Movie Review: 'Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire' Starring Rebecca Hall

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (2024)

Directed by Adam Wingard

Written by Terry Rossio, Simon Barrett, Jeremy Slater

Starring Rebecca Hall, Bryan Tyree Henry, Dan Stevens Kaylee Hottle

Release Date March 29th, 2024

Published April 2nd, 2024

My apathy towards Godzilla x Kong The New Empire knows no bounds. I saw the film a little before the release and was so unmoved by the movie that I forgot to write a review of it prior to the release. It's such a nonexistent movie for me that I have had to read through the Wiki description of the plot, more than once, to recall the plot of the movie. It's so boringly slick and stupidly loud that the only lasting impact Godzilla x Kong The New Empire had on me was a slight damage to my hearing in my right ear, I think I was too close to the speakers on the right side.

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire takes Godzilla and King Kong and makes them partners. It's a team up movie in the monster-verse. You can hear the marketing buzzwords bouncing off the walls. King Kong is struggling to adjust to life in Middle Earth, sorry, The Hollow Earth, the inside of the Earth where he hopes to find more giant apes like himself. Thus far, he's made no progress and has spent his time in pain from a toothache. Indeed, the opening act of Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire spends most of its time dealing with Kong's bad tooth.

Rebecca Hall, gritting her teeth while picking up a big budget paycheck, returns to the franchise as Dr. Ilene Andrews, Monarch Corporation's leading expert on King Kong. It was Dr. Andrews who helped discover the hollow earth and helped get Kong there and away from Godzilla who remains on the surface of the Earth, protecting it by destroying large swaths of it when fighting other 'titans' for dominance. In a moment the movie sure thinks is cute, Godzilla uses the Colisseum in Rome as a Godzilla sized doggy bed.

The plot kicks in when Godzilla becomes agitated by a signal coming from the hollow Earth. Someone or something is sending out a signal, a warning. Eventually, we will learn that a group of Kong sized apes are plotting to escape from their hollow Earth prison and return to the surface. Standing in their way is Kong, who makes a new friend, a baby Kong. They, along with Godzilla will have to level a large city to destroy this new this new threat. They will fight as loudly and destructively as possible to protect humanity.

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is the kind of movie written by people who think putting a guy in a Hawaiian shirt is character development. I'm not kidding, Dan Stevens' main character trait is that he wears a Hawaiian shirt which makes him a 'wacky' character. Meanwhile, Bryan Tyree Henry manages to somehow remain surprised at all times despite having helped to save the world when Kong and Godzilla fought each other in the last movie. Henry and Rebecca Hall deserve better than this awful movie but I can't begrudge them their big paychecks. I hope they buy new houses or whatever will allow them to do more meaningful work in the future.

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is dopey, loud and needless. It's a cash machine, a triumph of marketing and technology. It's not a movie, it's an idiotic spectacle. The film is insultingly simple and, considering that we had a really great Godzilla movie just last year, Godzilla Minus One, it's also unnecessary and irrelevant as a movie. I had hoped that when Apple TV announced their Monarch project that we were done with Godzilla and Kong movies for a while. Having the monsters on streaming meant that I could ignore the Monster-verse for a while. Oh how sadly naïve I was.

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