Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire: The Boys Are Back in Town! 

I'm just going to say this: Unlike other reviews, I'm not going to be comparing this movie to Godzilla Minus One.  I've been seeing that a lot and it's really bugged me.  A lot of criticisms I've seen have said that New Empire isn't as serious as Minus One and that the human characters aren't nearly as interesting.  Well, welcome to the Godzilla franchise!  Part of the charm of the Big G is that he's such a malleable character.  There's a ton that you can do with him.  If all Godzilla movies were made the same way, I honestly don't think he'd be as popular as he is.  This series of movies has always had tonal inconsistencies.  I saw a perfect comparison: If Godzilla Minus One is the juicy dinner, then Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is the sweet dessert.  You can enjoy both without tearing down the other.  I just wanted to get that off my chest before I got started.  

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is directed by Adam Wingard and stars Rebecca Hall, Brian Tyree Henry, Kaylee Hottle, and Dan Stevens.  It's been years since the titanic battle between Godzilla and Kong shook the Earth.  Now, the young girl Jia (Hottle), who shares a special bond with Kong, has been receiving strange signals from Hollow Earth.  Godzilla and Kong, once enemies, must now team up to not only save the hidden world beneath us, but the entire planet as well.  With all of that out of the way, let's dive into the review!

This movie is a blast man.  I was grinning like an idiot ear-to-ear for a lot of it.  It really made me feel like I was 6 again.  Is it dumb? Oh, yes.  Is it awesome? You're damned right it is.  The real stars of this movie are the monsters, who get quite a bit of screen time.  They feel like characters, which is neat.  The New Empire is very much a Kong-centered film, which was a little disappointing to me since I'm such a huge Godzilla fan (I was proudly Team Godzilla in 2021s Godzilla vs Kong).  With that being said, Kong was awesome in this.  He's had quite an arc in these movies.  This time, the movie focuses a lot more on the fact that he's lonely.  He thinks he's the last of his kind and when he does go to look for more apes, he's only disappointed.  The effects team did a great job showing the emotion through his eyes.  Godzilla, like always, is awesome.  Like I mentioned earlier, he's not in the movie, but when he is, it's spectacular.  The big guy gets a new design in this one that rips.  I think what I really like about him, is his personality.  The dude just wants to sleep in his little Roman colosseum, but those annoying monsters just keep waking him up.  One would think that after their brief team-up in Godzilla vs Kong, that he'd be more open to working with the big ape.  Well, you'd be wrong.  It's still on sight for Godzilla.  He gets one look at Kong and he wants to beat the crap out of him.  Kong even tries to reason with him too!  There are quite a few new monsters as well, the main one being the Skar King.  He's the oppressive ruler of the apes who live in Hollow Earth.  He's a pretty cool villain that's ruthless.  At first, I thought he looked kind of goofy (think Lanky Kong from the Donkey Kong games), but once we see him in action, we see how mean he is.  On the other end of the spectrum is the little guy named Suko (he's never named in the movie).  This little guy is a juvenile ape that looks like Kong.  Going in, I thought the movie was going to try and go the Baby Yoda route and make him extremely adorable/innocent.  It goes in kind of a different direction.  Yes, he's super cute, but Suko is also a bit of a jerk at first and Kong, well, let's just say he's having none of it.  What's really interesting about the monsters in this movie is that there are several scenes where it's just them.  There are no humans, so these sequences have no dialogue, which was pretty cool.  It kind of made me wonder if they can do a human-less monster movie.  Moving on from the monsters, I enjoyed the humans as well.  They're pretty goofy, but I thought they were entertaining to watch.   Since the last movie, Jia has gotten older and feels out of place in our world.  She misses Kong a lot.  Ilene Andrews (Hall), now a top member at the Titan research organization Monarch, is raising her as her daughter.  Like in the last one, I thought Kaylee Hottle did a great job in this role.  She communicates through sign-language and Hottle really pulled off acting with her eyes.  You feel bad for her quite a bit.  I think it's also a huge win for representation because Hottle is actually deaf in real life.  I hope we get to see more of her in the future.  Dan Stevens is having a ball as Trapper, a Titan veterinarian.  He's just a goofball and any scene he has with Bernie Hayes (Henry) is a delight.  They have really good chemistry with each other.  It felt like the actors knew what kind of movie they were in and just ran with it.  Visually, Godzilla x Kong is spectacular.  The effects are great.  There's a ton of detail on all of the monsters and CG environments.  This is important because, well, a lot of the movie takes place in an area that's not real.  One of the main characters (Kong) is also CG, so if he doesn't work, the whole movie falls apart.  This movie does use quite a bit of practical sets, though, and they look really good. Like with the previous installments of the Monsterverse, the sound effects are incredible.  Whenever one of the big guys roars, you can feel it in your chance.  The action in this movie is also awesome.  Most (if not all) of the fights are in the day time and it's easy to see what's going on, which was a problem in earlier installments.  The action is also bonkers, just like the movie itself.  I mean, in what other movie would you see Godzilla using his atomic breath, destroy the pyramids to kill Kong (who is wearing a robo-glove)?  Isn't that one of the best sentences you've ever read???  I also really liked how, with the action, the filmmakers played around with the lighter gravity that is in Hollow Earth.  There''s a whole sequence where the monsters are fighting in zero gravity.  This movie knows what it is and runs with it.

I did have a few problems with this film though.  Like I mentioned a few times, if you're here just to see Godzilla, you're going to be disappointed.  Don't get me wrong, he's freaking awesome, but he really isn't the focus of the movie.  Forgive me for the slight spoiler ahead.  At one point in the movie, Godzilla is going to fight another monster to absorb radiation.  It felt like this was originally going to be one longer sequence, but the filmmakers kind of broke it apart and stuck it in other points of the story.  We see Godzilla swimming to the location of the monster and the scene cuts back to a different plot line.  We see him finding the location, trying to get in, and then the scene cuts.  We see him fighting the monster, winning, and, guess what, the scene cuts.  It was a little odd.  Another little thing that bugged me was Hollow Earth itself.  It looks really cool, but we don't get to see a ton of the wildlife that lives there.  We see some creatures, like some bird things flying and hyena things chasing Kong in the beginning, but we never see them just hanging around.  When Kong is running through a big field, you'd think there'd be some other animals there grazing, but it's just empty.  It doesn't feel like an ecosystem.  Most of the time we see any new creatures, they're just there for Kong to beat up.  This next criticism is a little spoilery so I'm going to keep it as vague as I can.  Like a bunch of other movies, New Empire does the whole prophecy thing with one of the characters.  It's kind of a bummer.  In a way, it also breaks the lore a little of the Godzilla franchise, but casual fans won't really know what I'm talking about.  It felt like one of the movies in this series was setting something up and then this movie went in a different direction.  I also wanted this movie to be a little longer to give some things room to breathe.  There were some things I wished were elaborated on.  When Kong finds the other apes, there really isn't any time to see his reaction.  He's been alone for decades and now he finally finds more of his race.  I felt like the movie kind of skimmed over it.  One thing that was a little wonky was how Godzilla moved.  In this outing, he's super quick.  If you go back and watch the other installments, you'll see that there's some weight to him.  When he moves, it takes some time.  That's not really the case here.  In Hollow Earth, it makes sense.  This is an extremely minor gripe however and I feel most people won't care.  

To wrap everything up, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is a blast that really brought out the kid in me.  This is a movie that felt like a kid was playing with action figures and I mean that in the best way possible.  The monsters are awesome,  the humans (particularly Trapper and Hayes) are pretty fun, the effects and sound are stellar,  and the action is bonkers.  I think the movie could've used some more Godzilla, some more creatures in Hollow Earth,  and I also didn't really care for the prophecy aspect of the story.  I think the movie would've benefitted also from being a little longer as well.  If I were to rate it, I'd give Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire an 8/10.  I think that it's so cool that there are so many cool interpretations of these characters.  I can't wait to see where the Monsterverse goes next!