‘Godzilla x Kong’ Review: Not An X-Cellent Sequel

For the last week, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about a quote from Roger Ebert’s review of the 2003 action film Timeline. Introducing the press screening that Ebert attended, Timeline director Richard Donner boasted how his film featured far more practical effects than you’d assume. The fireballs flung around its medieval battlefields were real, Donner explained, not computer-generated.

“The problem,” according to Ebert, “is ... it’s not whether we’re watching real fireballs or fake fireballs but whether we care about the fireballs at all.”

I can’t think of a more succinct description of my problem with Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire than that. I didn’t care about the fireballs — or the surreal creatures, big kaiju battles, and lost civilizations at the center of a Hollow Earth. This movie does not offer a single reason to feel anything about any of them. On the level of brainless spectacle, it gets the job done. If you consider any other aspect with any degree of thought, you’re going to run into issues.

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Take the character Bernie, played in this film (and its predecessor, Godzilla vs. Kong) by Brian Tyree Henry. He calls himself a blogger, but never writes a word over the course of the film. (Hey, I get it; online publishing ain’t what it used to be.) Bernie also claims he is sick of being dismissed as a conspiracy theorist. His entire role in Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is predicated on the fact that he needs to find proof of monsters, and so he begs his way onto a reconnaissance mission to Hollow Earth that he is wildly unqualified for, just to make a documentary about the place.

All right ... but the monsters of this “MonsterVerse” franchise are not exactly sneaky or subtle. The New Empire shows us news footage of Godzilla smooshing half of Rome as he battles a crab the size of Rhode Island before bedding down in the Colosseum. If this is what is being shown on mainstream cable news, why wouldn’t anyone believe Bernie about any of the things he says?

They would believe him, but if they did, Bernie wouldn’t be around to provide comic relief during Godzilla x Kong’s Hollow Earth sequences. All the film’s human characters are like this. The script (credited to Terry Rossio, Simon Barrett, and Jeremy Slater) gives each of them a wisp of a character motivation to justify their true purpose in the film: Continuing the long tradition in Godzilla movies of scientists and empathetic nature enthusiasts who observe the monsters’ actions and verbalize their motivations while never getting hit by any of the debris these 300-foot-high critters constantly kick up.

The early “MonsterVerse” movies put the human heroes in the foreground. 2014’s Godzilla primarily saw its title character through the eyes of ordinary men and women. Those days are over. By The New Empire, the non-monster cast has been whittled down to the bare minimum. Besides Bernie, there’s also a scientist (Rebecca Hall) who specializes in Kong behavior, her adoptive daughter (Kaylee Hottle) who can communicate with Kong via sign language, and Trapper (Dan Stevens) a quirky veterinarian with a gleam in his eye whose whole personality is defined by the fact that he constantly wears a Hawaiian shirt.

An early scene alludes to a romantic past between Hall and Stevens’ characters; this idea is introduced, forgotten, and never mentioned again. Why bother with romance? These men and women exist solely to serve the story — which itself exists solely to engineer novel ways to bring together Godzilla, Kong, and this movie’s new antagonists.

And hey: the fight scenes are pretty novel! There’s a fun one involving gravity gone haywire and another between Godzilla and an iridescent underwater dragon. (Godzilla even gives someone a suplex at one point, which did make me wonder which professional wrestling federation ancient dinosaurs prefer. He seems like an AEW man to me.) Kong keeps swinging his magical axe from Godzilla vs. Kong, then later upgrades his arsenal to include a robotic fist.

Director Adam Wingard fills the frame with those sorts of bursts of color — glittering greens in the Hollow Earth and pulsating purples when Godzilla amps up his powers by absorbing another monster’s magic energy (or something). Never has the term “eye candy” felt more appropriate in describing a blockbuster, both in terms of the rainbow of garish hues on constant display, and the empty sugar rush they provide.

Plenty of visual imagination is on display; but like pretty much all of these MonsterVerse films, that’s as far as the creativity extends. Maybe that wouldn’t matter if Godzilla x Kong was wall-to-wall monster fights. Instead, there are many scenes of exposition to wade through, as the human cast walks around jungle sets to gaze at CGI crystals and underground caverns while they desperately try to explain why Godzilla or Kong or both need to go back and forth from the Hollow Earth to the surface.

As they do so, the characters occasionally pontificate about man’s place in the food chain, and how the “Titans” like Godzilla and Kong emerge from the primordial depths to remind us that we are not as important in the grand scope of things as we like to imagine. These MonsterVerse movies — there are now five of them — so consistently focus on uninteresting people that a case could be made that they are intentionally filled with bland, boring, and sometimes outright annoying characters to better underscore how worthless humanity truly is in the face of these beasts.

If so, this is one of those cinematic catch-22s — the film achieves its goals to its own detriment. The list of good actors the MonsterVerse has chewed up and spit out in a decade is truly mind-boggling. How could a franchise starring Alexander Skarsgård, Millie Bobby Brown, Kyle Chandler, Lance Reddick, Demian Bichir, Vera Farmiga, Sally Hawkins, Charles Dance, Thomas Middleditch, O’Shea Jackson Jr., David Strathairn, Ken Watanabe, Elizabeth Olsen, Juliette Binoche, Bryan Cranston, Tom Hiddleston, Samuel L. Jackson, John Goodman, Brie Larson, Corey Hawkins, Shea Whigman, and John C. Reilly, not contain a single human character worth caring about?

Additional Thoughts:

-After taking us to the Hollow Earth in Godzilla vs. Kong, The New Empire introduces a world inside the Hollow Earth called the “Subterranean Realm,” an uncharted region populated by more bizarre creatures. If you keep going deeper and deeper into a Hollow Earth, won’t you eventually get to the other side of the planet?

-Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire serves one valuable purpose: It proves once and for all that bigger is not better. As any genre lover could tell you, the last 12 months have already given us a classic monster movie: Takashi Yamazaki’s Godzilla Minus One, which not only includes actual human characters with feelings and emotional depth, it’s got a Godzilla who is terrifying and an effective metaphor for psychological trauma, and the film looks as good or better than The New Empire even though it was made for a fraction of its budget. Months after I saw it, I’m still thinking about Godzilla Minus One’s central hero, and several of its outstanding set pieces; meanwhile, I’m struggling to remember the basic plot elements of Godzilla x Kong 12 hours after I left the theater.

RATING: 5/10