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.

King Kong Lives

Lethargic and prone to comedic, bug-eyed reaction shots whenever Lamborghinis or similar are being crushed underfoot, King Kong Lives does at least take some massive conceptual swings in its early passages. A decade has passed since Jessica Lange's hirsute suitor was blasted full of holes by hovering Bell helicopters, then fell off the North Tower of the World Trade Center onto the concrete pavement below. Rather than turn the giant ape's bones to powder, this plunge has instead landed the Eighth Wonder of the World in a long-term but apparently stable coma. Tended by Linda Hamilton's Dr. Amy Franklin in a mid-80s present day, the sleeping Kong is suddenly found to be in desperate need of both a blood transfusion and a brand new, mechanical heart. 

Luckily for Kong, Brian Kerwin's earthy adventurer stumbles across another enlarged primate in Borneo. This gorilla, dubbed Lady Kong, is rather shy and retiring, especially when compared to her male namesake. The female of this species quite apparently preferring to brood and sulk rather than thrash about in an impassioned rage. Although farcical in terms of how John Guillermin's sequel accounts for its time skip, there's a certain kind of fun in how the film portrays the scaled-up, day-to-day processes of looking after a pair of enormous apes. Heavy trucks, driven by weekend warriors, bus around rotting fruit while fleets of bulldozers are employed to corral the more placid Ninth Wonder. The real highlight though is an open heart surgery sequence in which Hamilton's doc cracks Kong's ribs with a gleaming, sterilised circular saw before plunging a pacemaker the size of a small van into the titan's chest. It's a shame that the rest of the film has, comparatively, flatlined. 

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. 

King Kong

A deathless, special effects extravaganza that lulls its audience into a false sense of security by packing its first forty minutes with repetition, directionless exposition and a photography model that renders every environment, no matter how exciting, flat and false. Robert Armstrong plays Carl Denham, a fast-talking movie director who anticipates the post-modernism movement by talking directly to his viewers about the film they are about to watch. Denham sings like a canary, describing how his animal feature will likely have to crowbar in a romantic angle to allow for better box office (a genuine concern for King Kong's producer-directors Merian C Cooper and Ernest B Schoedsack in 1933) as well as detailed conceptual readings of the titular ape and his tragic arc. 

Once Denham and his crew of expendable bodies have settled on the uncharted Skull Island, the film transforms completely, scaling up to the level of the monarch monster. Human figures are insects here, vulnerable entities scurrying around beautifully appointed, bracken environments. They shrink into the corners of the frame, overwhelmed by Willis O'Brien's enormous stop-motion projections frothing and grappling above them. Action in King Kong is savage and pitiless; hardy sailors are chased through swamps by ancient herbivores before being chewed up or trampled underfoot. Kong himself is violent but curious, an ever-moving muscle constantly under attack. All challengers are vanquished on Skull Island, Kong ruling as an armature God whose presence is so mighty that he has stunted the humans who share his space into an awed, but fearful, compliance. 

SH MonsterArts King Kong

King Kong vs Godzilla

Seven years after he was buried under ice, Godzilla returns to stomp all over the Japanese economic miracle. After a couple of reels of scene-setting that includes awful, shoe polish make-up, Kong getting stoned on magical berry juice and an unexpectedly clumsy American nuclear submarine, King Kong vs Godzilla finally has the titular duo meet up in a valley strewn with train debris. Godzilla has already spent several minutes trashing anything he can put his feet on, but the sight of King Kong gives him pause. The Big G is spellbound. He recognises an equal, perhaps even a mate. When a helicopter strays too close to the monsters Godzilla blasts it with his radioactive breath, instantly incinerating it. Kong misinterprets this apparently romantic overture as an act of aggression. How does he respond? He starts hurling fucking boulders at the heartbroken reptile.