Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire
April 02, 2024
This is the dumbest movie in a franchise that includes the brainless Godzilla: King of The Monsters. Kaiju fights are awesome. Everybody knows this. Even if you don't know it you do. But this movie is so dumbly dense it's a Saturday morning cartoon playing in the heart of a neutron star.
When we meet Kong, we see how clever he is. The Hollow Earth is a lurid and dangerous Playstation 2 CGI environment. The prime ape has mastered tactics and tools. Local wildlife doesn't know what's hitting them. He's Kratos from Sony's God Of War, no family no home and a big axe but for the first hour there are no stakes. It takes more than 60 minutes before the driving force of the story appears.
There is a poor attempt to generate a mystery for the cardboard cut out humans to solve. The mystery doesn't matter and neither do the humans. I forgot about the mystery until one of the characters looks, points and all but says "Hey, that's the mystery!" Dan Steven's Hawaiian shirt wearing titan vet is fun. He should return whenever Monarch does. Everyone else is forgettable. Apart from Godzilla and some of the other titans.
Godzilla has moved to Europe and taken to napping in the Coliseum. Showing the monster's enduring popularity the nuclear powered lizard still gets top billing even though he's more of a guest star. The movie delivers the battles Kaiju fans want though I had a problem with a lack of scale in some of the fights. Seeing the monsters destroy things that you recognize above ground gives you an idea of how large they are. When they fight in the Hollow Earth, which they do a lot, I lost that sense of scale.
There will be another one of these and when there is the film makers should be more careful with the foreground scenery. Two giant creatures smashing each other as people flee for their lives is engaging. Two creatures you can't tell are giants smashing each other? Well that's just a punch up.