Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (2024)

Godzilla-x-Kong:-The-New-Empire-(2024)
Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (2024)

Director Adam Wingard’s movie Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (GxK) may appear an effortless money maker on its production house but though it is partially true, the film herself had a struggle to complete. Besides this, Takashi Yamazaki Toho studio has the Oscar win in their camp for Godzilla Minus One, the action pictures of this series were petering out with Godzilla vs. Kong(2021) for which the franchise and shared universe began. The fact that the success of GvK opened the doors to a sequel that was announced within a year of GxK’s release, says a lot about it being an but afterthought. This is also evidenced by the nonchalant attitude the new film possesses which makes its otherwise captivating storyline, fail to transform into something more.

As much as GxK centers around its title characters, it is their behavior in relation to the expansion of the franchise’s lore that arguably makes GxK one of the better films in the franchise. Since Godzilla has always been a representation of war through the lens of nuclear power, it is not a stretch to refer to the ending of GvK as a war with Kong and Godzilla separating and conquering their respective realms as a peace treaty agreement. This peace does not last long as Kong, “a family that hasn’t been found yet,” unleashes Hollow Earth’s Pandora’s box to discover a new threat that is far too powerful to take on alone and calls in help for what will be a brutal four-way brawl.

GxK largely depicts Kong, as he and the audience effectively visit the Hollows of the Earth and discovered some of its most interesting, and seediest, aspects. At the other end of the spectrum, Godzilla is almost a bloodbath cliche, and spends over half the runtime of the film either asleep in the Colosseum or feeding on nuclear plants to ‘enhance’ himself for the final showdown. The character development of Kong is luckily intriguing enough for us to forget the absence of the King of Monsters. He is, or rather was, all alone, and even manages to age and require a dentist’s appointment; so, so much so that his odyssey has more humanity than the actual people in the movie.

More on the GxK action sequences, which are as will soon become apparent simply gargantuan, grand, and enormously overwhelming as though they existed somewhere in the middle between godzilla’s dorsal plates, in the timeline of events. Nevertheless, the mother-daughter relationship involving Dr. Ilene Andrews (Rebecca Hall) and the last of the Iwi natives, Jia (Kaylee Hottle), the banters of Bernie Hayes (Brian Tyree Henry) which only get ignored as a new poster guy for the expositions comes into view, Trapper Beasley (Dan Stevens); these are some of the moments when people’s images are in focus. This is quite an eyebrow-raising situation exposing the fact that the franchise had only recently released Apple TV’sMonarch: Legacy of Monsters whose main theme was more human focused than topical titans and did it rather successfully.

The people behind the GxK franchise do everything possible to emphasize the gigantic actions and battles which are the absolute base level but the joined parts are very visible and look out of place. Kong’s gums were damaged we have one of the dog teeth ready and we have 1000 more. Does Kong’s right hand get handicapped? No problem here please allow us to show you an inexpensive enhancement that was lost in Hollow Earth which would optimize his incapacitated hand into a mace. Strangely, it is the same awful writing which seems to provide an illogical build-up for the action that makes the audience simply gaze over.

This is the part of the film where CGI has been merged with your typical monster movie. There are plenty of these epic ‘let them fight’ moments that allow you to overlook the film’s flaws almost entirely. Scenes such as Kong solidifying his badassery by going up against his new friend Suko or Cairo chile when Kong was trying to get Godzilla to help him fight his enemies. What about the ‘ultimate’ fight with Skar King and his pet Shimo, who is an ice-powered monster? He and his crew rip it and take monsters fighting to a completely new level. You also have a ton of funny monsters, a yellow-tinted monster glove, and a pink lava dripping Godzilla, it was almost too much. The film becomes a giant monster truck game every time there is a shift in view as there are movies where the beauty monsters battle out and get ready to kill. The eight to ten shots of the film are the ones where the titans get their hands dirty with only one single titan per shot.

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is trying hard to balance its emphasis on monsters wreaking havoc with the fact that the humans, themselves, are lost in trying to figure out where they fit into the grand scheme. But movie monsters films succeed because the audiences are entertained by the concept of large creatures rampaging through cities and obliterating them, and we would have savored more of just that. The disappointingly frequent uses of pathetic plot devices in these films to create emotional drama ruin some of the most amazing world-building we have ever witnessed in the series along with breathtaking action scenes which make GxK all the more painful to watch.

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