Summary
Hot on the heels of the return of the original King of the Monsters, the latest kaiju clash throws everything it can think of at the wall and sees if any bricks are left standing.
It’s a pretty good time to be a Godzilla fan. The OG kaiju roared his way back into our lives last year with Takeshi Yamazaki’s magnificent Godzilla Minus One, becoming the first non-English-language film ever to win an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects. So, like Godzilla themselves hearing the growls of a titan across the world, Hollywood has responded to the call with mountains of excess.
Chronologically following the events of Godzilla vs. Kong (2021), and the fifth film overall in the MonsterVerse franchise that began with Godzilla (2014), it begins with Godzilla happily chomping his way through rival titans on the surface while Kong continues to search for brethren in the subterranean realms of Hollow Earth. Yet when Dr. Ilene Andrews (Rebecca Hall) and her intuitive adoptive daughter Jia (Kaylee Hottle) detect strange signals from the underworld, a new threat looms large. The stage is set for a team-up, old foes becoming allies, families found and lots of monkey on lizard fighting.
In stark contrast to Minus One’s modest $15 million budget, GODZILLA X KONG: THE NEW EMPIRE comes in swinging with a reported $135 million price tag. Indeed, there’s no subtle obfuscation of monsters here: the audience is treated to a CG creature chase, a Godzilla/spider titan fight and a monkey with a toothache all in the first fifteen minutes.
Admittedly, there are times when it is difficult to tell what is going on. You might even get whiplash from the location changes. At other times, the arrival at a decision point is more plot convenience than logic driven. Indeed, the back half of the film presents a series of deus ex machina moments – from mechanical arms to creature cameos – that you simply have no choice but to roll with it.
What’s missing here is the human storyline. Yes, we get some returning characters and watch them progress incrementally over the course of 115 minutes. Yet the best monster films acknowledge the trauma and loss of devastation. As we watch iconic monuments topple across the world with nary a flinch, we remember that these films were a post-War reaction to very real destruction across Japan. Now a crushed pyramid, or the cultural collage of various First Nations peoples, is simply more grist for the mill.
Here the human elements are merely there to prop up the titanic clashes, and on this level director Adam Wingard’s film mostly succeeds. The arrival of additional Kong creatures gives us effects on par with the Planet of the Apes reboot franchise. Godzilla absorbing a nuclear reactor is an iconic moment. Still, while we all know the industry-wide problems with CG and workplace practice, there are elements of the climactic Rio de Janeiro sequence that are significantly less convincing than anything in Minus One.
Like Godzilla and Kong themselves, the Japanese and US franchises can happily exist in separate worlds for their respective audiences. GODZILLA X KONG wholesale scratches an itch for big budget brain candy, leaving the door wide open for more monster mayhem.
2024 | USA | DIRECTOR: Adam Wingard | WRITERS: Terry Rossio, Simon Barrett, Jeremy Slater | CAST: Rebecca Hall, Brian Tyree Henry, Dan Stevens, Kaylee Hottle, Alex Ferns, Fala Chen | DISTRIBUTOR: Warner Bros. (Worldwide), Universal Pictures (Australia) | RUNNING TIME: 115 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 28 March 2023 (Australia), 29 March 2023 (USA)
