‘Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire’ REVIEW: What Is A Man To A God And A King?
‘Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire’ REVIEW: What Is A Man To A God And A King?
The King of the Monsters and the Eighth Wonder of the World roars back into the big screen and teams up to destroy all monsters in a fun kaijū romp that fully embraces the absurdity and hilarity reminiscent of Godzilla’s Shōwa era. Adam Wingard’s Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire celebrates the outlandishness of this era of rubber suits born out of the psychedelia of the 60s and 70s by creating an equally cartoonish, goofy, and amusing monster brawlfest that sees Godzilla and Kong going toe-to-toe with a dangerous menace that is threatening to upset the balance of their world.
The Americans have finally cracked what makes a kaijū vs. kaijū film so much fun to watch by dropping all the pretensions of digging at something deep through the human characters and embracing their insignificance in a world where a gargantuar spider crab can bust through your apartment roof and kill you. A mistake that the MonsterVerse continuously makes is overestimating the scale of humanity’s significance in a world with towering monsters and forgetting that once there was a Godzilla film—Godzilla 2014 to be exact—in the franchise that spat on humanity’s self-importance.
The human story after the first film that started it all has been too egocentric, offering an unnecessarily complex emotional core that is hollow at its center and too detached from the main narrative for players whose mere roles are to deliver exposition. Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, on the other hand, knows exactly what it wants to be: a maximalist monster affair that puts its biggest stars (literally) front and center of a vibrant and epic kaijū fisticuffs. It is the only film in the series, aside from Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla, that understood the assignment.
That’s not to say that the human characters aren’t as entertaining to watch as their monster counterparts and that they should be removed from these movies altogether, quite the contrary. By accepting their place in this world, embracing that they are, as Dan Stevens said in an interview, mere "sideshows," and with a subplot that harmonizes with the main story, the chemistry of the cast is given a chance to shine.
Dan Stevens (Trapper) and Brian Tyree Henry (Bernie) are obviously having the time of their lives, while Rebecca Hall (Ilene) gives the same bravado as she would in a high-brow theater play, but they never overshadow the kaijū drama unfolding before them, fulfilling their roles as the living instruments to sell the scale of the titans.
But the unsung heroes of this film are the VFX artists who imbued Godzilla and Kong with so much personality and animated them with such human quirks that render them so lifelike that I started to actually feel empathy towards a lonely, oversized ape’s yearning for some companionship or relate to a humongous lizard’s grumpiness when his nap is constantly interrupted by other pesky kaijūs.
But you win some and you lose some. The title might say Godzilla x Kong, yet the film defers more to Kong as the main protagonist, saddling The King of the Monsters himself away from the action to either sleep or charge up, or both, while the Eighth Wonder of the World is slaying sea serpents and dropping other enormous apes using another smaller ape as a weapon down on Hollow Earth.
As for the villains, they are as interesting as a brick wall. They might have colossal feet, but they never succeeded in leaving any indelible footprint to be memorable. Excessively one-note and lackluster even in their designs, it’s apparent that the writers never bothered to think outside the box for these characters, which is quite lazy and unimaginative for a film that is heavily influenced by the Shōwa era. I couldn’t even eloquently deconstruct them if I tried, as you can easily boil down the main antagonists to “Godzilla, but bad” and “Kong, but bad”.
It is quite a miss that tends to get lost in all of the chaos and continuous barrage of explosive action sequences, but in the totality of all things, it is overshadowed by everything that the film does hit. It is, after all, at its most compelling when we peel back and observe it operating at its grandest scale.
Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire opens March 30 in Philippine cinemas nationwide.
