Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire - Like the Old Empire, with More World Landmarks Punched and Smashed

By Chris Knight

Rating: C

Hard to believe, but the Kong franchise is 91 years old. It all started with 1933’s King Kong, followed (appropriately) less than nine months later by Son of Kong. They knew how to churn out a sequel in those days!

Other highlights included the 1976 modern remake and its ten-years-later sequel, King Kong Lives, as well as Peter Jackson’s beautiful 2005 version of the original story, set back in 1933. Honestly, that would have been the perfect point of closure.

But apes gotta ape. And so 2017 brought us the not-bad Kong: Skull Island, followed four years later and deep into the pandemic by the very-bad Godzilla vs. Kong.

The latest chapter, with the rattle-on title of Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, falls somewhere between those two. (Also, the “x” is silent.) There’s a smidgeon more humanity than in the braindead Godzilla vs. Kong, but nowhere near the wit and spirit of Skull Island.

Rebecca Hall is back as Kong-ologist Ilene Andrews, accompanied by her adopted daughter and Kong whisperer Jia (Kaylee Hottle), Kong-spiracy theorist Bernie Hayes (Brian Tyree Henry), and groovy veterinarian Trapper (Dan Stevens), who invariably arrives backed by a ’70s soft-rock soundtrack.

Together, they realize that something is amiss in Hollow Earth, the underground realm where Kong spends his days making cranky-old-man noises and fighting off slightly smaller apex predators. Seems a group of giant apes is plotting to take over the surface world. (At least I think that’s what they’re up to: there are no subtitles, and less understandable dialogue than an old episode of Mr. Bean.) And so, the humans head underground to make things right.

Meanwhile, up on the surface, Godzilla is busy fighting a variety of other mega-monsters with goofy names, like a Pokemon tourney writ large. He even sets his sites on Kong before realizing that, wait a minute, the enemy of the ape I thought was my enemy is in fact my actual enemy.

There’s also a mini-Kong, introduced in trailers for the film and clearly intended to be the Grogu of the franchise, except that due to issues of scale this Grogu is about four times the size of a Wookiee.

It all takes place with a kind of cousin-of-Jurassic-Park vibe, characters often staring up at the computer-generated beasts and murmuring, “Oh my God,” or watching impotently as monsters raze famous landmarks. I like to think the great pyramids came down with sounds like “Khufu!” “Khafre!” and “Menkaure!” Kong and Godzilla both have the Cheops to level historic monuments without a second thought.

It’s all supremely silly stuff, switching between references to the poet Tennyson, mumbo-jumbo exposition about gravity shockwaves, and protracted fight scenes crafted to appeal to adolescent boys and their ilk: The roaring! The posturing! The punching! At one point, Kong dons an exoskeletal glove that looks to have been crafted from the carcass of a Transformer; I’m guessing Bumblebee.

There’s just enough interaction among the humans to make the outing mildly worthwhile, and just enough uncertainty to allow for yet another sequel to roll out in a few years. May I modestly suggest the title Kong-Zilla: Clean Up Your Room, and a plot in which the titans take a break from brawling and help rebuild the parts of Rome, Gibraltar, Cairo, Rio and elsewhere that were obliterated in this movie? Just because you found a Hollow Earth underground doesn’t give you license to lay waste to this one.

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire. Directed by Adam Wingard. Starring Rebecca Hall, Brian Tyree Henry, Dan Stevens. Opens March 29 in theatres.