Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire’ on VOD, a Sloppy But Enjoyable Display of Kaiju Crunch

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (now streaming on VOD services like Amazon Prime Video) turns Godzilla into a hot-pink radioactive diva, Kong into a sad boi with a power glove and director Adam Wingard into a kinda wannabe James Gunn. None of this is bad, especially if you’re a fan of the Monsterverse, now on its fifth film of, well, however many they decide to make as long as they keep raking in the dough (Godzilla x Kong earned a wily $558 million at the box office, virtually guaranteeing an eventual follow-up). And it may take being a kaiju apologist (guilty!) to truly appreciate this movie, which is an intensely silly thing, directed by Adam Wingard (returning after helming 2021’s Godzilla vs. Kong), with a nearly incomprehensible plot, starring Rebecca Hall as a character given the thankless and graceless task of trying to explain it. The good thing is, that’s mostly moot, because we’re here for the monster fights, and on that front, this movie delivers, like the pizza guy ringing your doorbell and smashing the pie right in your face.

GODZILLA X KONG: THE NEW EMPIRE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Hope you’re reasonably well-versed in 2021’s Godzilla vs. Kong, because we pick up sorta where that one left off, which should be in a whole lotta rubble – rest assured though, there’s plenty more world to destroy, specifically Hollow Earth, the Earth within the Regular Earth where our best giganto-ape buddy Kong lives. All by himself. We catch up with him as he’s being chased by very nasty wolf beasts, which he kills in a series of traps that prove he’s probably the smartest thing around here. He seems almost reluctant to eat them. They could’ve been his buddies maybe, curling up in front of the fireplace while he binges The Barefoot Contessa. But Kong is the last of his kind, and therefore must binge shitty TV all by his lonesome. 

This is How It Must Be, because Godzilla is up on Regular Earth, and if the two of them live on the same Earth, their competitive tendencies will kick in, and things are gonna get very incredibly broken. You may recall from the previous outing that Godzilla and Kong stopped whaling on each other long enough to tag-team against Mechagodzilla and save the planet, but now they’re right back to being mortal enemies. It is nature’s way. Godzilla serves a purpose on the surface, vanquishing superhuge tentacle crabs and crap, following the directives of his instinctual wiring to lord over all he sees more so than protecting humanity. But humans are nevertheless grateful for Godzilla for barely acknowledging them and only causing insane amounts of property damage and killing countless thousands instead of just vaporizing everybody and everything with his radioactive projectile-belches – before curling up for long naps inside the Roman Colosseum. It’s a kaiju’s life for he.

Unfortunately, there are human characters in this movie. It’s not unfortunate that they’re played by these particular actors, just that they have the thankless task of filling in the boring parts in between the parts where the monsters bash each other’s faces in and/or interact with miniature baby versions of themselves (more on that in a second). Dr. Ilene Andrews (Hall) runs the Kong research division of Monarch, a company that does significant scientific and electronical things that have to do with giant monsters, I think. I don’t know exactly what Monarch does, beyond existing because it must, in a world where humans suddenly got usurped from the top of the food chain. Dr. Andrews adopted young Jia (Kaylie Hottle), a girl who’s the last of her tribe and who also can communicate with Kong, which comes in handy when he emerges from a portal with a toothache and needs kaiju vet Trapper (Dan Stevens) to yank a canine and replace it with a metal one that can “cut through the Eiffel Tower.” Kaiju vet? Yeah. Kaiju vet. It’s a living.

One day, Dr. Andrews receives a strange beacon emanating from Hollow Earth and needs to find the source. So she and Trapper, Jia and kaiju conspiracy-theorist podcaster Bernie Hayes (Brian Tyree Henry, returning from the previous movie) follow Kong back to his upside-down world to investigate. As they poke around, Kong is attacked by some fellow giant apes, bonobos I believe, including a baby who ultimately sees the error of his ways and lets Kong, well, sorta adopt him, I guess. Baby Kong leads Regular Kong-ass Kong to an underground hellhole led by a bonobo cult leader who, thanks to Dr. Andrews’ eventual recitation of exposition, is named Skar, and in general is a cruel, power-hungry cretin who teases Kong for his false tooth and uses a magic crystal to mind-control a giant ice-belching Godzilla named Shimo. It becomes increasingly clear that Skar needs to have his hairy ass kicked. Meanwhile, where’s Godzilla? Well, he’s off eating radiation from nuclear reactor leaks, amassing power for reasons yet to be revealed. He’s also chilling out waiting to be activated as a big ol’ plot device. Maybe he’ll enjoy more character development in the next movie, like Kong does here. It’s only fair.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Here we go – thee definitive ranking of the five Monsterverse movies:

5. Godzilla: King of the Monsters – Reintroducing Godzilla to his longtime foes-slash-pals Rodan, Ghidorah and Mothra ended up being monumentally unmemorable, and a big disappointment. 

4. Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire – This one’s hopefully as stoopid as this franchise gets, and the plot is a mess – please don’t ask me what “the new empire” even is, because I don’t know – but the parade of beasts beating the pus out of each other is nonetheless enjoyable. 

3. Kong: Skull Island – Please bring director Jordan Vogt-Roberts back to the franchise – he made this one a highly entertaining and colorful blend of kaiju action and Apocalypse Now, with the series’ best human characters played by Tom Hiddleston, Brie Larson, John Goodman, John C. Reilly and Samuel L. Jackson.

2. Godzilla vs. Kong – This one had the perfect amount of XXXXXL roundhouses and chomporama, and pitting the title boyz against a new, crazy version of Mechagodzilla was chef’s kiss.

1. Godzilla – The 2014 movie that kicked it all off is the most serious of the bunch, and actually has something to say about nature and evolution and humanity’s place in it to maybe almost rival Jurassic Park. It offers the series’ best-directed action sequences (lots of scary on-the-ground perspectives). And it also has Godzilla ripping rival monsters’ heads clean off. Gotta love it.

Performance Worth Watching: There are human performances in this movie? I’ve seen it twice now and that’s news to me. 

Memorable Dialogue: I didn’t bother to mention the pilot who flies our human people into Hollow Earth, because he’s expendable. So when he dies, Trapper says a word in mourning that prompts Bernie to incredulously retort, “You just watched a man get devoured by a topiary nightmare and you wanna quote Tennyson?”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: …and maybe in the next movie Godzilla will hatch a Baby Godzilla so the wee tyke can use the Pantheon as a diaper genie. I mean, Baby Godzilla was established in the pantheon decades ago, so what the f— are y’all waiting for? 

This time, though, the Kongscapades take precedent, possibly because it’s easier to anthropomorphize an ape and his all-too-human eyes than the icy glare of a towering lizard. And here, Wingard takes his biggest risk, allowing Kong to interact with other apes during extended sequences that forego dialogue for hoots, grunts and gestures. That’s far preferable to the human interactions, where dialogue consists of breathlessexhortationsofexposition that Hall is (gasp, pant) asked to recite, or limp attempts at banter between Stevens and Henry, who are good sports about all this, and maintain their likability in spite of it. This is the type of movie that puts the subtitle ARCTIC OCEAN: TIAMAT’S DOMAIN on the screen, then immediately has a character say, “We’re entering Tiamat’s domain,” just to make sure we’re 100 percent sure that this scene is, indeed, set not in Tiamat’s garage, or Tiamat’s preferred coffeeshop, but Tiamat’s domain – and then promptly has Godzilla turn Tiamat into eel bait. IT IS NO ONE’S DOMAIN NOW.

Point being, the less people talk in this movie, the better it is. And even then, it gets a shade too goofy during the kerfuffles between beasts, with part of the big final megabash taking place in an antigravity field where… well, let’s not spoil things, but suffice to say that’s a confusing mess that thankfully washes up on the beach in Rio and orients itself so the monsters can tail-whip and ground-and-pound each other atop cityscapes in classical fashion. This is what we came for: Mass destruction. There’s a moment here where the Great Pyramids of Giza are turned to scree you could sift with a gold miner’s sluice box, and not only are we torn between enjoying the fight and cringing at the careless demolition of one of the great wonders of the world, but we’re also wondering how they put the Pyramids back together after the Transformers smashed them to rubble a decade or so ago. This is where we’re at as movie watchers now, my friends.

Wingard doesn’t take a single second of this stuff seriously. He maintains a consistently upbeat, energetic and gee-whizzy tone, with an ear for a classic-rock needle drop and the occasional emphasis on gooshy sentiment; think James Gunn’s vibrant approach to Guardians of the Galaxy, but less substantive and effective. A word of advice: Don’t even try to keep up with the plot, unless you fetishize futility. It drops the ball by loading up on the comic-booky gobbledygook and not prompting us to feel emotionally invested in Kong’s rebellion against the bully Skar, who enslaves his fellow apes and is just generally a good old-fashioned butthole. Then again, we’re not here to see Kong become Moses. We’re here to see him and his cohorts beat the shit out of each other, and they do it in spectacular fashion. Well, spectacular enough, anyway.

Our Call: Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire ranges from ludicrous to downright sloppy, but there’s enjoyment to be culled from either extreme. It’s moderately satisfying for more forgiving audiences (again: guilty!), so STREAM IT – but nonbelievers will roll their eyes more than they pump their fists.  

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.