Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire
WARNER BROS
It took Warner Bros. ten years to make a Galaxy-brained Godzilla movie, after the self-serious attempts at Americanizing the character with Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla (still the best-ever American adaptation of the character) and Michael Dougherty’s Godzilla: King of the Monsters (the best-looking Godzilla movie ever). Jordan Vogt-Roberts readapted Kong for the MonsterVerse with the visually exhilarating Kong: Skull Island, which led to the showdown of the century in Adam Wingard’s Godzilla vs. Kong. Already, there were signs that the franchise would be taking a goofy direction (though the monstrously dull television spinoff Monarch: Legacy of Monsters would make the two people who watched it think otherwise), and it gets dialled up to the extreme in Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire.
Of course, Godzilla taking an inherently childish and goofy turn is nothing new. After the grim Godzilla and its sequel, Godzilla Raids Again, Ishirō Honda began to heroize the Big G in 1963’s King Kong vs. Godzilla, with 1964’s Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster acting as the turning point for the character’s transformation from villain to hero. Throughout its seventy-year existence, the franchise has taken different permutations. Still, it has far been sillier than some of the ‘purists’ (who likely only saw Godzilla 1954, Shin Godzilla, and Godzilla Minus One) on Twitter would have to make you believe.
When Toho resurrected Godzilla through its Heisei era in 1984 for The Return of Godzilla, he was immediately posited as the antagonist Honda initially presented him as. But it didn’t take long for each instalment of the franchise to adopt a sillier tone, with the introduction of telepaths, time travellers, ancient civilizations, double brains, and large plants, to name a few. Hell, Jun Fukuda’s Godzilla vs. Gigan had cockroaches who took the form of humans as antagonists, with Godzilla and Anguirus communicating through speech bubbles as they team up to fight Gigan (Anguirus famously agrees with Godzilla by saying “OK!”). So the silly films outweigh the ‘serious’ instalments by the number of films produced, regardless of what the people who clearly haven’t seen the bulk of Godzilla will complain about how the MonsterVerse has turned into a ‘cartoon’ on social media.
If the core of the Toho franchise has seen Godzilla become a hero in much sillier films, why shouldn’t Warner Bros. try their hand at it, too? They did their serious instalments, so let them have fun for a bit. The real question one should ask ourselves is not why they shouldn’t do a silly Godzilla movie, but can an American version of a galaxy-brained Godzilla film be good? Absolutely, but not like what Wingard has presented it as in Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire – the ugliest and emptiest film of the MonsterVerse so far.
Several moments work well and lean into a campy aesthetic that should’ve been the basis of its visual inspirations. Tom Holkenborg and Antonio Di Iorio’s Tangerine Dream-inspired score gives the film an immediate 1980s feel. The orange hues of Ben Seresin’s non-IMAX photography are the closest modern audiences will get to see a Tony Scott-like frame on the big screen (Seresin worked on Scott’s last film, Unstoppable. It all makes sense now). When Dan Stevens’ Trapper is introduced with the task of replacing Kong’s teeth, he turns on the radio and lipsyncs to Greenfellow’s “I Got’Cha” – already the best needle-drop and character introduction of the year so far. It gives everything audiences need to know about the man, one who has always lived life on the edge and loves doing cool (but dangerous) stuff with the coolest people around.
Stevens is arguably the best part of the movie, chewing up the screen in every instance he gets, even if his character’s tonal shifts aren’t as smooth as they should be. But it doesn’t matter — he’s having fun, Wingard is having fun framing him as the world’s biggest star (seriously, his intro is legendary), and the audience is also having fun seeing him in a role that seems tailor-made for his personality and acting style. After giving one of the best career turns in Wingard’s The Guest, seeing Stevens collaborate with him again feels natural (and fun).
But that’s about the only instance of fun Wingard and screenwriters Terry Rossio, Simon Barrett, and Jeremy Slater throw at the audience, with the bulk of the movie set in Hollow Earth as Dr. Ilene Andrews (Rebecca Hall) investigates seismic shifts in the environment when her adopted daughter, Jia (Kaylee Hottle) begins to experience strange visions about the arrival of the Skar King. With Trapper and Bernie Hayes (Brian Tyree Henry), Dr. Andrews travels to Hollow Earth to find out what is happening while Godzilla is raking up nuclear energy to prepare for the incoming war.
While most of the human drama is completely useless, as with most Godzilla movies, what sinks Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire isn’t its overtly silly tone or completely formless human characters that serve as exposition delivery machines (Rachel House, in particular, dips from the film once she’s done delivering the exposition her character requires), but unengaging visuals and dull fight scenes. As flawed as Wingard’s Godzilla vs. Kong is, it at least delivered on the final fight, with a staggering sense of movement and colours as Godzilla and Kong fought MechaGodzilla in Hong Kong. It’s all CGI, but it felt incredibly real, and the film’s stakes were immediately raised from the dull human drama.
Wingard and Seresin smartly decided to up the scale of Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire by shooting most of its action scenes with IMAX cameras (side note: the IMAX 3D presentation has great stereoscopic effects). However the challenge of shooting in IMAX is gargantuan since the cameras are sharper, and the margin of error is minimal because a badly framed image will look worse on a ten-story screen.
There isn’t a single IMAX setpiece that doesn’t feel kinetic or visually exciting. Apart from real glacier photography in a later scene where Godzilla enters Tiamat’s lair, none of the IMAX scenes can produce scale on the cinematic level of the earlier MonsterVerse instalments, such as King of the Monsters or even Larry Fong’s audacious photography in Kong: Skull Island. When Kong fights against a group of apes who are in the Skar King’s pocket, attempting to figure out who Kong is fighting is almost impossible since Seresin pits one indistinguishable CGI blob against another indistinguishable CGI blob in an artificial environment. Audiences are a long way off Lawrence Sher’s work in King of the Monsters, which strikingly used lightning, snow, and rain to produce a pure sense of wonder and awe as the monsters quickly begin destroying cities. When Mothra appears in that film for the first time, it feels like a divine intervention, compared to how Wingard haphazardly introduces the character here, constantly showing up at the worst possible occasions with absolutely no life left in its non-moving backgrounds.
In The New Empire, Wingard seems to direct each IMAX scene on sleep mode. Instead of letting the monsters speak for themselves and craft animated fights that will produce excitement, where each character will get their time in the spotlight, he puts every monster in the same frame as they fight inside pure rubble. How one can distinguish the other during its climax is almost impossible. A good example of this happens during the aforementioned scene when Kong fights the Skar King’s heavies – at some point, he uses a small ape as a weapon. This moment is hilarious, but one can’t even see him utilizing it until the middle of that particular shot, where the small ape is transported at the top of the frame. Basic cinematography notions like ‘depth of field’ and ‘horizon lines’ are completely thrown out the window, which seems particularly galling after David Lynch reminded everyone (through the figure of John Ford) that “When the horizon’s in the middle, it’s boring as shit!” at the end of Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans.
It feels even more baffling considering that Seresin and Wingard crafted great images in the last movie, while in this one, they never once try to capture the same level of scale and awe-inspiring kinetics as their first attempt. This ultimately sinks the entire affair, no matter the fun Stevens, Hall, and Tyree Henry are having spewing the most useless gobbledygook imaginable. It’s part of the course for Godzilla movies, but shouldn’t the main event (Godzilla and Kong) at least look somewhat competent?
When the miniatures and costume work of the Honda Godzilla films look more exciting and larger-than-life than a 2024 picture with incredible advances in visual effects and cinematography, there’s a major problem. At least Honda knew how to transpose his imagination on screen with the technical capabilities of our time. In viewing these films in our current times, the miniatures never look silly. It’s an astonishing display of pure creativity. Filmmakers had to use their imagination to bring their characters to life and make each ‘visual effect’ feel as real as possible through their lens.
Of course, miniatures are a pain to craft nowadays for movies and television series. However, most of the Hollywood blockbusters currently released this year (barring Dune: Part Two and Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire) have lost the sense of wonder and excitement when it comes to capturing larger-than-life environments that will transport their audiences into another world. Wingard is a great filmmaker, who has always thrived with working in lower budgets compared to when he transitioned to blockbuster filmmaking. Should another Godzilla film occur through his lens, he desperately needs to capture Honda’s sense of wonder that Takashi Yamazaki recently transposed in the uneven but far more exhilarating Godzilla Minus One. Perhaps he needs to watch that film again or, better yet, Ryuhei Kitamura’s Godzilla: Final Wars. Now that’s a Kaiju movie.