Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire

If nothing else, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire really highlights the disconnect experienced when viewing extended sequences of animation that are no longer designed to be purely gestural. When it finally gets going, Adam Wingard's latest computer generated monster mash takes a photorealistic, simulation style approach when describing the collapsing, human component in enormously scaled fights that batter into, then over, our fragile dwellings. Action, when it escapes the confines of an otherworldly, subterranean paradise, hops from continent to continent, smearing everything in sight. Cities and ancient monuments alike are pulverised as these mountainous beasts grapple for supremacy. Obviously blocked and styled to prickle a sense of awe in its audience, The New Empire delights in the minutiae of demolition, filling the screen with enough sparks and embers to frustrate the bitrate of any streaming service. 

The (presumably) unintended consequences of all this mathematically plotted carnage is an acute revulsion though. One that, in June 2024, is informed by months and months and months of social media images detailing the systematic extermination of Palestinian children. That New Empire works so hard to avoid a sense of horror taking hold unfortunately tallies with a real-world permissiveness when considering Arab babies buried beneath rubble. Wingard's film then, although keen to depict bridges packed with family sedans as fleeting points of interest in Godzilla's oblivious churn, never engages with any human perspective other than the passive delight of a removed and appreciative crowd: one that cheers on the cataclysm from the safety of a green screen set and, apparently, feels no connection to the trampled citizens of Egypt or Brazil. King Kong taking on a scarlet slave master who, in a 2001: A Space Odyssey-style conceptual leap, has styled a bleached spinal column into a lash may be an exciting flight of fancy but there's precious little entertainment to be extracted from the relentless, reference-level reproduction of imploding apartment buildings.

Godzilla vs. Kong

Despite placing Godzilla's name at the top of the card, Adam Wingard's Godzilla vs. Kong is very much structured around Edgar Wallace and Merian C Cooper's Eighth Wonder of the World. Like seemingly every Warner Bros tentpole these days, Godzilla vs. Kong's debut is preceded by rumours of production difficulties and whispers of a director being side-lined or second-guessed. This initial release version (presuming another may eventually follow) is very much like the theatrical cut of Zack Snyder's Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice in that the assembly itself has chosen their preferred combatant. While Snyder's film strained to place Batman in a driving seat that the character hadn't been designed for, this MonsterVerse sequel happily motors along under Kong's impressive steam. 

Josh Schaffer's brisk edit, and perhaps even Eric Pearson and Max Borenstein's screenplay, makes gigantic strides to keep the film under two hours. The minutiae of kaiju wrangling is renounced, circumvented by witty snips and tranquil 70s rock that centres Kong's predicament as the film's driving force. The soundtrack speaks for him. This computer generated Kong, mapped out by umpteen special effects studios, is never simply a featured trick - he's the film's mute male lead. An ape the size of a building that is (somehow) communicated as an underdog; struggling manfully to not only keep himself breathing, but to protect the puny humans that have made themselves his family. Wingard's Kong is one weathered by age, far past his blonde abducting years, happily settled into the role of a colossal Grandfather to the last human survivor of Skull Island, Kaylee Hottle's Jia. 

Lifted out of an enclosure lined with a flat panel sky, Kong is press-ganged into acting as a guide for Alexander Skarsgård and Rebecca Hall's seafaring academics - the hope being that a brush with his ancestral environment will spark something in the ape's latent, genetic, memory. The sense of discovery that Godzilla vs. Kong offers is communicated, not just thematically but emotionally, using the film's enormous gorilla. Godzilla is simply a reactive force, acting as the predatory answer to mankind's latest pilot driven horror. It's a portrayal very much like the King of Monster's role in the Millennium era of his Japanese series but it's also a framing that keeps him offscreen for the majority of the runtime. Kong on the other hand is placed in chains and shipped back to a point of origin that he has no living connection to. Like the 1933 original, Kong's story here is one of displacement. The character, always portrayed as some form of prisoner, suffers for the curiosity, or outright greed, of humans. 

In this film the physical trajectory, if not the dynamic, is reversed. So instead of being tranquilised then shipped off to a New York to be gawped at, the Skull Island native is drugged for passage to the Antarctic, the icy continent apparently the one stable access point to the mythical Pangea at the centre of the Earth. Kong's place in Hollow Earth is hereditary rather than personal but the prehistoric, lighting racked, location does allow the long-suffering primate an opportunity to assume the position of a monarch. A moment to pick up a magical weapon then take a throne that, once, could have been his. The human connection to this realm is technological, an opportunity to synthesise a particularly powerful energy wavelength. For Kong this brief stop, before battle is joined in Hong Kong, is therapeutic; it demonstrates to him that, not only does he physically come from a line of culture and Kings, but his predecessors were able to vanquish the lizards that plagued them. 

Although he passed away in 2017, Godzilla vs Hedorah director (and, let's not forget, Prophecies of Nostradamus' assistant director) Yoshimitsu Banno is still credited as Executive Producer on Godzilla vs. Kong. The credit acknowledges that this big budget monster movie still has its roots in an unproduced IMAX short - Godzilla 3D to the Max - that Banno had attempted to steer towards the largest possible screen. Banno's great big credit registers as ironic in an American production where the King of Monster's portrayal feels peculiarly laundered - specifically, one that has had its atomic hide sheared off. While Toho's creation has multiple, contradictory, creation stories, Wingard's film is the first to suggest that Godzilla and his kind might be naturally occurring behemoths. Presumably, the ancient saurischian bones scattered over the Hollow Earth's seat of power haven't been mutated by mankind's extremely modern nuclear arsenal? This hint of whitewash lingers, a distasteful correction that generates its own background radiation, particularly in a film where Asian characters are portrayed as either shopkeepers or attachés who behave like Vulcans. 

For its finale, Godzilla vs Kong offers up a triple threat in which every neon structure on the Hong Kong skyline sits ready to be used as a turnbuckle. True to form, the film examines these massive interactions from the perspective of the newly crowned Kong. Godzilla is clearly adversarial, a bristling abomination that charges through skyscrapers like a blood-crazed crocodile. Kong doesn't rely on his mass, and cannot count on fire breath, so he fights smarter - snatching up rotating restaurants to use as a shield or hanging from superstructures, crane cudgel in hand. Although we are repeatedly assured that Hong Kong is in the process of being evacuated, ground level shots of kaiju calamity are framed by darting pedestrians, struggling to get to safety. An early news report improbably tallies up only 8 deaths from a particularly violent Godzilla landing in California. The Hong Kong collision inspires no such updates but surely the count is far higher? 

For a film in which Godzilla's portrayal skews far more bestial and aggressive than either Gareth Edwards' Godzilla or Michael Dougherty's Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Wingard's film is reluctant to really embrace the individual, physical, calamity generated by a collapsing, photo-realistic, city. Even Mechagodzilla's synthetic villainy - when it finally puts in an appearance - is expressed purely in the realm of his contemporaries. The mechanical facsimile attacks a flagging Godzilla, exhausted from a night spent battling Kong, using spine rockets and electrified fists to clobber the ailing tyrant lizard. Firmly bracketed away from human terror then, this Mechagodzilla is simply a cheat. An opportunist who sees their chance to batter the current title holder. A backstory for MG that includes exhumed Ghidorah bones and a supercomputer run amuck barely factors into the robo-beasts characterisation - presumably included so the audience can delight, unapologetically, in this undead creature's eventual dismemberment. 

Death Note

Unlike the plodding superhero serials Netflix is famous for, Adam Wingard's Death Note adaptation really moves, quickly churning through several successive stages of dramatic possibility offered by a dusty old book that allows its owner to instantly kill anyone, anywhere in the world. After taking delivery of the tome and chatting with Willem Dafoe's cackling demon, Nat Wolff's Light Turner uses this power over life and death to settle a number of personal scores, beginning with a recent slight from an oversized grade repeater then progressing to the ignominious destruction of the man who killed Light's mother.

These early passages of Death Note delight thanks to their aggressive lack of moral dimension. Aside from a weak, barely communicated plea for Christian forgiveness from Light's father, revenge (and then cosmic capital punishment) are organised using the petty principles of the high school loner. The film's deaths are gooey and amusing, using the sudden, Mouse Trap style mini-disasters seen in Richard Donner's The Omen or the Final Destination series to smuggle in the film's otherwise alarming extermination conceit whilst also presenting the incidents as an opportunity for a well-constructed, luridly shot gag.

Rather than tread water constructing increasingly elaborate murders, Death Note uses Margaret Qualley's Mia and Lakeith Stanfield's L to expand the film's conceptual boundaries. Mia pushes Light to broaden his horizons by aggressively punishing every level of human criminality. The resulting carnage is pointedly sloppy, the aftermaths woven in and around the film's eradication montages include all manner of bystanders, be they bunny girl sex workers or just hapless commuters. The couple are drunk on their power, delighting in not so much the mission but the way in which their actions are understood as those of a powerful, vengeful God.

Death Note uses these images of overseas destruction to draw a nagging visual connection between the impersonal violence of America's drone program and these two vengeful high-schoolers. Both are evidence of a stunning application of force coupled with spotty, perhaps even disinterested on-ground intelligence. Mia, in particular, relishes the slaughter, viewing it as something on-going and sustainable rather than Light's short but explosive fix. Stanfield's L is even better again, the actor deftly combining a combative physical fluidity with the pained, knowing expression of someone magnificent confronting the disappointingly messy patterns of his intellectual inferiors.

Blair Witch

Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick's The Blair Witch Project was designed as a document, ideally discovered as a dupe cassette, then experienced without knowledge of its artifice. This was filmed testimony, a narrative found and solemnly assembled out of hours and hours of hysterical footage; supernatural snuff working in concert with a dead actor PR campaign on loan from Ruggero Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust. For their pass at the material, Simon Barrett and Adam Wingard account for the deluge of shaky cam films that have followed, taking the same basic misadventure premise then beating in a succession of fun house zaps.

Rather than replay the original's short days, long nights structure, Barrett and Wingard transport their characters to a timeless, hostile environment that aggressively distends the situational horror. So instead of methodically building dread, Blair Witch jettisons reality, positing a more overtly supernatural enemy that now has complete dominion over every aspect of her space. The central threat is no longer an invisible prankster, she's the land itself. Thanks to Wes Robinson's vlogger, we pick up a few scraps of trivia regarding The Witch's torturous passing, and a further insinuation that she bled deep into the Earth and took hold of it. Wingard's take may lack the original's loping intensity but his film's booming sound design and harsh, corrupted cutting envelops the audience in a series of jolts that'd have William Castle grinning.

Films 2013

5. You're Next

You're Next's strength was in the ways different characters contextualise the danger they're in. The Davison family respond to having crossbow bolts fired at their heads as an ingrained collective, complete with interpersonal baggage. They're so self-obsessed that even in the face of annihilation they cannot conceive of a situation in which their own egos are not being managed and coddled. A life of privilege has prepared them for nothing other than success. They expect to win; they cannot think in any other direction. They approach the assault emotionally, responding to a filmic scenario in a filmic fashion. They discern narratives within their struggle and cater to them. They are fools. Erin, an Australian interloper masquerading as pliant arm candy, is completely different. At rest she demonstrates the kind of quiet self-assurance that needlers often mistake as passivity. Galvanised into action, she reacts quickly and logically, upending genre conventions by stamping them prone.


4. Gravity

A 90 minute long panic attack that moves and functions on prehistoric story beats. Gravity is pure incident, Dr Ryan Stone evolving before our eyes from the kind of person who frets about losing a screw cap into a human missile. Her craft and crew shredded, Stone has to pick her way along international space debris until she finds a tin can secure enough to take her home. Disappointments and outright failures became the norm, mutating her sense of expectation. Stone changes from a single function component into a badass overseer, able to grapple with her situation and pummel it into compliance. Like You're Next, Gravity uses gender prejudices to turbocharge the will to power. Alfonso and Jonás Caurón understand that taking someone soft and reticent and turning them cold and hard is much more satisfying than seeing a military industrial man succeed.


3. Drug War

Protagonist is a slippery designation in a film like Drug War. At a glance, law and order man Zhang Lei fits the bill as he doggedly pursues a narcotics ring. Lei creates opportunity through a series of charades, adopting the identity of the last drug kingpin he met to woo the next. Lei is following a breadcrumb trail though, he has rules and regulations to consider, his success aligning with the wants of an all-powerful collective. He's a little too remote to truly root for. This interpersonal disconnect allows focus to shift onto Timmy Choi, a cowed drug lord who initial registers as cowardly and compliant. Of course he's nothing of the sort. He's just plotting, waiting for an opportunity to shift events in his favour. Drug War seems to be about how responsible ideology rarely translates into an exciting movie experience. In real life a well-oiled machine succeeding by inches is preferable, but entertainment mediums need people like Timmy Choi taking child hostages.


2. Milius

Milius is devastating. The documentary begins as a long overdue reappraisal of John Milius's contribution to the movie brat movement, covering everything from writing and directing AIP cheapies to being credited by Francis Ford Coppola as the main creative force behind Apocalypse Now. The documentary describes its subject as the go-to guy for boiling, bullshitting machismo. In between acting out anecdotes, we learn Sean Connery regularly had Milius employed to punch up his roles. Clint Eastwood fawns over Conan the Barbarian. George Lucas makes no attempt to hide a genuine love and affection for the man.

The doc charts a rise and fall then seems to be heading towards a wider reassessment. Suddenly everything falls apart. The effects of the debilitating illness that John Milius suffers are amplified by the situation, and I'm not just talking about my own selfish desire to see a Milius helmed Conan sequel. We see a man who has earned the respect and admiration of his peers struck down in the cruellest possible fashion. Milius then becomes a piece about how difficult, impassive older males attempt to articulate their love for each other. They can't just say it, they have to describe it using sports metaphors and denial.


1. Django Unchained

Django Unchained talks about identity and the ways in which extreme social situations impact upon it. Despite the ubiquity of the reading, it doesn't seem to me that the film is about an extravagant German transforming a humble slave into a superman. Instead it's about Schultz and Django's partnership providing a safe, stable environment that allows the former slave to reassert a personality he's always had. The rodeo shitkicker we see at the film's conclusion is, judging by Broomhilda's reaction to him, the man Django has always been. It isn't a comic book super state, it's the defiant one who stole Broomhilda's heart. We don't know him because Django has had to bury that person deep inside himself, lest he attract trouble.

This is the pantomime at the heart of Django Unchained. The white, master characters enjoy wild, overblown personas. They are indulged. Their social status and the colour of their skin allow them to act without filter. The black characters are not allowed this luxury. They have to pore over their statements and reactions, checking them for perceived provocation. While the white characters flirt outrageously with destruction, safe in the knowledge very little can trouble them, the black characters know death can come at any time. One wrong look could be their end. They are thus adept at behaving in a way that causes minimal offence - childlike, inferior. Anything that makes the people with power feel bigger.

King Schultz's fraternity helps stabilises Django, but it doesn't transform him. That comes in the hope that he can be with his wife again. Django Unchained is, at its heart, a deeply romantic film. Django exists to be with Broomhilda. It isn't just love or want, it's need. Next time you watch the film look at Jamie Foxx's performance when Schultz tells Django where his wife's name came from. The second Django realises he's going to discover something new about his love, no matter how tangential the relation, he abandons what he's doing - in this case eating - to sit in rapt attention. Passed over during award season and frequently described as the weak link in Django Unchained, Foxx is actually the calm, collected centre of the film. He knows the stakes better than anyone else and won't do anything to fuck up his last chance at happiness.

Also Liked:

The World's End / Pacific Rim / Only God Forgives / Spring Breakers / Ender's Game / Fast & Furious 6 / Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods / Elysium / Prisoners / Batman: The Dark Knight Returns Part 2 / The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

You're Next

My favourite thing about You're Next is how different characters contextualise the danger they're in. The Davison family respond to having crossbow bolts fired at their heads as an ingrained collective, complete with interpersonal baggage. They're so self-obsessed that even in the face of annihilation they cannot conceive of a situation in which their own egos are not being managed and coddled. A life of privilege has prepared them for nothing other than success. They expect to win. They cannot think in any other direction. They approach the assault emotionally, responding to a filmic scenario in a filmic fashion. They discern narratives within their struggle and cater to them. They are fools. Erin, an Australian interloper masquerading as pliant arm candy, is completely different. At rest she demonstrates the kind of quiet self-assurance that needlers often mistake as passivity. Galvanised into action, she reacts quickly and logically, upending genre conventions by stamping them prone.