Cinephiles with long memories will no doubt recall that triumphant moment in 1984 when actress Shirley MacLaine reached the culmination of her long and storied career when she took home a long-overdue Oscar for her work in Terms of Endearment. Those with even longer memories and a predilection for the trashier aspects of cinema history will also recall that, in one of the more pronounced cases of cultural whiplash of note, she followed that triumph a couple months later with her appearance in Cannonball Run II, a film that is generally considered to be one of the direst and most desperate films ever made, even by those who manage to maintain some vague affection for the original. There have been other similarly bizarre combos over the years—some even think that Eddie Murphy failing to win the Supporting Actor Oscar for his worthy work in Dreamgirls was tied directly to the catastrophically awful Norbit being released right as the Academy members were preparing to vote—but I cannot think of a recent one as glaringly obvious as the one currently embodied by one of the most venerable icons of world cinema working today, Godzilla.
Last winter saw the release of Godzilla Minus One, an epic-sized reboot of the long-running kaiju franchise that went back to depict his origins. Unlike a lot of the Godzilla films that have emerged over the course of the past 70 years, the film took care to develop the human characters in thoughtful and surprisingly complex ways so that when the stomping and destruction began, there was more to it than simple mayhem. As for that mayhem, it was produced on a budget far lower than that found in most current blockbusters but what the FX artists were able to accomplish by utilizing their ingenuity instead of just throwing tons of money at indifferent CGI visuals was legitimately stunning. When the film earned an unexpected Oscar nomination for those effects, people were genuinely thrilled and when it wound up winning the prize over the likes of Guardians of the Galaxy 3 and Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning, it was, with the possible exception of the performance of “I’m Just Ken,” the most satisfying and crowd-pleasing moment of the entire ceremony.
Now, just a few weeks after that unalloyed triumph, one of the very best Godzilla films has been followed up by one of the worst in Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire. The latest and by far the least entry in the so-called MonsterVerse—which began promisingly with the surprisingly entertaining Godzilla (2014) and Kong: Skull Island (2017) before going off the rails with Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) and Godzilla vs Kong (2021)—this is a film that comes across as nothing less than a total rebuke to all of the qualities that made Godzilla Minus One so special. It is lazy, by-the-numbers hack work, blockbuster-style, that contains a barely sketched-out story, monotonously dull human characters and special effects that bludgeon rather than dazzle before arriving at a climax that, although slightly more peppy than everything else, fails to justify the stuff preceding it.
Picking up where Godzilla vs Kong left off—assuming that you even remember that largely undistinguished film—this one kicks off with the titular beasts maintaining an uneasy form of detente. While Godzilla makes his home on the Earth’s surface, curling up to nap inside of the Coliseum in Rome (perhaps the single genuinely arresting image to be had here), Kong, assumed to be the last of his kind, remains exiled beneath the surface in the vast area known as Hollow Earth, where he battle various weird monsters while still yearning to find more like him. The early scenes observing Kong going about his business are the ones that come closest to working here, mostly because they are presented entirely in visual terms without any dialogue or, more significantly, any of the tedious human characters who tend to bring these things to a flying stop.
Alas, it isn’t too long before those bores make their presence known. Returning from the previous film is monster scientist Ilene Andrews (Rebecca Hall) and her adopted daughter Jia (Kaylee Hottle), the last surviving member of her Skull Island tribe and one who shares a powerful link with Kong. Also returning is Bernie (Bryan Tyree Henry), who is now a wacky podcaster specializing in monster theorizing whom Ilene inexplicably turns to when she begins tracking abnormal and potentially destructive monster signals emanating from Hollow Earth. The main new human character this time around is Trapper (Dan Stevens), a brash veterinarian (and old acquaintance of Ilene’s) who turns up to extract a bad tooth from Kong’s jaw and tags along when Ilene, Jia and Bernie head to Hollow Earth to investigate those signals.
Those signals have also attracted the attention of Godzilla, who begins stomping about in pursuit of the sounds, pausing along the way to wreak havoc on a French power plant and take down another creature in Antarctica in order to build up his energy beforehand. Meanwhile, Kong is astonished to discover a remote area of Hollow Earth that includes a colony of giant apes just like him. Alas, these apes, including the inevitable adorable child iteration, are under the iron thumb and hairy paw of Skar, a brute who enslaves the others and who enforces his power with the help of a dragon that breathes ice instead of fire. This proves to be the big bad and eventually, Godzilla and Kong finally have their uneasy reunion before teaming up to stop Skar and save the planet from destruction or whatever.
While the first two MonsterVerse entries, particularly Godzilla, managed to offer up pop art spectacle that still maintained enough of a convincing human element to keep them from going completely off the tracks, the subsequent films have delved further into indigestible combinations of the contrived and the cartoonish and The New Empire is the worst offender of the bunch. As I mentioned, some of the early scenes following Kong by himself are intriguing but whatever magic they manage to generate dissipates whenever the humans come into play—between the uninteresting exposition dumps that make up most of the dialogue involving Ilene and Bernie, the clumsy subplot in which the hamfisted parallels between Jia and Kong are expanded even further, and the stridently unfunny comic relief from Trapper, who seems to have based him schtick on Ace Ventura, albeit the Saturday morning cartoon version, you will always find yourself wishing that some giant beast will come along and squash them. Their plot lines merely serve to drag the proceedings down throughout and the uniformly desultory performances don’t help matters much—watching Hall, you get the sense that while they have indeed paid her enough money to utter the inanities in the screenplay from Terry Rossi, Simon Barrett and Jeremy Slater, the producers evidently didn’t kick in enough to make her deliver them with anything other than a sense of vague contempt throughout.
Of course, one does not go to a film entitled Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire for the narrative structure, crisp dialogue or deft performances—one goes to see Godzilla and King Kong wreaking stylish havoc, either against each other or teamed up against another worthy opponent. Unfortunately, the titular team up doesn’t actually occur until the final 20-odd minutes and while this sequence is at least superficially entertaining on some fundamental level, the results don’t really justify the extended buildup and are fairly forgettable to boot. As for the prelim bouts, in locales that also include Rio and Cairo, they are handled by director Adam Wingard with a curious lack of energy or ingenuity—you could find more grippingly staged action from a couple of kids playing in a sandbox with action figures than you get here.
When they aren’t fighting, the two titans are given little of interest to do and what scraps they get are pretty sad—Godzilla too often comes across like an afterthought than an important character while Kong spends entirely too much time bonding with both the adorable little girl and the even-more-adorable mini-Kong. The presence of the latter may remained longtime Kong fans of the last time filmmakers tried such a gambit in King Kong Escapes (1986), a movie generally regarded as a nadir for Kong-related cinema but which at least maintained a loopy grandeur (this was the one where scientists installed Kong with an artificial heart the size of a Volkswagen) that stuck in the mind afterwards—by comparison, the images have barely hit the screen before they begin to fade from the memory.
So as you have probably been able to surmise by this point, I did not care for Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire very much—if one wanted to offer a presentation of all the inherent flaws of current-day blockbuster filmmaking, the kind presented by people with absolutely no clear vision of anything other than potential box-office receipts, this would more than suffice as a Platonic ideal of such a thing. However, would I have been so down on it if it hadn’t been immediately preceded by the genuinely magnificent Godzilla Minus One, a film that managed to find the ideal balance between eye-popping spectacle and relatable drama? Honestly, I don’t know. Godzilla Minus One was made by people who not only loved Godzilla and the thrills that can be had by watching him wreak havoc but who also knew how to tell a story and present human characters that you could like and relate to amidst the chaos. By comparison, Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire feels more like the product of people looking to create a catchy title than a compelling story. FYI, the X in the title, according to the studio, is evidently only there to look cool and is not meant to be pronounced—in other words, it is ultimately as superfluous as the rest of the film.