Film: Godzilla x Kong — The New Empire
A movie review of a giant stinking turd of a film.
Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire
Director: Adam Wingard
Legendary Pictures/Top Story Spotlight/Warner Bros. Pictures
The stakes were low, sure. I remember thinking the first Godzilla vs. Kong film was a perfect bit of post-Lockdown putty; something to scrunch around in your mind while popcorn got caught in your teeth. And not much more than that. But, weirdly, I went along to this expecting more. So that’s on me.
I can’t be bothered bestowing the title, and I still enjoyed some of the passage of time, but The New Empire might be one of the worst films I’ve sat through. So much money thrown directly at a turd and told to polish it, whilst never shown how.
The humans in the film are there only to explain the action. But the action doesn’t need explaining, and is worse for it. We get it. Big fucking Kong ape, giant fucking lizard monster. Let them either fight each other, or team up and destroy other monsters. The end.
Instead, we get Rebecca Hall doing line readings as if the director has her parents tied up with a gun to their head just next to her cue cards. Instead, we get this desperate attempt to go all Guardians of The Galaxy and slather in songs by KISS and Survivor and Badfinger as if framing iconic seems with nearly-ironic music. But there’s no irony and nothing iconic.
The first 30 minutes felt like reasonable setup. After that it was a slow crawl to Nowhere. And when the very best thing you can say about an action film like this is that the music was good (the score I mean, not the aforementioned Guardians-cribbed needle-drops), well, meh, come on…
Junkie XL (aka Tom Holkenborg) has this kind of score-work sewn up by the way. But it’s no slap across his tracksuit to say that he should not be the star here.
Godzilla and Kong should be the stars. And they’re barely given the chance. Kong has some scenes, including a promising opening run. But ‘Zilla is almost nowhere to be seen.
And then when they do pair it’s completely uninspiring.
But worse than that is the way this film has been shot. So blurred around the edges, I was convinced we were tricked into watching a 3D print without the glasses. The regression to making movies look more like video games continues. And at such a pace that they’re not even lining up the shots any longer. This film crawled to its finish. Without ever going anywhere exactly. And the whole time it was absolutely ghastly to look at. So nothing worked at all. Which is criminal.
It felt stupid just being there. And I was dumber when I left. Now that’s always a possibility at such a film, but it shouldn’t be the sole takeaway.