by Justin Nordell
Have you ever watched a small child completely engrossed with their plastic action figures? With boundless creativity the kiddo has created an entire world in which these hardened heroes and villains live as they are thwacked and banged together incessantly with vigor and aplomb – a battle to the death where the stakes couldn’t be… lower, other than who may be put back into the toybox first.
Yea… that’s essentially what watching Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire is like.
When last we left our two behemoths, Godzilla was protecting our world from titans (bad guy action figures) and King Kong had been sent to live in solitude in Hollow Earth (silly truthers, the Earth is HOLLOW not flat). As Hollow Earth begins to feel mysterious tremors, Jia (deaf actress Kaylee Hottle reprising her role) begins to have psychic visions of the same signal. Coming from Kong’s home of Skull Island, Jia is the last of the Iwi people and has a deeper connection to Kong than their ability to sign to one another. Since the last film, Dr. Ilene Andrews (Rebecca Hall, The Night House) has adopted Jia and brought her to the Monarch research facility on Barbados that monitors Kong. Worried about her daughter, Dr. Andrews visits podcaster and only other returning cast member from Godzilla vs. Kong, Bernie Hayes (Bryan Tyree Henry, Causeway), asking for his help in deciphering what these visions could mean. Bernie uncovers that the signal and visions are originating from Hollow Earth, so our trio along with stodgy military man Mikhal (Alex Ferns, The Batman) and handsome Titan dentist named *checks notes* Trapper (Dan Stevens, star of director Adam Wingard’s criminally underseen The Guest) dive down to Hollow Earth to investigate.
Godzilla, who has been sleeping in the Colosseum in Rome like a cat napping in its favorite box, springs to life on the surface world and begins absorbing as much energy as possible – sensing something is coming. Meanwhile Kong, sporting a brand new dental implant thanks to Trapper, ventures deeper into Hollow Earth and comes across none other than a troop of massive monkeys just like him! Believing to be the last of his kind, our primate is pumped to meet his kin… until they attack and try to kill him. Chasing them off, Kong takes the youngest one under his massively muscled furry wing and has him lead to where they come from.
In the depths of Hollow Earth they come across an entire primate society, who seem to be enslaved by a monkey known as The Scar King (think a thousand foot tall King Louie from The Jungle Book but on meth). Right out of Iwi lore, The Scar King brandishes a whip made out of a spinal column and a gemstone that controls his very own ice titan Shimo, that supposedly brought about the last ice age on Earth before they were banished to Hollow Earth. The Scar King injures Kong and sends him back to the humans, tracking him as his one way ticket out of Hollow Earth and back to the surface. Will Kong (X Godzilla) be able to stop this simian scourge before it’s too late? Of course they will – the sequel has already been greenlit. But honestly it’s a LOT of fun to watch it happen.
Director Adam Wingard (You’re Next) is the first filmmaker of a Monsterverse™️ film to come back for a second round, and as such he brings with him the same dumb fun approach that made the last entry so successful. Godzilla X Kong is the first film in the franchise to really make the human characters second fiddle to the main stars: the giant monsters themselves. While this is immensely successful, as is the killer eighties tinged synth score, the effects work and script let down the proceedings a few times with some scenes looking like Syfy original movies while others look like documentary quality. These inconsistencies may bother you as it did me, but if you’ve seen and enjoyed other films in this franchise, just turn your brain off and relish in Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire on the biggest loudest screen possible… it’s what Kong would want.
Grade: B-
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