You’ve heard the age-old adage: It’s about the journey, not the destination. Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire banks on the opposite being true. It’s an exercise in reverse-engineering, taking a few key end points and mapping out a plot that could possibly get us there. We want a shot of Godzilla and Kong side-by-side and flying through the air in slow-mo while trying to punch an enemy – how do we do that? We want Kong to have a cool mecha-arm – why does he have it? Godzilla should be pink! But how?
But how? For a movie about prehistoric creatures prancing around the Earth’s crust like it’s the interior of a wrestling ring, it’s a question Godzilla x Kong is surprisingly concerned with.
The gist of the but how? is that after the events of Godzilla vs Kong, the titans are peacefully co-existing by inhabiting separate domains. Godzilla roams around Earth topside, with humans, curling up like a cat for naps in the Colosseum and keeping larger-than-life threats at bay. Meanwhile Kong is relegated to Hollow Earth, a subterranean world accessible only by a closely guarded portal in the sea. Surveilling Kong from above, Dr. Ilene Andrews (Rebecca Hall) and her adopted daughter Jia (Kaylee Hottle) note that Kong seems almost depressed in Hollow Earth, living as the last of his kind despite the fact that he is the kind of creature meant to live in a group. A series of protracted events lead both Kong and Godzilla, as well as Andrews, Jia, disgraced podcaster Bernie Hayes (Brian Tyree Henry), and “dentist to the titans” Trapper (Dan Stevens) even deeper into the Earth’s core to fight a new adversary and meet some old and new friends.
The label may say Godzilla x Kong but make no mistake: this is a movie about King Kong. And to the degree that you can get on board with the fact that you’re watching a cartoon for long stretches of its runtime, the Kong stuff works. The script goes to great lengths to humanize Kong and make him feel more like a character than a creature, suggesting that director Adam Wingard is no stranger to the notion that the human characters tend to be the least interesting part of these films. Fittingly, the closest sibling Godzilla x Kong has among the MonsterVerse family is Kong: Skull Island. Wingard seemed to draw inspiration from the film’s vibrant color palette, soundtrack, and overall goofy tone. The greatest exemplification of that tone is Stevens’ portrayal of Trapper, a Hawaiian-shirt laden kaiju veterinarian who just wants to live and let live rather than save the day. To that same point, instead of trying to imbue the film with a sense of dread or drama, Godzilla x Kong is trying to hype up its attendees like they’re watching Wrestlemania. The last third of the film is nothing but big, dumb, silly fun, and it’s hard not to take some joy in the light-hearted spectacle of it all.
But I came away with a mixed reaction to Godzilla x Kong because of the protracted journey it takes to get to that spectacle. It’s an interesting issue, because as we see more “shared universe” movies pop up, we also start to see the same sets of problems addressed across different franchises. A frequent issue in team-up and versus movies is one of character motive. Why would Godzilla and Kong team up after spending the last movie trying to rip each other apart? Finding the answer to that question in this film is the kind of clunky plotting that reminded me of Batman v Superman. While I admittedly enjoyed that movie more than most, I could feel the mental gymnastics the script took to get Bruce & Supes from strangers to enemies to friends in the confines of a few hours, hinging the weight of massive plot developments on feather-light coincidence, like the name “Martha.”
And that kind of gymnastics is also a waste here. Firstly, because the exposition adds a lot of unnecessary bloat to the first half of the film. Godzilla’s going here! Now he’s going over here! And Kong’s going over there! There’s a lot of telling and awkwardly-strung-together “and then, and then, and then…” moments. Secondly, because even with all of that, the script still doesn’t make any of it make sense. Despite all of the clearly added-after-test-screening voice over explainers and heavy narrated exposition, I couldn’t tell you why all of the various monsters and fighting we see in the endgame are there, and I’m not sure I really cared. It seems likely the film was heavily edited to add more explanation, but instead of clearing things up, it just left more of the film’s freshly sewn seams showing. It also means Godzilla x Kong left a good bit of the human character arcs on the cutting room floor, which is by and large fine, except for the fact that it renders their development in the first half of the film even more pointless.
At the end of the day, Godzilla x Kong is exactly what the poster looks like: big dumb himbo fun. It’s an improvement on its predecessor and likely exactly the kind of movie that kids will love and parents won’t mind taking them to. But to get to the monsters lurking in its core, you’d better be prepared to trudge through some unnecessary layers.