The MontyVerse

Everyone can kind of point to what they think the turning point was in the pandemic when “the movies were back.” For some it was Tenet, the first major studio release. For some it was Spider-Man: No Way Home, the first post-pandemic movie to make over a billion dollars. For some it was Top Gun: Maverick, the summer juggernaut that catapulted itself to a Best Picture Oscar nomination. But for my money, the movie that drove audiences back to the theater was 2021’s Godzilla vs. Kong, the first post-pandemic movie to cross 100 million domestically, raking in nearly half a billion worldwide. A large-scale monster movie featuring two icons of the genres fighting one another was exactly what audiences needed to get them back to the movies.

Now, three years later, director Adam Wingard returns to the Monster-verse with Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire. Picking up where his previous film left off, The New Empire primarily follows King Kong exploring the deepest regions of Hollow Earth. But when a new threat to Kong’s empire comes along, the king of the jungle must call upon his most formidable opponent: Godzilla. As the monsters transition from enemies to allies, they will discover…honestly, nothing. Also along for the ride are some human characters, including Rebecca Hall and Bryan Tyree Henry reprising their roles from the previous film. What are their character names? I could not tell you, but it’s not like you should care.

If you’re going into this Monster-verse movie expecting something along the lines of last year’s Godzilla Minus One, temper those expectations significantly. Gone are the contemplative moments and reckoning with the destruction caused by these creatures, replaced with some of the trippiest visuals you will see in a blockbuster movie this year. Wingard doesn’t pretend his movie is anything like Minus One, but he does have enough of an idea of what the movies in this Monster-verse are to make a fun but forgettable time at the theater. This movie is not interested in exploring the ramifications Godzilla and Kong have on Earth, but it knows to play into the undeniable fact that watching a giant ape with a robot cast run alongside a lizard with nuclear breath is awesome.

Some of the visuals are quite impressive, and the CGI is utilized to its fullest extent. It feels strange to have to say this, but it’s nice to see a movie with a large budget put all of that money onto the screen. Not only with the various species of Hollow Earth and beyond that we are introduced to, but the shot composition and what Wingard chooses to visually complement his scenes with. One sequence of the humans entering Hollow Earth has an absolutely wild way of showing it, and when the film leaned into those weird elements, it was undeniably at its strongest. On the flip side of that, unfortunately, there were multiple times during which Wingard would have a sort of shallow focus around the edges of the frame, which was used inconsistently, and therefore felt out of place whenever it came up.

I could try to talk about the story and screenplay, but to be perfectly honest, the majority of the story has already left my mind after seeing it. But to reiterate, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. So long as you know the kind of movie that you are going into when you watch this, you should have enough of a good time that you won’t be mad you saw it. The writers for the film can write action decently enough that they can fill extended sequences with nothing but ape grunts and Godzilla shrieks, and audiences can follow enough of what’s happening. Every beat is highly predictable — from the second any character is introduced, their resolution might as well also flash on the screen, it would only be slightly less subtle than the film. If you think a character is going to die, chances are they’re dying. If you think Character A is going to be set up with Character B for the next film, chances are they will be.

My biggest problem with the film does not come from any of these elements. I can deal with the paper-thin story and characters, and I can accept it not being the work of art that Minus One was. The thing that I took significant issue with was the scale of the film. This might be a bit of an odd complaint, but it was something that really prevented me from being all in on the ridiculousness of the movie. It has a really hard time giving the viewer a sense of just how big Godzilla and Kong are. It achieves this on occasion, particularly with Godzilla, but I think the main reason for this is because we do not get to see a ton of interaction between the monsters and the humans. It’s a lot of the monsters in their world, and the humans in Hollow Earth, and Hollow Earth feels like it has a sliding scale, wherein the humans and the creatures both look as though they belong there. Wingard was somewhat more successful at communicating the scale of the monsters in Godzilla vs. Kong, but here, I really wouldn’t know just how big Godzilla and Kong are unless the movie insisted it.

For example, there are almost no low-angle shots in this movie, and the ones that there are happen at the beginning of the film, and we forget about them almost immediately. If I didn’t know that King Kong and the rest of his species were 50 feet tall, I might have just thought they were the same height as the monkeys from Planet of the Apes. Godzilla and Kong destroy almost an entire urban city, and yet I never once felt like they were so much bigger than the city and the people that lived in it. It just kind of felt like they switched locations for the sake of switching locations. The axe that Kong uses is bigger than some of the buildings, but we never really get that sense. This is something that Godzilla Minus One was extremely effective at communicating, and again, I know they’re different movies, but the sort of techniques used by Takashi Yamakazi and the rest of the Minus One team feels like something that anyone who gets into the Monster-verse should follow.

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is probably not going to convert any new fans to this franchise, and I can imagine that some people whose first Kaiju movie was Minus One will walk into this with those expectations and leave wildly disappointed. For audiences looking for some mindless entertainment with some cool visuals and creatures fighting, this should scratch that itch well enough. But anyone looking to go below the surface, you’ll probably find it’s just like the Earth that Kong rules over — hollow.