Saturday, March 30, 2024

Godzilla x Kong: The New What-now?

So, I just went to see Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire.

That was a thing.

It's good to see the studio is learning not to waste money on big-name actors in kaiju films. I couldn't tell you who any of the lead actors were. Not at all. The only one I recognized was the little girl from the previous film who could do sign language with Kong. Now she's a sullen teen. That's a thing.

Yeah, so... Godzilla x Kong... what to say about it. Hm... let's start with the good stuff, shall we?

  • Kaiju dentistry. Yes, I'm being serious.
  • Kong getting his Kong on a lot.
  • Baby Kong.
  • Utterly pointless destruction of humanity's creations from ancient times (good-bye pyramids!)
  • Godzilla's preferred bed.
  • Crystal gravity pyramids.
  • The little girl has superpowers.
  • MOTHRA!
  • Lots of monster on monster action. Eventually. Like in the last half hour or so.
Right, so the bad...

  • Waaaaaaay too much pointless exposition.
  • Just who the fuck were all these people on screen?
  • Really awkwardly-bad attempts to add human interest to the film. I'm fairly confident the audience gave zero shits about the main heroine and her relationship with her daughter.
  • Hippie kaiju dentist.
  • Taking waaaaaaaaaay too long to get to any sort of point.
  • Technobabble.
  • Camera angles. Unnecessarily weird camera angles.
  • Kaiju cavities.
  • The script could have benefited from any sort of editorial process to trim down the bullshit by a good 90%.
  • Incredibly awkward title.
So, in the end, I enjoyed seeing Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire. More accurately, I enjoyed the last... oh... 25% of the film. There were some nuggets earlier on, but the film was mostly a meandering hot mess that tried to hard to come up with a plot that wasn't there. I'll admit, I was a bit unimpressed with the villain monsters, too. Oh, the fights were good, but they lacked the real oomph that Ghidorah or Mecha-Godzilla had. Such is life.