GODZILLA X KONG: THE NEW EMPIRE
2024
Directed by Adam Wingard
Written by Terry Rossio, Simon Barrett, Jeremy Slater, and Adam Wingard
So with no further unspecific handwringing, let's just get its plot out there, and there's boilerplate snark I could use—"it won't take long!" that sort of thing—but it's drained me of much energy to try to be fun about it. Some time after the team-up against Mechagodzilla back in Godzilla vs. Kong, and that film's bizarre, eco-nihilist insistence on a villainous aspect to the prospect of humans taking defensive measures against the so-called "Titans" that now infest our globe, Godzilla has claimed the Earth's human-occupied surface as his domain and Kong (Allan Henry on mo-cap) has claimed the wild kaiju-filled sprawl of the "Hollow Earth" that lies beneath, or possibly in an adjacent dimension or something, the former serving usefully as an indifferent guardian god against other monsters, the latter just kind of trying to live, isolated and alone in a setting that somewhat reminds him of his home on Skull Island, except there are also sky mountains where he is now. Kong's investigations of the further reaches of the Hollow Earth, however—and a lot of this movie is "what could be on the other side of Hollow Earth? oh, turns out, more Hollow Earth"—reveals that he isn't that alone, for a whole survival of what I guess is supposed to be his species of extra-great ape persists down in the deepest depths, and for some reason they have long nursed an appetite for dominion over the surface world. Led by an evidently-immortal figure whom inscriptions describe as "the Skar King" (A. Henry again), Kong is perceived immediately as a challenger, and they chase him all the way back to his minder humans, mostly Dr. Ilene Andrews (Rebecca Hall), who's come down here with conspiracy theorist Bernie Hayes (Brian Tyree Henry, mostly because he was in the last movie) and giant monster veterinarian Trapper (Dan Stevens, even though he wasn't, or at least I don't think he was) to track down the source of psychic visions experienced by Andrews's adoptive daughter, friend of Kong and sole heir to the legacy of the tribespeople of Skull Island, Jia (Kaylee Hottle), now in her awkward years and pining for a place where she truly belongs.
Hell, it almost does sound like a story—not apparently one with much use for Godzilla until the final act, when Kong seeks his help (by way of a kaiju fight scene, naturally) to battle beneath the hollow planet of the apes to stave off their rise and conquest—but it wouldn't be the first time Godzilla is largely irrelevant to the plot as-such and served more-or-less as a deus ex machina, so this is not any kind of big problem. This is probably a more serviceable plot than the last one's was, and it's not, in fact, ever derailed by any singular "big problem," just this constant sucking feeling of the least effort, in service to the least ideas, splashed with money and "style" till you feel nauseous about it. But I will dwell on what doesn't work about it a little: I'm not sure there's been a single Godzilla movie to date that's so completely divorced itself from the traditional pleasures of even the dumbest Godzilla movies. (As for King Kong movies, likewise, though those have been even more constrained in their possibilities, to Skull Island romps and violent collisions with human society.)
Even so, there is a noticeable line of descent from the Toho films to this, and I didn't even really understand it there while Toho was still doing it. I'm going to assume that you have some basic grounding in Godzilla history so we can get through this with something resembling efficiency, but when we look at the first spate of "Showa Era" Godzilla films, we have an enormous variety of human-sized stories to slot into the monster action we're here to see, and while there's arguably a staling sameness to the overarching plots (possibly a dozen movies in a row about aliens or other actors using mind-control on monsters in service of world domination schemes) there was always some measure of personality to the heroes and even the villains. These were Silver Age comic/pulp fiction/sci-fi matinee adventures, about your average Hiroshis and Tomokos falling into a world beyond their imagination. By the time the post-1984 reboot "Heisei" and "Millennium" eras had begun in earnest, the approach to such things had changed—more "realism," in a rather attenuated sense of that word—and now the instinct was to erect enormous institutions around Godzilla, and tell his stories through them. That's where we find GxK, without even the modest personality of "Godzilla-based science fiction about how we can't make fun action war movies due to all our wars being unjust." Now it's just a void, occupied by the returning characters from the last film, despite having already failed to be "characters" then, but still representing the entirely-vague super-scientific edifice of Monarch and what amounts to Monarch's controlled opposition. It continues to boggle my fucking mind right out of its skull that a kaiju conspiracy theorist is a major character in this series of movies that's been, going on six hours of this franchise now, about kaijus openly wrecking the planet.
But this is so: Bernie's redundancy tells you where we are, weird fiction-wise, as the first clutch of Legendary/WB "Monsterverse" movies had a real sensation of characters who were plumbing the unknown, and hence retained access to the mood and forms of horror, and now we've arrived at a point where characters are living in a world that's been all but entirely demystified, where Godzillas and Kongs are their jobs, and who are boring on their own merits. They exist almost exclusively to verbalize plot mechanics and very occasionally justify the dumber plot beats, providing, for instance, the bare minimum logistical scaffolding around Kong getting a robot arm on the basis that the childlike brains of Wingard and his co-writers thought it'd be neat were Kong to have a robot arm. It is especially discouraging to see Hall here, gamely attempting to engage with the thin gruel of her rejected mommy arc as well as with the prospect of giant monsters. Stevens's profound immodulation is probably more aligned with the non-goal goals of the project. B.T. Henry is monumentally unamusing as comic relief, but the character's a less irresponsible valorization of conspiracy theorists now, I guess, if one gives a shit? I don't know why I'm discussing the performances at all. (The best is A. Henry, I guess, in that his Kong has a certain "why me?" weariness. His more emotive scenes, unfortunately, are mainly by way of "Mini-Kong," a young inhabitant of the Skar King's kingdom. Because everyone always enjoyed Minya.)
It's a movie about its kaiju concepts, then, right? In the absence of anything else to point to, I suppose it must be, and I was prepared to be charmed by the payoff to the implications that Godzilla vs. Kong was making regarding the persistence of a Kong Civilization; and Wingard and company slip into what feels like the least interesting version of that possible, so that "civilization" is certainly the wrong word for it, just a few glamor shots of the Skar King lounging across a throne in the hellish bowels of the Earth, though he somehow controls an ice-blasting giant reptile with a... thing. It is not self-explanatory and no human's around to explain it to us, and that's all for the best, anyway. It's just so very blank, though, just a canvas for a CGI cartoon. And hell, fine, bring on the CGI cartoon.
That CGI cartoon is almost unwatchably unpleasant, presumptively representing the final form of Wingard's aesthetic, and give him this, he has one. This is genuinely one of the ugliest major motion pictures I've ever seen, this random melange of color—everything looks like it's infected and sick (I'm especially impressed by the gore which mixes reds and yellows and puke greens inside the same bodies), while barely a single shot passes without recourse to the gaudiest imaginable early-00s anime glowing neon hues, and mid-10s anime lens flares. (The latter is pretty notable considering most of the movie takes place under the fucking ground.) It looks like you smashed a kaleidoscope; even Ben Seresin's cinematography (which is, in fairness, frequently only "cinematography") can't look normal, afforded this bizarre spherical lens silent film haze for extra unlikeable weirdness, possibly because such a thing accrued to the original King Kong made in 1933, and is perhaps more of a needless imposition on a digitally-shot (albeit photographically-printed) movie made in 2024. The curious warpage of trees and the like is still arguably the most successful aesthetic gesture in the whole film (more successful, anyway, than what we see of the technological spaces, full of arbitrary sheets of overlapping, atrocious color), but it doesn't help the impression that you're watching sludge.
Sludge is the overriding mood of GxK. The kaiju battles don't really have any oomph or weight or, in many cases, any apparent ability to cause harm to their participants, and, oddly—considering the impulse of the Monsterverse movies has been to tilt more and more towards becoming solely vessels for kaiju action, to the exclusion of any context that would make that action meaningful—until the final twenty minutes, it almost feels like there aren't any monster fights here after all. This is objectively untrue, but until then they're all prefatory, and of little narrative consequence. (Godzilla battles a glowing sea serpent for sustenance, and acquires a new, hideous pink glow representing a video game-like power-up; so what! Kong gets injured by frostbite; that matters for about three minutes!) The best one in the whole movie—possibly best because it is the very first, and the joyless trudge has only just begun—is avowedly prefatory, involving Godzilla fighting a spider-cephalopod thing in Rome. It may also be the best because it's one of the last that offers much to give the action a sense of scale: the absence of human spaces throughout most of the movie means that we're instead usually asked to get our sense of grandeur by comparing the monsters to Hollow Earth shrub formations. The finale involving an absence of gravity—a strategem effected by the humans, for reasons I didn't bother trying to catch, but which I'm pretty sure happens almost explicitly because the thought was that it would look cool—does not look cool, emphasizing that the construction of these action scenes in this kaiju movie is mostly out of, like, close-ups. The designs range all over the place: the best of the new major beasts is Tiamat, that pink sea serpent (her pink-and-blue fight with Godzilla is, for what it's worth, about the only time the colors seem calibrated to work together with one another), and Godzilla, I perceive, looks worse than he ever has in the new American films, skinnier and approaching the lizard-like build of Emmerich's somehow-still-better 1998 Godzilla. The film is invariably better the closer it's hewing to Kong: Skull Island's sensibility (there's probably less daylight between the two than I'd like to admit, but the poppy colorfulness of that film that I adore and the tastelessness of this one I hate still feel very different). There are some (prefatory) rat monsters that chase Kong that are even modestly scary. The "Skar King" is a Stretch Armstronged, red cartoon version of Koba from the new Planet of the Apes films, and I am viscerally offput by him.
But the CGI creature design is probably the best thing going here. It's the overarching design mentality that fails them. That is where your brain defends itself from a headache by simply getting bored with it and shutting itself down to these endless vistas of caverns filled with random shining crystals and lens-flare-prone Mothras. It's so constant that nothing lands as "weird" anymore: great, you've got a giant temple carved out of glowing crystal like the nine-figure CGI blockbuster version of a Toho movie where the same thing was made out of foil and glitter; in some other circumstance, where it felt meaningfully different from anything else in this pile of sugary puke, maybe it would have actually activated my sense of wonder. Not here. Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire doesn't do anything right, from its terrible, unspeakable title on down (is it old school erotic fan fiction we're dealing with here, or what?; would I say it, "Godzilla By Kong?"—and I feel I've been extremely good waiting till the end to make fun of that). Even that title, nonetheless, seems of a piece with it, as do its disaggregated un-performances, as do its sloshing, putrid colors and the sheen that looks more like a coating of ooze. The diligent professionalism that went into servicing such an undisciplined vision makes it worse. Not to assign any world-ending importance to it that it doesn't earn, but it feels truly post-human in the most awful of ways, the culmination of certain digitally-assisted art trends of the past decade. There's a shot of Jia and Kong and Mothra that feels like the worst, most-overprocessed, slimiest-looking digital painting you've ever seen; every single image of the Skar King comes off like the soulless result of the prompt "a villainous mirror to King Kong"; there's a fight across the Giza Pyramids that ought to at least result in cool iconography, and yet the computer believes that the pyramids are just more "building" models and the only idea it has for them is a blue-tinted pillar of light cutting through them. The whole movie feels like AI slop. Worse, it isn't, but the human minds that made it have likewise trained themselves on the worst art in the world for years. Now they've made one more thrice-regurgitated input for the AI learning models to absorb. I have a great terror that everything will look like this one day. I could barely stand it for two hours.
Score: 1/10
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