Ever since the wider world caught wind of it, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire never made any secret of where its interests laid; to be a big, flashy, over-the-top brawl involving, among others, the two undisputed heavyweights of monster movie history — this generation’s All Monsters Attack, if you will.
The fearlessness with which the film owns that distinction has delighted some and turned off others, and neither of those responses are invalid. On the one hand, there’s no more important item on a film’s checklist than figuring out your identity and sticking by it, whether or not that identity has much merit, and let’s face it; giant monster fights are some of the most carnal, undiluted fun you can have in genre fiction.
On the other hand, it’s hard to disagree that a Titan-stuffed slugfest seems like a massive downgrade from Godzilla and King Kong’s thematically cerebral roots; that is, Godzilla as a nuclear allegory, and for Kong, the dangers of natural spectacle, and the utilitarian side of love. Indeed, even if blasting these two monsters with the current iteration of the Hollywood franchise ray didn’t outrightly ruin them, The New Empire should have never been a film truly worthy of any score higher than, in this case, three and a half out of five stars.
Read that again; it should have never. On paper, this movie had no right to challenge the ceiling that its monster genre identity placed upon it. And yet, somehow, someway, a brilliant, granular glimmer shone in The New Empire’s eye, and despite not taking enough advantage of it (hence why it’s still pressing against said ceiling rather than smashing through it), this glimmer should earn a tip of the hat from even the film’s most rancid doubters.
Let’s get the obvious out of the way first; The New Empire is about a bunch of monsters fighting each other good-and-evil style, and the scenes where a bunch of monsters are fighting each other good-and-evil style are the meat of the triumph here. Each earthshaking confrontation boasts at least one of three winning elements; dazzling evocation, bombastically entertaining choreography, and peculiarly effective humor, and more often than not, there are at least two of these aspects involved. The undisputable highlight of the film is a zero-gravity battle between Team Godzilla-Kong and Team Skar King-Shimo (plus a few extra faces on either side), which takes those first two elements and utilizes them to supremely crackling effect.
That being said, there are a few exchanges of punches and energy beams that could have been played to much better effect, with Kong’s difficult recruitment of Godzilla being the prime example. For context, at one point in the film, Kong returns to the surface world to bring Godzilla back to Hollow Earth so he can help Kong fight Skar King and his army, but Godzilla rolls up swinging, no doubt hoping for a salty runback. After trading a few blows with Godzilla to the beat of a stentorian background symphony, Kong becomes fed up with Godzilla’s nonsense, and eventually incapacitates the reptilian Titan before dragging him to the Hollow Earth portal. Godzilla regains consciousness, however, and aims a blast of his newly-acquired pink atomic energy at Kong, ultimately prolonging the fight.
Now, the film frequently and quite deliberately plays itself for laughs, but this fight wasted a massive opportunity to play with convention. By treating this bout as a somewhat epic battle courtesy of the orchestral soundtrack, the film deprives it of the chance to really express itself in the way that its textual presentation suggests it wants to; namely, Kong and Godzilla humorously and unceremoniously slapping each other around a bit before Kong basically goes “Listen bud, I don’t like you either, but you’re coming with me whether you like it or not, and we’re gonna solve this new problem, so behave,” before flippantly dragging Godzilla to wherever Kong needs him to be. Furthermore, concluding the fight at that point would have allowed for a much bigger, more exciting reveal of Godzilla’s new powers by saving them until the final confrontation.
The human characters in The New Empire serve an important purpose, make no mistake; to lay the expositional and logistical groundwork to set up all of these giant monster fights. That said, the film both knows this all too well, and forgets this a bit too often.
When the likes of Rebecca Hall, Brian Tyree Henry, and Dan Stevens serve monologues on Titan history, upgrading Kong, or explaining why if A happens, then B will happen, The New Empire is on its strongest footing. It’s when the film tries to involve us in a vague impression of a mother-daughter emotional core, or when Henry’s Bernie Hayes stretches his role as comic relief (in name alone), that The New Empire proves it needed a bit more time in the oven. To truly become its best self, a movie should demand excellence from what it excels at; but in its family drama, and awkward, spoken zingers (the film’s comedy is only ever truly effective when it comes by way of the monsters), The New Empire falls far short of excellence.
Given this context, the human characters being in service of the monsters and their antics is an absolute necessity, and it’s that mostly-incomplete-but-nevertheless-present intention that gives The New Empire the potential to be a genuinely fantastic movie. Godzilla and King Kong have long since outgrown the constraints of their more erudite origins, especially as characters of The New Empire, and exist exactly as unchained, intelligent, top-of-the-food-chain beasts would; as animals with a commitment to nature, be that their own, their kin, or the natural world, itself.
A human watching classic King Kong films might be concerned with how King Kong, as an abstraction, represents love and spectacle. King Kong himself isn’t concerned, though, nor does Godzilla spare even a shadow of a thought of how he parallels atomic devastation; they’re instead thinking “This is bad and dangerous, I need to fight it,” as any animals would. And what is The New Empire if not a bunch of monstrous animals fighting what they’re sensing as bad and dangerous? Thus, by placing its human characters almost entirely in service of this monster-centric story, The New Empire restores Kong and Godzilla not as one-off cinematic case studies, but as infinitely more mythological, wild beings who are beyond human control and comprehension; indeed, we humans with our media literacy and academia are no longer in control of these two – they’ve stepped into a much more independent truth befitting of all-powerful forces of nature.
Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is a fun, brisk popcorn movie, despite not using all the tools at its disposal, and not always having the right idea about which tool to use. Nevertheless, it’s beyond proficient with the tool it needs the most, and works from a blueprint for something pretty incredible. Worst case scenario, you’ll dislike the film despite knowing exactly what you’re getting into, at which point it’s your fault for watching it in the first place. Best case scenario, you walk away satisfied, potentially hyped, and even surprised at what it managed to be.
