MOVIE REVIEW! - 'Godzilla x Kong: New Empire'

'Godzilla x Kong: New Empire' (2024)

REVIEW BELOW THE RATING!

Last year, Japanese studio Toho released “Godzilla Minus One” and created what is probably the greatest Godzilla film ever made. It was also simply one of the best films of 2023. So, you can understand why I may have had more than a few reservations for “Godzilla x Kong: New Empire”, the latest film in Legendary Pictures’ American Godzilla/Kong film series known as the MonsterVerse.

Look, you know what you’re going to get with a MonsterVerse film. It’s going to be big, it’s going to be loud, and it’s going to have human characters that you’ll forget about approximately five minutes after viewing the movie. If you can get behind that and you’ve been a MonsterVerse fan for awhile now, then you’ll want to watch this movie and if you don’t, you’ll want to skip it.

In the new movie, Kong is trying to make his home in Hollow Earth, a realm that exists within our planet. However, Kong is lonely as he is presumably the last of his kind. In the meantime, something has caused Godzilla to awaken and he is trying to prepare for something while Rebecca Hall’s Ilene Andrews and the rest of Monarch are trying to figure out what this new threat may be.

Eventually, Kong encounters other great apes, revealing that he is not alone, but they are led by the villainous Skar King. It looks like Kong is going to need some help on this one and you can imagine what that help will be.

Godzilla and Kong must join forces to face a new threat!

Okay, so the human story. Hall’s Ilene Andrews is trying to raise her adopted daughter Jia (Kaylee Hottle), the last member of the tribe from Skull Island. Meanwhile, Jia has some sort of psychic connection to a signal from Hollow Earth that may be the key to figuring out what has Godzilla all riled up. Ilene and Jia team up with Trapper (Dan Stevens), a Titan veterinarian… No bullshit. That’s his job… and Brian Tyree Henry’s Bernie Hayes and head to Hollow Earth to figure out the new threat.

I will say one thing about the human characters in this movie. I did enjoy Hall, Hottle, Stevens, and Henry in this movie. Their characters are given a generic storyline like the other human characters in previous films, but they appeared to have had a great time making the movie, they give great performances, and as a result, I actually kind of cared about them a little more this time out. I think it also helped that they scaled back how many main human characters there were this time.

But let’s face facts here, if you’re coming into a MonsterVerse film at this point, you want to see the monsters beat the shit out of each other. The good news is that the monster fights are top-notch and the special-effects are great for the most part. I particularly had a good time with the final battle.

Now, if I’m being honest, I did enjoy “Godzilla vs. Kong” more than this movie so if you really didn’t like that flick, you won’t like this one. That’s also because this movie is trying its damndest to do what that movie did with the big effects and the big action sequences.

I do think that the MonsterVerse has gone about as far as it’s going to go if this is the continued route. You can only take so much mindless destruction with very little story to go along with it before it starts to get tiresome. However, I was pleasantly surprised that “Godzilla Minus One” had not spoiled the MonsterVerse completely for me.

If you can manage to just accept what you’re going to get from a MonsterVerse film, then this one ticks all the boxes the previous films did. It’s big, it’s loud, and it’s action packed, even if that does come at the cost of any real emotional story.