Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (2024)

PG-13 for the typical summer blockbuster stuff.  Again, I cannot stress enough how this franchise has massive casualties that never are really addressed.  Like, so many people die and you never really think about it unless you choose to.  Then there's some swearing and scary moments.  Big monsters get hurt.  If you think about the incredible amount of casualties, you would be horrified.  But it's the same as playing Rampage.  It's just part of the storytelling experience.  PG-13.

DIRECTOR: Adam Wingard

Why?!  Why do I keep returning to this franchise?  I know that I don't really like it.  I can almost assuredly say that I keep returning because I've invested so much into it.  Listen, as many movies that are out there that I would watch, I am even further behind on TV shows.  But as I was slogging through what was ultimately the same movie I've seen time and again, I was trying to figure out when I would watch the Monarch TV show spin-off of these movies on Apple TV+.  That's how wired I am for closure on something.  I want to know that I've seen everything, even if I don't really care for the original product.

Part of me was resigned to watch this.  I had just finished the five-plus hour Fanny and Alexander and I needed something way dumber to relax the old mind-grapes. I also had the horror of realizing that Ingmar Bergman also has a five hour Scenes from a Marriage in the box set that I will be knocking out ASAP, especially considering that I'm about to start writing the novel again come Monday.   Keeping all of these things in mind, I decided to watch Godzilla x Kong because I needed something completely vapid.  And vapid it was.  Man alive, this movie is paradoxical in its storytelling.  There's just so much jam-packed nothing going on.  It's not just that there was nothing going on.  That would make the movie seem boring.  Instead, we're constantly reminded of all of the different characters and plotlines in play and none of them seem to matter.  There is a hierarchy of story though and, oddly enough, Godzilla isn't in a ton of those main plots considering that he's the first word of the title.  The movie has the human protagonists putzing around the jungle of Hollow Earth (a concept I'm having a really hard time getting past my critical sensor) while Kong is looking for his own kind.  The human story...isn't much.  There's a little bit of a story when it comes to what it means to be an adoptive parent and I suppose I can applaud the movie for giving their plot a modicum of meaning.

But oddly enough, it seems like the actual protagonist of the movie is King Kong.  He gets a lot of screen time.  Good for him.  He's a king. Anyway, I do applaud the odd humanization of this giant ape.  Honestly, the first few moments of this movie, I thought hat King Kong was portrayed by a silent Sam Elliott.  He's a guy just fightin' his way through the wilderness.  He can't eat because his tooth hurts and he's just lookin' for his family.  There was one moment where I thought that Kong was going to lower the brim of a massive cowboy hat and sleep in the orange sunset.  Yeah, it gives Kong characterization and someone that we can latch onto in the big fight sequences, but it's almost a bit much.  The point of the original King Kong was that animals had souls.  "Twas beauty that killed the beast" or whatever.  But Godzilla x Kong takes it to a level where Kong has capability for incredibly complex thought.  This is the kaiju movie where King Kong has the capability to make Rambo  / Kevin McCallister traps.  Like, I don't know why I need that separation between Kong and the human characters, but I just do.

I'm really trying here.  I want to give an in-depth and thoughtful blog, but this is a movie that is almost so dumb that there's nothing. I firmly believe that almost every movie has something to pick apart.  I could talk about my favorite scenes.  I knew that somewhere in this blog that I would be mentioning that Kong, during the awful Meet Cute between him and the other apes, uses Mini-Kong as a weapon and that was highly satisfying. But that's not analytical in the least.  And that's the movie.  This is a movie that almost fights to be about nothing.  The weird part about that is that it also kind of lowers the stakes of the film.

The bad guy of the movie is the Scar King, a character that is so incredibly underdeveloped that I'm not really sure if this is a blip on the radar for most people living on Earth.  While Kong using a baby ape as a pair of nunchuks might have been the high point of the movie for me, there's a scene where Dr. Andrews (whose name I absolutely had to look up for the sake of this blog) reads what is supposed to be ancient lost-culture hieroglyphs.  It's her specialty.  After all, she has an Iwi (?) daughter.  But she is reading what are clearly just loosey-goosey cave drawings and telling a complex story about the Scar King. But all of that is happening in a exposition dump that should never have happened.  There's no way that's the level of detail that is happening in those drawings.  Anyway, we never really get to understand how much of a threat that Scar King is beyond what we're told.

I mean, obviously, we're meant to see the parallels with the two monsters mirroring Godzilla and Kong.  I just wish that there was some kind of tie between these characters besides the fact that they are similar styled monsters.  I get that the Scar King is a really bad dude who enslaves his own people.  I just don't really see him as a threat that Kong couldn't take care of without a little bit of planning.  After all, he made those absolutely absurd Rambo traps when he was being chased down...another moment that I call complete shenanigans on.   It seems like we're meant to believe that this jerk of an ape is the end of the world character, worthy of waking up Mothra.  (Is it weird that while I find Mothra as a deity absurd, my mind can rationalize it because I've seen enough of the classic Godzilla movies?)  It honestly seems like Kong should have been willing to rally the troops and stage a revolt against this guy who can't be on his game all of the time.  That might have been a more satisfying ending because what this movie (and really these movies) are simply equate to CG creatures punching each other until the credits roll.  There's no real smart epiphany these things have.  They punch until the obvious advantage is balanced and then the movie ends.

Let's talk about what I'm conflicted with.  That old ape, right?  That was a mirror of Samuel L. Jackson in Django Unchained, right?   That was literally all the thought that went into it. I'm not crazy, right?  Also, completely anticlimactic death for that ape.  

Anyway, I didn't hate this movie.  I just don't care at all for this film.  It makes me really wonder what attracts these actors to come to this movie because this cast is too good for this movie.  I want to talk about Dan Stevens and Brian Tyree Henry in this film, but I have nothing to say outside of "How big was that paycheck?"  Maybe they were having fun, but I don't see much about these movies that shows quality.