Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire

⭐ 7.0/10

(Originally written by Joseph)

Nobody on this app enjoys stupid monster movies more than me. The problem with this movie, however, is that I'm a Godzilla fan, and this is a King Kong movie! Where is my sweet king Godzilla!!

This movie got a lot of the formula right. The series started off with a serious movie and they have slowly been getting dumber and dumber. I like serious and dark, and I love dumb, but I hate when it's in between. This one still had plenty of earnest moments that were a hard watch, but I also feel like it's the first to outright embrace dumb. There were two moments with cartoon sound effects during fight scenes, so we're getting closer. Kong uses a smaller monkey as a nunchuck. Godzilla curls up in the Coliseum like a cat. Progress!

But this one also had plenty of issues. I think the thing we love most about these are the scale. Godzilla towering over buildings and hitting them over with his tail. But this one mostly takes place in "hollow earth" where everything is up to monster scale, so this may as well have been a normal monkey and a normal lizard. Not a great choice. I also feel like this movie just didn't look that great for a lot of the time?

Anyways, I had a great time watching. There were some teenagers in back of us having fun, and the whole thing was a hoot. There was a fifteen minute scene between the monkeys where there was no dialogue, but just the most powerful non-verbal storytelling I've ever seen. As Villeneuve says, dialogue is for chumps. Brilliant stuff. Will have to watch 10 more times while I fall asleep to see if it's as good as Kong vs Godzilla.