If you're looking for shiny shit to watch while stoned, Godzilla x Kong: New Empire is for you!
It's the best MonsterVerse movie since Kong: Skull Island
For the last twenty years or so, American studios have given moviegoers shiny shit that’s fun to watch when you’re stoned. That was the catalyst behind the 3-D boom of the late oughts/early teens, and it’s the impetus behind many of our biggest franchises and institutions today
Marvel movies=shiny shit that’s fun to watch when you’re stoned. D.C movies=also shiny shit that’s fun to watch when you’re stoned, within reason. The Fast and the Furious movies=an enjoyable time at the cinema if you’re sufficiently baked. Every last animated film Dreamworks or Pixar or Disney or Sony animation has put out in the last two decades=pleasurable romps for the appropriately baked.
Needless to say, the Monsterverse, which kicked off in 2014 with Godzilla and then continued with 2017’s Kong: Skull Island, 2019’s Godzilla: King of the Monsters, 2021’s Godzilla V. Kong, and now Godzilla x Kong: New Empire, is primo shiny shit that’s fun to watch when you’re high.
I have mixed feelings about this phenomenon. As someone who likes to get high and then watch silly popcorn movies, I feel like these movies were made for me.
But as a film writer, cinephile, and movie lover, I think that movies should aspire to more than entertaining marijuana enthusiasts with empty spectacles. They should, ideally, articulate the complexities of the human condition, comment on society, and teach us something profound about who we are and the world that we live in.
There is a place for movies like that, but it sure as shit is not in the MonsterVerse. The MonsterVerse is devoted to giving us two hundred million-dollar A-list blockbuster versions of the silly, low-budget detritus we watched as kids.
The Monsterverse is committed to shiny shit that’s fun to watch when you’re stoned. That’s all I want or expect from these movies. It’s just what I got from Godzilla x Kong: New Empire.
Godzilla x Kong: New Empire picks up where Godzilla v. Kong left off. King Kong now resides in Hollow Earth, but it is a lonely and solitary existence. Things pick up for the big guy when he discovers that he’s not so alone after all.
Kong encounters a tribe of giant gorillas led by Skar King, a psychotic despot who rides an ice-powered Kaiju named Shimo like a horse and wants to transgress the barrier separating Hollow Earth from our world so that he can rule on the surface of our lousy excuse for a planet.
This puts Skar King in direct conflict with Kong, his adorable new little pal/surrogate son Suko, and the film’s human characters.
The MonsterVerse’s primary weakness lies in its human characters. With the exception of Kong: Skull Island, which shamelessly and enjoyably ripped off Apocalypse Now, as well as King Kong, I’ve spent every other entry in the series patiently waiting impatiently for the humans to stop talking so that monsters could go back to fucking shit up.
Kong: Skull Island starred Tom Hiddleston, Samuel L. Jackson, Brie Larson , John Goodman and John C. Reilly. It had a cast full of ringers cast in fun roles.
The same is true of Godzilla X. Kong: New Empire. Godzilla X. Kong is an awfully safe, mainstream project for the star and director of The Guest, but if you’re going to cast an actor like Dan Stevens in an instant blockbuster like this, it sure helps to give him a larger-than-life role as a wacky monster dentist who dresses like Ace Ventura.
It’s not a role at all conducive to dignity, but it is a lot of fun. He’s joined by a returning Brian Tyree Henry as Bernie Hayes, a conspiracy theorist whose wild conjecture about the world of Kaijus, of Titans, as they are known here, won him a front-row seat to see and assist in mankind’s eternal battle monsters.
Rebecca Hall rounds out the leads as Dr. Ilene Andrews, an anthropologist linguist who is also the adopted mother of Jia (Kaylee Hottle), a deaf girl with a special connection to monsters who is also the last member of her tribe.
Or is she?
Hall’s innate gravity grounds the silliness of a mega-budgeted, globe-hopping monster mash that finds Godzilla napping in the Roman colosseum between fights and King Kong acquiring a cool new robot-arm after his regular one is injured.
Godzilla x. Kong: New Empire’s answer to the vexing problem of puny man-animals ruining things for the monsters that are the only damn reason anybody wants to see any of these movies in the first place involves making the humans as colorful and entertaining as possible.
Director Adam Wingard and screenwriters Terry Rosio, Jeremy Slater, and Simon Barrett clearly understand that audiences go to monster movies for the monsters and only the monsters. So they have their monsters onscreen as much as possible.
King Kong is human enough: movies like this don’t need dreary, real humans to get in the way of all the fun.
These shiny movies for stoners tend to last way too long and feature way too many subplots and characters. So I appreciated that Godzilla X. Kong: The New Empire wraps things up in well under two hours.
Director Adam Wingard and cinematographer Ben Seresin give the movie a retro neon look heavy on pinks and purples. It’s a pop art take on the material that gives the whole thing a Lisa Frank quality.
Is Godzilla x Kong: New Empire as good as Godzilla Minus One? God no. They’re not on the same level. But it’s important to judge movies not on the basis of what you think they should be but rather what they’re trying to do.
Godzilla Minus One sets out to be the best, most dramatic, scary, and poignant Godzilla movie ever made. It succeeds. Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, in sharp contrast, just wants to entertain stoned moviegoers with shiny shit and giant monsters. It similarly succeeds in its more modest ambitions.
Three and a Half stars out of Five
I like that we can have a somber, thoughtful Godzilla movie that explores the darkness of human nature *and* a big dumb Godzilla movie where the munky fights the lizard *in the same year*.
I admit that I have only seen one movie so far of the MonsterVerse - Kong: Skull Island. And I liked it well enough, so I'll have to start giving them a try. That said, these types of movies have a tendency to cheer me up. Chaotic, silly, massive - all my favorite ingredients. I recall having a rotten day at work years ago and coming home to watch Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. It wasn't considered a good movie, I know, but damn did I have a good time watching giant robots wail on each other.