I guess we don’t need to play anything. Godzilla, when it was brought to the screen by Gareth Edwards, was a drama where human characters had enough space, worked with fear and went for a serious note. However, with each subsequent installment, MonsterVerse moved away from this seriousness, and last time probably everyone understood that they will probably never return to it, unless there is a hard reboot. Repeat this for a minute before you go buy your movie tickets, because the new movie with titans destroying everything in their path, in the established trend of “more action, less plot, gone logic” not only continues, but succeeds push him to the very top. If flushes like Fast and Furious 10 are too blunt for you, this might give you a stroke. So watch out for that. On the other hand, I wouldn’t totally want you to think that this is automatically a bad movie because of the director’s and studio’s approach.
Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is simply a continuation of a colorful, good-looking fairy tale for boys and perhaps also for girls who are no more than twelve, or for adults who can tune in to this age in the cinema. The creators promised that this time we would explore more of the Hollow Earth hidden beneath ours (30% of readers willingly stopped reading the review and went to do something useful, and I don’t judge them for that), and they definitely didn’t mess up. Here, Kong discovers an underground realm (yes, there is an underground realm in the underground world, the other twenty percent gone) and discovers that an ape civilization is hiding here, ruled by a terrible monster. And in the meantime, Godzilla is walking around the world, destroying the Mediterranean, and every ten minutes some huge monster gets in the mouth, either from Godzilla or from Kong. And then they meet, talk it out, figure out what’s going on and set out together to break the grip of the greatest danger. Doesn’t that seem like enough? Bad luck. You won’t get more.
Fortunately, Adam Wingard understood that this little was enough for his directorial vision, so while in his previous Godilla vs. Kong, the two titans have been groping for a long time, here it goes full throttle from the start and in “it looks a bit like Avatar and we have to smash everything that isn’t a giant ape or a lizard” mode. And it looks pretty good on those battles. Nobody lingers too much, we get to see a lot of monsters, and it’s basically just a matter of Kong getting to the lake where one monster is waiting for him, while Godzilla heads off to Rome to deal with the other.
The battles themselves look very real, King Kong x Godzilla has solid tricks, we spend most of our time in the Hollow Earth. Sometimes it reeks of Jurassic World and there are man-eating trees, and the fairly modest footage is filled with a lot of action and attractions that don’t make sense, but they look pretty good and there aren’t many of them. We may not like it, but honestly, when you first saw Godzilla or King Kong as a kid, did you wonder how this or that world works, any mythology or such? No, you wanted to watch giant battles. And Wingard knows that, and he’s betting everything on them, and I can’t say he’s done a bad job in that regard.
Fortunately, the fact that there are still human heroes in the film made up for it. Compared to the previous works, they have significantly reduced their number, and more or less there is only a little girl from a mysterious tribe who can talk to Kong and something like a story is attached to her. And then there’s Brian Tyree Henry, who’s trying to spell things out, Rebecca Hall, whose job it is to explain things, and Dan Stevens, who’s running around in a Hawaiian shirt goofing off. Unfortunately, despite the fact that the role of people has been reduced to that of a guide, the creators still seem not to have realized that we really don’t need the heroes explaining what is what between battles and revealing the stupid mythology of the Hollow Earth. And they tried with a straight face to say things like “if they pour that chemical into the water now, it will negate gravity and the crystals from both Earths will connect and close the portals to our world”. We all know that what’s really going on is that gravity stops working and Kong and Godzilla can fight in weightlessness, right? Plus, even Meryl Streep wouldn’t be able to pull off the kind of crap Rebecca Hall has to spout.
Play the trailer So easy – Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is even dumber than the previous installments and at the same time more action-packed, visually imaginative, with more space for pretty pictures and impressive carving. The level of fun and silliness sometimes fails to balance in a completely ideal way, but it certainly did better than, say, the last Transformers, and it holds somewhere on the level of the average Fast and Furious installments. If you miss this straight-up spectacular entertainment and you don’t require anything extra, the two hours can pass quite pleasantly in the cinema. In IMAX, it all roars beautifully, so following two hours I left with the feeling that the whole thing was crazy nonsense, but not boring. Before visiting the cinema, consider whether this is enough for you.
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