Some thoughts about Godzilla

No, really. The headline isn't a metaphor

Photo by Mohamed Jamil Latrach on Unsplash

I was on a plane last weekend and decided to watch a movie. I have some rules for this kind of thing, which are, loosely: don’t watch anything that you are really interested in seeing, because the plane-movie experience stinks from both a screen and (especially) sound perspective.

Exceptions can be made for, say, a courtroom drama. Or a silly comedy. Or a movie that you do not expect to be good but are literally watching to kill the two-plus hours until you land.

Which is how I came to be watching Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire. I wasn’t dying to watch this latest instalment in the MonsterVerse, a Warner Bros. franchise that now spans five films and two television series, even though I have seen the other four films and one of the TV series. Or perhaps I should say I wasn’t anxious to watch this movie because I had seen all the MonsterVerse stuff. A franchise that started off OK with Godzilla and Kong: Skull Island has gotten sillier as it has gone along, larding on more layers of lore about giant monsters living in the Earth while at the same time adding bigger and smashier battles. These things will spend ages trying to tell the audience deep messages about the balance between humanity and all living creatures and then have 15 minutes in which the monsters completely destroy a city while they are beating the living shit out of each other. If Godzilla is supposed to be a good guy now, how about he starts watching where he puts his damn feet?

So, yes, my expectations for Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire were pretty low. It turns out that was far too high. Let’s begin with the title: What is Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire even supposed to mean? Is it Godzilla AND Kong? Godzilla against Kong? Is the ‘x’ supposed to be a multiplication symbol? (Don’t worry, they don’t mate.) And there didn’t appear to be any New Empire to speak of. It’s not a great sign when the premise of your film is so flimsy that you can’t even come up with a coherent name for it. Honestly, Godzilla: The Fifth One would have made more sense.

Anyway, about that premise. When last our monster friends were seen, they fought each other to a draw but then came together to battle an even more dangerous foe: a mechanical Godzilla made by Bad Humans. Now normal Godzilla lives in the sea and King Kong lives happily in Hollow Earth, which is to say a fantastical place below the Earth’s surface where all kinds of wild creatures reside. (He rips a lot of them in half when they try to get all up in his business.) And a secret agency called Monarch monitors the whole thing, trying to maintain an uneasy peace above and below the Earth’s surface. Basically, Godzilla and Kong are like neighbouring dogs who hate each other but as long as they don’t make eye contact it’s cool and neither barks too much.

But some bad shit is going down in Hollow Earth involving some other Kong-type fellows and also a Godzilla-type dude and so the O.G. Kong and Godzilla are going to have to save Earth in a giant fight. There’s also a telepathic indigenous community in Hollow Earth that has some incredible tech and may or may not have built the Pyramids of Giza by manipulating gravity somehow, but I’m genuinely unclear on why or how they ended up hiding out down there if they had such a great handle on life on Earth. I mean, you guys have gravity aced and are communicating with the power of thought. You’ve got us beat.

The whole story, such as it is, seems to exist entirely to get the action from Set Piece A to Set Piece B, but even the big smash-ups long ago stopped being interesting. CGI ape throws CGI lizard into CGI building, CGI lizard shoots big laser out of mouth, CGI ape runs away and crushes more CGI buildings. Every now and then a human is filmed in closeup, looking concerned. No wonder most of the cast members from earlier films have stopped reprising their roles. Meanwhile, famous landmarks in places like Rome, Cairo and Rio are casually destroyed and none of the human characters even seem to notice or care. All that matters is which ape and/or lizard ends up still standing at the finale.

The obvious problem here is that there was really not much story left to tell after the fourth MonsterVerse film, Godzilla Vs Kong, which was not what you would call wholly good, but at least had a very punchy battle between the titular characters. It was a payoff of something. The latest instalment seems to have decided to make its fights feel different by adding a splash of colour: whole sequences have bright pinks and purples that were probably even more annoying on a big screen than they were on the back of an airplane seat.

All of this ends up looking that much worse against Godzilla Minus One, a Japanese film that came out in December and took the monster fable back to its roots. It’s mostly a story about two damaged humans, and its special effects are beautifully old-school. That film is lean and simple, and it absolutely rocks. The MonsterVerse business is already a bloated mess by comparison, despite the fact that, as franchises go, five films is not that many.

And, yet: Godzilla x Kong is the fifth-most successful film of 2024, earning more than $570-million at the global box office. This, of course, means yet another film is already in the works. Gah. When does the next shuttle to Hollow Earth leave? There didn’t seem to be any signs of a cineplex there.