Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire

Godzilla, the King of Monsters, and the almighty King Kong face a colossal threat long hidden deep within the planet, an ancient kingdom of monsters that not only challenges their own existence, but the very survival of the human race.

The American Monsterverse didn’t start out as a franchise, it started as just an American reboot of Godzilla, but now here we are, five movies and a TV show later. Overall, it’s been… mmmm, not bad. It’s had some good parts, it’s had some average parts, and it’s had some bad parts.

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is one of the bad parts.

Set in a world of where there are many kaiju, or titans, as they call them, mankind has mostly learned to live beneath the shadows of these great beasts. The various titans in this world, the giant crabs, the giant sea snakes, the giant eels, the giant moths, the giant lizards, and the giant apes, they're all treated kind of like mobile natural disasters. Most days, you're fine. But every once in a while... run for the hills! Because while most of these titans generally seem to stick to their own areas, and they’re all watched over by Godzilla, who shows up to beat the hell out of 'em, should any of them get too rowdy, most of the specific areas these titans call their own also include human population centers, not to mention some major cities, each one full of people, all waiting to be stomped on… which they are.

A lot.

Meanwhile, Kong lives deep below the planet's surface, ruling all he can see in Hollow Earth. Other than the occasional toothache driving him to the surface to see the dentist, something that could cause Godzilla to show up looking to kick some ass, he mostly stays in his kingdom deep, deep underground. Still, safe as he is down there, Kong is lonely, as he is the last of his kind.

Or so they thought.

Soon enough, a sinkhole reveals a passage that leads down even deeper than Hollow Earth, or higher above Hollow Earth, depending on where you’re standing at the time on the surface of the Earth, I guess. This passageway leads to another forgotten realm deep underground, one known as Subterranean Earth, and good news for Kong, there’s a ton of other giant apes down there. Bad news for Kong, they’re mostly a bunch of assholes.

Even worse news for Kong, there’s a king asshole down there too. It's an evil ape who is part of ancient prophecy, so it seems like he’s hundreds of years old, I think, which makes no sense, but then, we’re talking about a race of giant apes that live in huge caves deep within the earth, so… whatever. Anyway, a massive orangutan, he forces his people to toil away in the lava-lit darkness, mining the earth for reasons that are unclear, but I assume that he just likes to keep apes busy. Idle hands, after all. He also uses a spinal column bone-whip for a weapon, and rides a chained up ice-breathing kaiju named Shimo. He is bad news all around.

Thy call him… Skar King.

Because he has a scar.

And he's the king.

Long, long ago—thousands of years, maybe, I’m not sure, the timeline makes no sense at all, especially when you realize that all the major players were alive then, and they're alive now, but again... whatever—anyway, long ago, Godzilla beat the unholy crap out of the Skar King, and buried him in Subterranean Earth. Skar King has been down there ever since, sitting on his bone throne, and just fuming, as he stews over his defeat. So naturally, he's spent all his time waiting for the chance to return once again to the surface world and conquer it. Why did he not just start digging in literally any direction? I don't know. But if we're being honest here, the whole thing is just silly. An evil giant orangutan from Hollow Earth, who wants to conquer the surface world, shouldn’t sound as silly as it does, but here we are.

So, in his excitment to finally get to monkeying around with some other giant apes, Kong accidentally releases the Skar King from his subterranean cage.

Meanwhile, you might remember Anthropologist Ilene Andrews from the last film… No? Weird. Anyway, she’s still taking care of her adoptive daughter Jia, who is the last of the Skull Island natives. Ilene is busy juggling an unhappy teen, while trying to figure out what exactly these mysterious energy pulses that the Monarch Project detected mean. Not only that, but Jia, a deaf girl able to communicate with Kong telepathically, has been entering fugue states lately and drawing frenzied pictures of the same pulses.

And the fact that everyone in the Monarch Project—a group that was created specifically to monitor titans and the various underground realms beneath our feet—saw all these new readings, and also saw Jai’s drawings, the girl who, again, can communicate telepathically with a giant ape, and didn’t immediately go: “Oh shit, this is bad news,” and instead were like "Mmmm... it's probably nothing, but you can go to Hollow Earth and look on your own, if you really want," really calls into question the general competency of the Monarch Project in my opinion.

So, Ilene turns to kaiju conspiracy theorist podcaster Bernie Hayes, another character from the last movie that I’m sure you all remember well, and together the duo figures out that the energy pulse are both a distress signal and a warning about impending danger.

Could it be related to Skar King?

During all of this, Godzilla—who really only seems to be in this film because his name is in the film’s title—when he isn’t using the Colosseum as a kaiju-sized dog bed, has been lumbering about the planet, seeking out other titans and picking fights with them, all so that he can kill them and absorb their solar radiation.

Godzilla is doing this to charge up his energy levels in preparation for the imminent arrival of the Skar King, because he too can feel the energy pulses and knows that this means his ancient ape enemy is returning to the surface, and even though these charge-up efforts seem to amount to a whole lotta nothing in the final fight, you do get to see a couple of fun kaiju battles.

Plus, you know that Godzilla is fully charged, as all that energy turns his spike ridge, his eyes, his mouth, his nostrils, and his gill slits (and presumably his butthole) a lovely shade of hot pink.

Meanwhile, Kong isn’t the only one who has discovered that he isn’t actually the last of his kind, as Jai, the headband-wearing teen, also discovers that there's more of her magical primitive tribe--which feels vaguely racist--within the Subterranean Earth too--which also feels vaguely racist. But to be fair, feeling vaguely racist is pretty much the best you can hope for whenever a story uses Hollow Earth Theory for its plot, as the Southern Poverty Law Center can explain here.

On the bright side, at least they didn’t run into the lost Aryan race.

Dan Stevens shows up in this film, which is always nice. Here, he plays a ridiculous swashbuckling Ace Ventura-like "kaiju veterinarian" named Trapper. He’s here not just to give Kong a grill when the titan has a cavity--which feels vaguely racist--but also for when after Kong initially gets his ass kicked by Skar King and his pet ice kaiju, Trapper is there with the answer for the inevitable Round Two.

Kong-sized Iron Man armor.

Why not, right? Fuck it.

Anyway, when that only kind of works, and Godzilla's charge-up doesn't seem to do the trick either against Skar King, his ice-breathing titan Shimo, or his army of giant apes, luckily Jai is there to discover that she is the chosen one prophecized to reawaken the kaiju known as Mothra.

What does Mothra do? Not a lot, really. Or at least, she does basically the same thing as everyone else, which is mostly crash loudly into one another.

But she does look neat, so there’s that.

The whole kerfuffle finally culminates in a big battle royale in the middle of Rio de Janeiro, where soooo many people must have died underfoot. By the time the fight was done, there must have been nothing but a foot deep layer of hot human-paste smeared all over the broken streets of downtown Rio.

Gross.

Kong was probably sitting in a Hollow Earth lake later, washing people-muck off his feet and pulling out tiny splinters from the bones of families who had been out for a day of idle shopping at the Farmer's Market before a pair of giant apes and a couple atomic dinosaurs showed up and squished them.

So yeah, this is definitely the worst entry in the MonsterVerse, lacking the wild fun that mostly seemed to power the others films, not to mention the touchstone idea at the root of each one. Whether it was “First Contact” world changing event of G-Day in Godzilla, or the Vietnam War film feel of Skull Island, or the kitchen sink kaiju approach to the King of the Monsters, or the awesome smackdown of the last film, which mixed a classic “enemies to partners” set-up with some wonderful pulp sci-fi goodness like Journey to the Center of the Earth and alien-controlled giant robots, those films had a style and a theme and a central idea. This film doesn’t really seem to have anything.

For the first time in this franchise, I think it's fair to say that this film feels lazy, half-assed, and perfunctory.

This film is also maybe the worst example yet of that thing where the human characters really have no reason to appear in one of these kaiju stories, except to run and scream, as they don't really even do that here, and instead, mostly ooh and aah from a distance and act as technobabble narrators. There’s so much explaining going on in this movie, it almost feels insulting, almost as if the filmmakers honestly believed we were not going to be smart enough to follow along with this obvious film and its ridiculously simplistic nonsense plot.

Disappointing.

Still, it was definitely fun watching Kong use a truculent and untrustworthy child giant ape to beat off two other giant apes that… wait. No.

That’s not what happened.

Ahem… it was definitely fun watching Kong use a truculent and untrustworthy child giant ape like a pair of simian nunchucks to beat down a pair of giant apes who tried to ambush him. So there’s that at least.

But really, that’s pretty much it.