncharted) where an entire army of giant, violent apes prepares to wage war on their ancient foe, Godzilla, and conquer Hollow Earth and the surface world. Their leader, Scar King (I know, I know, I told you this is really stupid shit) controls a secret weapon through *some* mysterious means: yet another titan, Shimo, who has the chilly power to change the world's climate and usher in a new ice age. Because somehow that would be good for giant apes, too? Hmmm....
This film works especially hard to anthropomorphize the apes, and it get less cute as it continues. Kong himself is treated like a big baby who fights good, and the humans just keep cheering him on and retrofitting him with artificial aid. When he discovers his own kind, one young one (who is objectively visually off-putting) acts like Tolkien's Gollum, repeatedly trying to trick and trap Kong to eliminate the potential threat to his master, Scar King. The lengthy scenes of apes communicating nonverbally bored me to distraction, and it all plays out much more rote than even I could give it credit for.
And all this has been centered on the Kong side of things because the film itself is Kong-centric. Godzilla is mostly absent from this film, apart from a few money shots like sleeping in the Roman Colosseum. The film globetrots more than a cheap spy flick as Godzilla hops around to eliminate other titans (one wonders what happens to those carcasses) before we even get to see or experience them. The humans, in their unforgivably exposition-heavy dialogue, suggest he's collecting and storing energy for a major upcoming conflict (for no clear reason), and when he goes to kill the most energy-rich one named Tiamat, he does so with almost no ado and very little screen time (which renders the whole climax of that subplot flaccid and facile).
The disaster scenes here, as in the previous one, are woefully monster-centric, and you know that tens of thousands of people are just arbitrarily dying en masse without so much as a moment of respectful screen time. Like the climactic battle between Kong, Godzilla, and Mechagodzilla previously, here the fight scenes devastate heavily populated cities before a new and totally unexpected climax in Rio de Janeiro, which was dispiritingly nihilistic in its lack of a human element. Even the sudden emergence of a new Mothra -- which completely ignores the previous hint of a Mothra rebirth from earlier in this same franchise -- doesn't help refocus things on the human element despite a bizarre quasi-religious sect of Iwi people who apparently worship her and share a psychic link with her through Rebecca Hall's daughter. The kaiju take center stage in the end, no matter how hard Brian Tyree Henry and Dan Stevens try to let their humor win the day.
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