Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire Parent Guide

After Kong, Godzilla, and Mechagodzilla thrashed Hong Kong in Godzilla vs. Kong, an uneasy peace has been established. Godzilla remains on the surface, hunting and destroying other Titans. Kong has gone into the Hollow Earth, looking unsuccessfully for more creatures like him. The Monarch organization, meanwhile, is closely monitoring both Titans, fearful lest they cross paths again with dire consequences for humans caught in the middle.

Despite the relative tranquility, Dr. Ilense Andrews (Rebecca Hall) has become increasingly concerned about Jia (Kaylee Hottle), the young girl from Skull Island who can communicate with Kong. She’s struggling to adapt to her life away from home – but now there’s a new development. Jia started drawing strange triangles, which to Dr. Andrews’ eye, resemble the unusual readings Monarch has received at the monitoring station. Something is transmitting that signal, and that something is somewhere Hollow Earth. Worse, Godzilla is reacting to the signal, taking in as much radiation as he can. He’s getting ready for a fight, and if Monarch wants to find out who he’s planning to irradiate, a team will need to go into the Hollow Earth and find out.

Big monster movies are either about the monsters or the people. Big action romps like Godzilla: King of the Monsters are about how cool it is to watch two multi-story abominations level a major metropolitan area. Harrowing, tense, and emotionally loaded films like Godzilla Minus One are about the people struggling in a devastated world. This film, on the other hand, is about the studio’s finances. It diverges from the first two films in the current Legendary Films franchise, and that’s not a good thing. This movie looks and feels like a Transformers flick, just without the robots. Well, mostly without the robots. That’s just the tip of the issue though.

Despite being an absolutely ridiculous comic book of a film, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire spends most of the movie following around four extremely dull characters: Dr. Andrews, who has two jobs - spew exposition and look worried; Jia, who has the same jobs but is deaf, and so exposits in sign language to the good doctor, Bernie (Brian Tyree Henry), who is responsible for annoying the heck out of you; and Trapper (Dan Stevens), who is in charge of accomplishing serious tasks. Despite his preeminence in the title, Godzilla gets maybe 15 minutes of screen time. Kong gets a little more, but you’re going to spend at least half of this movie with the four most crushingly uninteresting people you’ve ever seen. It’s not fun, believe it or not.

If boredom doesn’t deter you, the negative content likely won’t either. The film is lethal on a mass population level, but it’s only gory for the monsters. Presumably, the death toll for the film is in the hundreds of thousands, but that’s never mentioned by anybody, and the deaths are not seen on screen. Monsters are beaten, stabbed, torn apart, and thrown to their deaths fairly frequently. Despite all that carnage, there is thankfully very little profanity. The characters are too busy drily info-dumping gibberish at you to get up to much else – including drinking and smoking, which I don’t think anyone bothered doing. There’s also no sexual content, mercifully. The last thing we need from characters like this is procreation.

I like Godzilla. I mean, I really like Godzilla. I genuinely think that Minus One should have been nominated for best picture. King of the Monsters is one of the best big action movies made in the last twenty years. Sadly, I spent most of this movie checking my watch and praying for a quick death. Maybe I just couldn’t quite turn off enough of my brain to find the dumb fun in this, but trust me, I had it as off as it gets before losing essential functions. Maybe your brain numbing skills are more precisely honed than mine, but I wouldn’t bet the price of a movie ticket on it.