For all of their inherent potential goofiness, giant monster movies do have the capacity to address larger – pun only slightly intended – issues within their narratives. The original 1954 Godzilla from director Ishiro Honda is a very somber meditation on the horror of Japan being the only country to have been subjected to atomic warfare. Although it was probably not the intent of directors Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack when crafting 1933’s King Kong, the film has been read by some genre scholars as a critique of European colonialism. And even though most of its films have reached for thrills rather than commentary throughout its seven decade run, the Godzilla franchise has occasionally dipped back into deeper themes with such films as Godzilla Vs Hedorah and the more recent Shin Godzilla and last year’s Godzilla Minus One. Even the mostly derided 1976 version of King Kong from producer Dino De Laurentiis had some comment of the then current gas crisis buried within.
While it is great that these films can sometimes deliver material for fans to talk about and dissect afterwards, sometimes all you want is just some good ol’ popcorn fun and the latest installment of Legendary’s MonsterVerse, Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire, delivers that in spades. If you prefer emotional treatises on post traumatic stress disorder and survivor’s guilt occasionally punctuated by Godzilla attacks, this might not be your type of monster movie. But if you prefer full-throttle monster stomping action – or even better yet, if you happen to like both – than this is the film for you.
It has been a few years since giant monsters Godzilla and Kong butted heads to an uneasy truce. Godzilla now only shows up to fight off other rampaging giant monsters in between his catnaps in the Roman Colosseum. Kong meanwhile has retreated to the untamed wilderness of the Hollow Earth, where after a period of lonely wandering, he discovers that he may not be the last of his kind after all. But it turns out that the tribe of giant apes that Kong has rediscovered had been hidden away deep in Hollow Earth for a reason, and this tribe’s leader Skar King, has definite designs on escaping out to and conquering the surface world. It falls to Kong and Godzilla to team-up to put a stop to things.
Director Adam Wingard continues to embrace all of the crazy, pulpy ideas that the MonsterVerse franchise has built up over its previous four entries with glee and abandon. He knows the thrills that fans are looking for and whether you are the generation that grew up watching these movies on Saturday afternoon TV or the ones who first watched via rented home video, this film delivers. The giant monster fights scattered throughout the film are fun, and have a number of inventive moments. With the real world being so thoroughly mapped by satellites, such pulp concepts like lost civilizations and areas containing dinosaurs that have somehow survived to modern times, the franchise’s Hollow Earth conceit allows for those tropes to be transplanted there for the story to explore. Having Terry Rossio, who wrote or co-wrote the original Pirates Of The Caribbean trilogy, the two Antonio Bandaras-starring Zorro films and an early 199s well-received but prohibitively expensive for the time, unproduced Godzilla film, as part of the writing team here is also an asset.
Godzilla may get top billing here, but this film is more Kong’s story than anyone else. (And that includes the human characters.) There are long stretches where we follow Kong traveling through Hollow Earth on his own or with his encounters with the giant ape clan he discovers, so there is nothing more to guide the audience in these dialogue-less sections than giant ape’s facial expressions and physical reactions. It is not readily apparent if this was achieved through an actor’s motion capture performance or if the entirety of these characters’ “performances” were created via CGI animators. It would be nice to know, if only to give the appropriate people credit for their work here. The film’s story would definitely fall apart if the audience couldn’t invest themselves in Kong’s journey as a character.
Even by monster movie standards, this is not a perfect film. An effort to keep things moving as quickly as possible results in a few moments of choppy editing, and if you aren’t familiar with the previous MonsterVerse entries, the movie doesn’t give you much in terms of reasons to invest in the human characters here, outside of the buddy chemistry between Brian Tyree Henry’s unconventional giant monster expert and Dan Stevens’s giant monster veterinarian characters. But if you are looking for two hours of crazy giant monster fun, this latest MonsterVerse installment is hard to beat.
