Roughly half-way through Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire, the big gorilla moseys into a brick kiln of sorts, run by other giant apes. There are feudal undertones to this civilizational layer under the earth’s surface and despite its drunk-on-CGI aesthetic it echoes a familiar zeitgeist. A brazen mobster runs the show. He’s hungry for territory and commands his power through an ice-blasting, otherwise harmless monster straight out of folklore. On some level this feels like a spoof of global reality. The metaphorical parallels aside, though, Godzilla X Kong is a dazzling, borderline unserious blowout between titans, folk monsters, civilizational myths and bioelectric devices (whatever that means). It’s not as good as the film that started the King Kong-Godzilla duopoly but it’s a whole lot of creature-smashing, scenery-guzzling fun.
The film opens some years after the titanic showdown between the giant chimp and the nuclear lizard. A sort of truce endures, with Godzilla sticking to the surface while Kong enjoys solitary contemplation inside ‘Hollow Earth’ – the mysterious but vast ecosystem discovered in the last film. Kong is also lonely, has a bad tooth and wishes to reconnect with his human friends; primarily Jia (Kaylee Hottle), who becomes the focus of the humanitarian aspect of the story. Last of her tribe, Jia is trying to drag herself through school but can’t focus, because of strange visions she ends up drawing on pieces of paper. Artsy interpretations aside, her adoptive mother Irene (Rebecca Hall), reads them as signs of something ominous – maybe a fledgling career in the arts? Godzilla’s diagnosis is similar because he is going around the planet poking his nose into all kinds of nests and reactors to charge batteries for an upcoming battle.
All answers of course lead to Hollow Earth, which also means that unlike the previous film, this one spends the majority of its time in the CGI-conceived and plastered world of floating mountains, murderous seagulls and dietary abominations. Jia and Irene are joined by Bernie (Brian Tree Henry) and animal whisperer Trapper, played by the oddly charming Dan Stevens. Bernie and Stevens, you can tell, have been saddled with the task of lightening things up with banter and pop-up science fiction. To the largely thunderous design of a film that can become a bit much for the senses at times, they offer moments of buddy-like calm and naivety. Their application to the world down in the hollowness, though, remains passive for the film is at its most interesting when it focusses on the giant gorilla, as he figures things out and thinks his thoughts with grunts, moans and wide-eyed astonishment.
Directed by Adam Wingard, Godzilla x Kong lacks the malleability of human wonder. It’s larger in scale, but feels overstuffed with creatures and bystanders. A new societal hideout is discovered, gravity is confusingly propelled as a sort of technology and a number of unremarkable titans become dietary fibre for a film that packs way too much cheese for what could have been a breezy, bruising slugfest between a bunch of scar-faced monsters. It instead wants to connect worlds, dispense shallow emotions and elaborate on nonsensical scientific ideas. It makes the humans painfully uninspiring accessories that offer little other than exposition and some hit-and-miss comic relief. Instead, it’s Kong’s virtuoso performance as both the underdog and the emotional anchor of a galactic battle that becomes truly compelling when it clutches at big-stake rivalries operating on astronomical scales.
With this latest instalment of the monster franchise, however, there is also this growing sense of overfamiliarity. Monster films are enticing, when layered with admiration juxtaposed with frailty. When the two co-opt each other as part of a socio-political arrangement, things seem duller despite the cosplay of franticness. At one point in this film, Godzilla, deemed to be saviour of humanity, the one ‘fighting their battles’, is carpet bombed with fighter jets and shivering helicopters. What explains this continued conflict when this is also a monster who has made Rome’s Colosseum his own private duvet? For all the silly, whirring momentum of these films, the dialectic origin of whatever is said and discussed in them can at times feel futile. Maybe just let the medieval primates do the emoting and the fighting then.
To this film’s credit, it doesn’t take itself too seriously. So much so it doesn’t even offer the humans the opportunity of becoming anything more than ringside cheerleaders; people who stitch the monkey up, give him pep talks in sign language and return him to a bout he scarcely looks in danger of losing. Except, when he is up against Godzilla. For a territorial battle that the two arch enemies fight together – at the behest of a hypnotic moth, mind you – it’s their prickly reunion that feels the most enthralling. Could we have maybe just had round two of that titanic clash? This union of sorts is nonetheless satisfying for its child-like enthusiasm and spectacular visual language. If only the humans in the film – much like the audience in the theatres – could have done more than cheer, worry or react in awe.
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