Adam Wingard’s Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire picks up a few years after the events of Godzilla vs. Kong, with the two eponymous titans keeping the peace by staying in their separate realms. Godzilla now busies himself protecting humanity from various threats, and napping in Rome’s Colosseum, while Kong jumps and swings around Hollow Earth, tearing apart critters and wistfully hoping to find other enormous apes like himself. Given the film’s title, their teaming up is an inevitability, but Godzilla x Kong takes its sweet time getting there, spending much of its first 90 minutes engaging in pointless, anticlimactic world-building in Hollow Earth and elaborating on the wisecrack-laden and cringe-inducing human drama above.
In Hollow Earth, Kong finally runs into a trio of angry apes nearly his size, along with a pesky young ape who’s trying to prove his toughness, though it’s not exactly the welcome party that the titan was hoping for. After proving his superiority in fisticuffs, Kong befriends the little guy, who introduces him to a hidden society of apes held under the thumb of a vicious ruler, the Scar King. This moniker is only the first of several nods to The Lion King, and it’s a comparison that the treacly and trite father-son bonding that ensues never comes close to living up to. While plenty of action accompanies this storyline, all sense of scope and scale is dwarfed by the fact that all the apes are the same size, making these sequences feel all the more generic.
Regrettably, the human stories above ground will have you looking for the nearest portal back to Hollow Earth. Ilene Andrews (Rebecca Hall) continues to keep watch over Kong as her now-adopted daughter, Jia (Kaylee Hottle), the hearing-impaired girl she rescued from Kong Island, begins to sense a deeper connection to both Kong and Godzilla from afar. As Jia’s unique powers reveal themselves, her story leans further into the tiresome trope of the noble savage.
Even more troublingly, that plotline increasingly draws on stereotypes about Indigenous people being mystical and spiritually connected to nature, especially once Jia joins Ilene on a trip into Hollow Earth. The heaviness of this storyline is meant to be offset by returning podcaster Bernie (Brian Tyree Henry) and newcomer Trapper (Dan Stevens, channeling Paul Rudd’s quippy, nice-guy shtick). But the duo’s banter quickly grows grating and distracting, namely for the way that it clashes with the numbing self-seriousness of the rest of the film.
All this talk of plot and character-building may leave you wondering when Godzilla and Kong finally team up to kick some ass. After all, this is a series whose main promise is some kaiju-on-kaiju action, leaving the cities in which they fight in rubble. And it does happen, with successive fights among the Giza Pyramids in Cairo and a suitably epic throwdown in Rio de Janeiro satiating the cravings of those looking for widespread, wanton destruction.
These sequences are certainly the highlights of Godzilla x Kong, but even they pale in comparison to the set pieces in Godzilla Minus One, lacking any of the psychological richness and emotional resonance that Yamazaki Takashi’s film brought with it. Wingard’s film is certainly bigger and louder than his prior entry in the series, but the pro-forma motions that it goes through only work to undercut your rooting interest in the outcome of Godzilla and Kong’s climactic team-up. The last 20 minutes, in particular, live up to the promise of bludgeoning viewers with plenty of rock-‘em-sock-‘em combat and demolished human landscapes, but what any of it is actually for will be forgotten even before the dust begins to settle.
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