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A Review of “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (2024)”

 

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I am honestly glad we are getting more movies in the Monsterverse. The movies have been amazing or anything but they have been thoroughly entertaining. After Godzilla vs Kong, we are getting a team-up movie with Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire. Does this continue to be entertaining, or is this finally the entry that bores you?

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You came to this movie for big monsters fighting and in this aspect, the movie succeeds. There are a great many fight scenes in this movie, especially with Kong. I love the way Kong fights and how you can clearly see how he is strategizing and planning compared to Godzilla’s ferocious animalistic style. They also created a new villain for Kong with “The Scar King”. I love the design of him and his more agile style of fighting. The movie builds up to an epic 3rd act brawl and it is insanely entertaining and worth watching for it alone.

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The CGI is pretty good considering that this is the cheapest MonsterVerse movie so far. Hollow Earth looks great and Kong looks phenomenal. Godzilla has a new pink design for story reasons and it looks fine. There are some visually great-looking shots by returning cinematographer, Ben Seresin, that capture the mystical nature of Hollow Earth and the Titans. Kong is the main lead in this film and he is the stand-out star. There are many scenes with just Kong and other apes that go on for 10 minutes long with no dialogue or humans and they work so well. Just through Kong’s facial expression and body language, you can perfectly understand the emotion and the story that is being conveyed. It is impressive. In terms of human characters, Trapper played by Dan Stevens is a fun newcomer. He has excellent chemistry with returning character Bernie played by Brian Tyree Henry.

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Unfortunately, the story concerning the human characters is still incredibly dumb. There are many questionable and stupid things such as why they only brought one armed soldier for a mission or why even a conspiracy podcaster is even involved in the mission. The human characters are still not interesting or engaging enough to care about. They tried to incorporate the mother-and-daughter relationship plot element again with returning characters Dr. Ilene (Rebecca Hall) and Jia (Kaylee Hottle) but it doesn’t work well because they don’t explore it enough. For the most part, Ilene is again the exposition character. It’s a shame as Godzilla Minus One shows that you can do big monsters and engaging human characters in a movie.

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The pacing drops off significantly around the second act where it just has a bunch of humans talking and exposition dumps. Additionally, Godzilla is barely in this movie despite being the first in the title. Every fight scene concerning Godzilla barely lasts a minute in the first 2 acts. It is understandable to show how powerful Godzilla is but it would have been nice to see the fights last a bit longer. On that note, while the fights are indeed entertaining, they are not as well choreographed as the ones in Godzilla vs Kong. Junkie XL returns to score the music for this movie but it definitely lacks the impact that Junkie usually does. The music score is a bit forgettable.

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Overall, I came to see giant monsters fight and I got exactly that. This feels like a very high-budget B movie and honestly, that is completely fine. Godzilla x Kong is another entertaining movie in the MonsterVerse and I hope more is made in this cinematic universe. The possibilities are endless!


 

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