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A few months ago Toho released a new Godzilla movie that revisits the origins of the now world-famous monster and returns to the core of where it came from. Now that Legendary and Warner Brothers are releasing an adaptation of the character, it’s time to just watch Godzilla beat the tar out of other giant monsters while they destroy a major city in the name of saving humanity. At the end of the day, this movie is designed to be a crowd-pleaser and succeeds on that front, even if there are some shortcomings.
Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire follows the continued adventures of Godzilla and Kong as they have partitioned what aspects of the world they protect. Kong protects the region known as Hollow Earth while Godzilla protects the humans that live on the surface from the other titans. When an ancient threat from the core of Hollow Earth returns to start a new ice age, Godzilla and Kong have to team up to stop them. Rebecca Hall, Brian Tyree Henry, and Dan Stevens also star.
First off, despite being top-billed, Godzilla is a supporting character in this film designed to up the stakes as the narrative progresses. It’s an interesting way to use Godzilla and allows Kong to be developed more as a character, however, there are certain aspects that do fall flat. Over the course of the film, there are two other titans that are dispatched that would have been interesting foils for Godzilla to face off against in their own movie. A water-based leviathan that is powered by solar radiation and a dinosaur with ice powers are both interesting enough concepts for villains that are ultimately wasted in this film.
The other big issue with the movie is that a large amount of the Kong story that happens in Hollow Earth just feels boring, slow, and shallow. These segments do not have humans so large swaths are just two large apes grunting at each other before a fight breaks out. It ends up feeling like that Rick and Morty episode with the snake world except here it is played with a sense of gravitas. It just feels ridiculous when a scene like that is immediately followed up by one where one character picks up another character and uses them as a weapon against two attackers before throwing a rock and hitting another chimp in stride with a level of accuracy that would make Kong a solid contender to be starting QB for the Giants should Daniel Jones not work out. On top of this, the sense of scale is a little weird in Hollow Earth so the Titans do not feel as big as they should which makes it just slightly less interesting.
On the plus side, the fighting is great and the human story is grounded enough that it can be engaging. Both Godzilla and Kong move with a dexterity that feels new for giant monster fights, which allows for a level of brutality in the PG-13 film. At the same time, the human story does not intertwine with the monster story as intensely as it did in Godzilla Vs. Kong back in 2021, it just serves to deliver enough exposition and levity at key moments. At the end of the day, that’s enough to offset some of the other more boring aspects of the plot until the end of the movie when Godzilla and Kong actually meet.
At the end of the day, the visuals in this film make it interesting enough to watch in a theater on a premium format screen. There are enough action sequences before the big set piece at the end to keep viewers engaged and there are enough cool moments to make it worth a watch. It is also worth noting that there have now been two consecutive weeks with a major franchise movie released that had “Empire” in the subtitle and neither had anything to do with an empire, even in the most superficial sense.
Final Rating: 7/10
