Here Be Monsters

Has Japan’s favorite radioactive lizard gone glam? Godzilla x Kong: the New Empire, Adam Wingard’s latest gonzo installment of Hollywood’s current kaiju series, is rife with hot-pink dorsal fins, trippy blue neon crystals and glowing green membrane walls. Seems like the New Empire in this monster mashup is a Land of the Lost discotheque.

Despite the multiplier between their names, Godzilla and Kong do not breed or somehow splice together their DNA. Marketing geniuses are the ones who adopted the idiotic affectation of using X as a silent-letter indicator for additive value in the title, then went and added even more to it with a misdirect subtitle.

What’s the new empire, exactly? Is it the brave new world in which Godzilla plays hall monitor to the delinquent Titans stomping on earth’s population centers? Or is it Hollow Earth, the realm deep beneath the surface where up-is-down, down-is-up, and King Kong captures his dinner with strategicly placed booby traps all around a prehistoric hellscape? Maybe it’s Subterranean World, the redundantly named realm under the realm of Hollow Earth, which itself is under the realm of regular Earth?

GODZILLA x KONG: THE NEW EMPIRE
★★★ (3/5 stars)
Directed by: Adam Wingard
Written by: Terry Rossio, Simon Barrett, Jeremy Slater
Starring: Rebecca Hall, Brian Tyree Henry, Dan Stevens, Kaylee Hottle, Alex Ferns, Fala Chen
Running time: 115 min

The New Empire is definitely not some revival of the Roman Empire, since the movie opens with a gigantic tentacle-mouth crustacean pummeling the Eternal City—at least until Godzilla shows up to crack open the overgrown sea creature, covering himself in bright yellow goo, before curling up in the Colosseum and taking a nap like it’s a 2,000-year-old dog bed.

Be warned—or, for rabid fans of cultural decimation, be reassured—that Godzilla x Kong includes the trampling of at least a half-dozen World Heritage Sites. It’s admittedly thrilling to watch Godzilla swan dive off the rocks of Gibraltar, but he and Kong are almost cruel in the way they so flagrantly wreak havoc on Egypt’s ancient pyramids. The Great Wall of China is probably safe for now, as long as the franchise’s financier Legendary continues to be a subsidiary of the Chinese conglomerate Wanda Group.

Wingard’s last foray into this titanic clash of the Titans was 2021’s Godzilla vs. Kong, a superior smackdown that benefited from a tighter premise—and title—which delivered on the promised pain. This direct sequel is too unfocused, too busy, too preoccupied with justifying the silly work of getting Godzilla and Kong to team up together like a klugey classic-rock supergroup. Speaking of power pop tunes, Wingard borrows a page from the Guardians of the Galaxy playbook and lards his soundtrack with not-quite-classics from the late ’70s and early ’80s like “Turn Me Loose,” “I Was Made for Lovin’ You” and “Twilight Zone.” I’m sure Dutch rockers Golden Earring appreciate the royalty checks.

The best part about Godzilla x Kong is just how self-consciously goofy the whole messy movie is. The movie even features a passing gag in which an ad for Gargantuan Insurance gives people a way to rebuild after monster fights reduce their cities rubble. “Godzilla just made landfall in France!” yells a concerned member of Monarch, which keeps track of all Titan movements. Their iPhones even have apps that blare TITAN ALERT. Very handy.

All this emoji-shrug levity feels about right when your film’s erstwhile protagonist, Dr. Ilene Andrews (Rebecca Hall) employs a Titan veterinarian named Trapper (Dan Stevens, doing Aussie cosplay). The two happen to be ex-lovers, just to give a glimmer of backstory to our human heroes. No one cares. Trapper also specializes in dentistry for 300-foot apes, because why not. That bit of oral surgery gives Kong a titanium canine tooth, which plants the notion of further “minor augmentations” that arise later in the film. Bionic Kong, anyone?

Why this film isn’t called Kong x Godzilla is frankly perplexing, since he’s the one who gets a character arc. It’s lonely in Hollow Earth! He’s got a toothache! And he just met a previously-undiscovered race of other apes who definitely do not like him! Except for a furious Curious-George type who the film’s press notes identify as Suko. They meet angry, Kong swings Suko around like a club to beat up some marauders, they get chummy and share the meat from a sea serpent that Kong rips apart. Cute.

The bad guy in this nesting-doll of battle zones is the Skar King, a snarling simian meanie with an enormous snake-bone whip tipped with a glowing crystal that controls Titan Shima, a cryokinetic stegosaurus-type he rides like a horse and who has a deadly freezer breath that started the last Ice Age. Got all that? Neither do I. But it’s the reason that Godzilla and Kong have to team up—after Godzilla recharges at a nuclear facility and Kong gets his paws on that dope battle ax he debuted in the last film. The 11^th-hour ringer? A not-so-little mythical insect called Mothra.

Suffice to say, there’s a lot of screensaver-worthy moments of extreme mayhem among Skar, Godzilla, Kong, Shima, and Mothra. That’s a hard act to follow. Maybe the next movie will be an office comedy focusing on the hapless middle men from Rio de Janeiro to the Arctic Circle processing all those Gargantuan Insurance claims.