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Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire
Kaiju Action / English / 2024
WHY'D I WATCH IT?
The last movie I saw in theaters was a Toho Godzilla movie, and now there's a Legendary Godzilla in theaters.
WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
First, I want to comment on the theater experience. This was a smaller screening than Minus One and it didn't have the faux ultra-widescreen or fancy seats that movie had. There were maybe a dozen or more people in the theater this time around, so people actually turned out to see this one.
At first I had some audience members sitting pretty close to me who were already loudly commenting during the trailers which I thought might disrupt the movie a bit, but I quickly realized that my biggest issue was that the surround sound speakers on the left side of the theater were out of sync by a full second, so every single bass boom I would hear first from the main screen, and then again to my left.
It was so immediately irritating I actually walked out of the theater. I certainly didn't want to waste my $16 ticket and $6 ****ing bottled water, but I managed to find an employee who followed me back to listen to the speaker and gave me permission to change my seat (it was reserved seating).
I ended up sitting much closer to the screen which caused a lot of the action to blur together uncomfortably, but also revealed some of this movie's lackluster CG, but at least I didn't have to listen to that horrendous speaker desync.
The CG of this movie is of course in every possible scene, but the stuff that stuck out to me was when both Kong and Godzilla at the start of the movie felt the need to soak themselves in viscera. The "wet" texture that covers them, particularly on Kong, looked very weak and it was the most glaringly bad CG I saw throughout the whole movie.
I don't know why Kong is even shown to eat other monsters anyway. Not that gorillas wouldn't eat other animals if they had to, but gorillas are well known to be frugivores, they eat fruit, plants, and sometimes bugs.
It's particularly glaring to me because not only is Kong the least fantastical of the monsters in these movies, but by contrast, Godzilla is never shown eating anything, and he's a giant lizard that exists to kill everything. Sure he bites and will rip monsters apart, but only Kong, and the other giant apes in this movie, all originally frugivores, ever eat other monsters, so I just don't ****in' get it.
I've never seen Skull Island, so I don't know if his diet is established, but it thrills the pocket nerve of this vegan.
Not having seen Skull Island, I seemed to be missing a lot of backstory too cause this movie seems to want to present Skull Island as a surface-level colony of the human civilization that exists in Hollow Earth, which is only established in King of the Monsters.
So, even moreso than Godzilla vs. Kong, this movie really wants to unite the world lore of the Godzilla and Kong-exclusive movies.
The whole problem with that is:
1.) I don't give a shit, I'm here to see a kaiju movie.
2.) The story is beyond insignificant.
The story is really in two or three layers here.
The most important part is that Godzilla has either become aware of the human "Iwi" civilization in Hollow Earth, which is only established in the Kong movies, because they're suddenly sending out a distress signal now for no adequately explained reason. OR, he's become aware of "Scar King", which is another giant ape (who cares), which is controlling a kaiju called "Shimo" (who?), which is supposedly responsible for the first ice age.
I've never heard of either of these monsters and both of them seem entirely original to this movie. Scar, or "Skar", looks like a MonsterVerse Lanky Kong with whip, and Shimo just looks like an ice turtle with an ice beam that ices things.
I genuinely don't give a shit about these monsters. I at least recognized the baddies in King of the Monsters and Godzila vs. Kong, Gidorah and Mecha-Godzilla are iconic even if I've never seen their respective movies, but who the **** are these guys?
Their design also just presents them as an Inferior Kong and Inferior Godzilla. It's a monkey with a whip instead of an axe! It's a lizard with ice breath instead of atomic breath!
Who cares. The whole movie feels so much less important when these throwaway fanfiction kaiju are the baddies. OH NO! Scar is trying to get to Earth's surface! Only to get defeated by Godzilla anyway!
I don't even know how or why they threw Mothra back in here, I don't remember what happened to her in the previous movies, but her only meaningful role is to "convince" Godzilla to cooperate with Kong, and it really is as low-effort as it sounds.
There's another kaiju named Tiamat, which only exists for Godzilla to kill and it also appears to be a totally original kaiju.
The stakes have just never been so low as they were in this movie, and yet you can tell they tried. They rationalized giving Kong a Mecha-Godzilla-based robo fist which... really doesn't do anything except prevent that same arm from getting frostbite a second time.
Godzilla is "powering up" by absorbing other monsters for part of the movie until he turns neon pink which... never amounts to literally anything. The devastation he can cause never reaches the level of Minus One, but also the pink glow only ever serves to imply that his next atomic breath will be stronger. And then he more or less never hits anyone or anything of consequence with it.
Some Hollow Earth anti-gravity fight scenes really don't push the action to anywhere near the level of the previous movies either. None of it was terribly memorable.
I like the idea that Godzilla takes naps in Colosseum in Rome...
I like that Kong can set up traps to ambush enemies... but that's it.
The rest of the story surrounds the discovery of the Iwi people in Hollow Earth, who were apparently significant in Skull Island... but again I never saw that movie. They can read peoples' minds for literally no reason...
The one Mom character who I don't remember from the previous movies that can read Iwi is able to look at these large font hieroglyphics and just starts dumptrucking exposition about Scar this and Shimo that... and I seriously just tune out until the visual storytelling returns, which this movie actually does quite a bit of.
Perhaps too much of. I strongly believe the human stories in these movies are just huge slogs breaking up the action scenes you actually care about, but there was SO MUCH monster grunting, bellowing, and screaming in this movie. Extended scenes of Kong grunting and getting grunted at, it got a bit silly.
The worst part of the whole movie BY FAR is just the subplot involving the Mom character and the Daughter who's "the last of the Iwi tribe".
The Daughter is getting visions from the telepathic distress call the Hollow Earth Iwis are sending out and she feels like she doesn't fit in at school. There is exactly one substantive scene at the beginning of the movie establishing this, that she is the last of her kind, and she doesn't belong.
WELL GUESS WHAT, SHE'S NOT ALONE and they find the Iwi tribe in Hollow Earth and she suddenly fits in and can communicate with everyone with her find and she plays with the other kids and the Mom has a bunch of moments where she panics about having to leave her behind with what is essentially an uncontacted tribe on the most dangerous part of the whole planet... and guess how it ends?
"Whaaaa, you thought I wanted to stay here? Where you go, I go, just like we said at the start the movie!"
It was SO ****ing predictable, just a complete non-dilemma from start to finish, wholly unnecessary and insubstantial human drama getting in the way of my kaiju movie.
I recognized all of one 1 human character in this whole movie, and it was the Conspiracy Radio Jockey, because he's feels like an appropriate character in the universe, he's the only one with any funny lines, and he best represents the audience's perspective as just wanting to be present for the spectacle of things.
Everyone else I either completely forgot about or have never seen before because they were only in movies I hadn't seen.
The movie wasn't outright bad in any way, but there were no surprises, no stakes, and no new kaiju to get hyped for. I'd say this wasn't as boring as Godzilla (2014), but I also cared a lot less.
Final Verdict: [Meh...]
Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire
Kaiju Action / English / 2024
WHY'D I WATCH IT?
The last movie I saw in theaters was a Toho Godzilla movie, and now there's a Legendary Godzilla in theaters.
WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
"*grunting noises*"
First, I want to comment on the theater experience. This was a smaller screening than Minus One and it didn't have the faux ultra-widescreen or fancy seats that movie had. There were maybe a dozen or more people in the theater this time around, so people actually turned out to see this one.
At first I had some audience members sitting pretty close to me who were already loudly commenting during the trailers which I thought might disrupt the movie a bit, but I quickly realized that my biggest issue was that the surround sound speakers on the left side of the theater were out of sync by a full second, so every single bass boom I would hear first from the main screen, and then again to my left.
It was so immediately irritating I actually walked out of the theater. I certainly didn't want to waste my $16 ticket and $6 ****ing bottled water, but I managed to find an employee who followed me back to listen to the speaker and gave me permission to change my seat (it was reserved seating).
I ended up sitting much closer to the screen which caused a lot of the action to blur together uncomfortably, but also revealed some of this movie's lackluster CG, but at least I didn't have to listen to that horrendous speaker desync.
The CG of this movie is of course in every possible scene, but the stuff that stuck out to me was when both Kong and Godzilla at the start of the movie felt the need to soak themselves in viscera. The "wet" texture that covers them, particularly on Kong, looked very weak and it was the most glaringly bad CG I saw throughout the whole movie.
I don't know why Kong is even shown to eat other monsters anyway. Not that gorillas wouldn't eat other animals if they had to, but gorillas are well known to be frugivores, they eat fruit, plants, and sometimes bugs.
It's particularly glaring to me because not only is Kong the least fantastical of the monsters in these movies, but by contrast, Godzilla is never shown eating anything, and he's a giant lizard that exists to kill everything. Sure he bites and will rip monsters apart, but only Kong, and the other giant apes in this movie, all originally frugivores, ever eat other monsters, so I just don't ****in' get it.
I've never seen Skull Island, so I don't know if his diet is established, but it thrills the pocket nerve of this vegan.
Not having seen Skull Island, I seemed to be missing a lot of backstory too cause this movie seems to want to present Skull Island as a surface-level colony of the human civilization that exists in Hollow Earth, which is only established in King of the Monsters.
So, even moreso than Godzilla vs. Kong, this movie really wants to unite the world lore of the Godzilla and Kong-exclusive movies.
The whole problem with that is:
1.) I don't give a shit, I'm here to see a kaiju movie.
2.) The story is beyond insignificant.
The story is really in two or three layers here.
The most important part is that Godzilla has either become aware of the human "Iwi" civilization in Hollow Earth, which is only established in the Kong movies, because they're suddenly sending out a distress signal now for no adequately explained reason. OR, he's become aware of "Scar King", which is another giant ape (who cares), which is controlling a kaiju called "Shimo" (who?), which is supposedly responsible for the first ice age.
I've never heard of either of these monsters and both of them seem entirely original to this movie. Scar, or "Skar", looks like a MonsterVerse Lanky Kong with whip, and Shimo just looks like an ice turtle with an ice beam that ices things.
I genuinely don't give a shit about these monsters. I at least recognized the baddies in King of the Monsters and Godzila vs. Kong, Gidorah and Mecha-Godzilla are iconic even if I've never seen their respective movies, but who the **** are these guys?
Their design also just presents them as an Inferior Kong and Inferior Godzilla. It's a monkey with a whip instead of an axe! It's a lizard with ice breath instead of atomic breath!
Who cares. The whole movie feels so much less important when these throwaway fanfiction kaiju are the baddies. OH NO! Scar is trying to get to Earth's surface! Only to get defeated by Godzilla anyway!
I don't even know how or why they threw Mothra back in here, I don't remember what happened to her in the previous movies, but her only meaningful role is to "convince" Godzilla to cooperate with Kong, and it really is as low-effort as it sounds.
There's another kaiju named Tiamat, which only exists for Godzilla to kill and it also appears to be a totally original kaiju.
The stakes have just never been so low as they were in this movie, and yet you can tell they tried. They rationalized giving Kong a Mecha-Godzilla-based robo fist which... really doesn't do anything except prevent that same arm from getting frostbite a second time.
Godzilla is "powering up" by absorbing other monsters for part of the movie until he turns neon pink which... never amounts to literally anything. The devastation he can cause never reaches the level of Minus One, but also the pink glow only ever serves to imply that his next atomic breath will be stronger. And then he more or less never hits anyone or anything of consequence with it.
Some Hollow Earth anti-gravity fight scenes really don't push the action to anywhere near the level of the previous movies either. None of it was terribly memorable.
I like the idea that Godzilla takes naps in Colosseum in Rome...
I like that Kong can set up traps to ambush enemies... but that's it.
The rest of the story surrounds the discovery of the Iwi people in Hollow Earth, who were apparently significant in Skull Island... but again I never saw that movie. They can read peoples' minds for literally no reason...
The one Mom character who I don't remember from the previous movies that can read Iwi is able to look at these large font hieroglyphics and just starts dumptrucking exposition about Scar this and Shimo that... and I seriously just tune out until the visual storytelling returns, which this movie actually does quite a bit of.
Perhaps too much of. I strongly believe the human stories in these movies are just huge slogs breaking up the action scenes you actually care about, but there was SO MUCH monster grunting, bellowing, and screaming in this movie. Extended scenes of Kong grunting and getting grunted at, it got a bit silly.
The worst part of the whole movie BY FAR is just the subplot involving the Mom character and the Daughter who's "the last of the Iwi tribe".
The Daughter is getting visions from the telepathic distress call the Hollow Earth Iwis are sending out and she feels like she doesn't fit in at school. There is exactly one substantive scene at the beginning of the movie establishing this, that she is the last of her kind, and she doesn't belong.
WELL GUESS WHAT, SHE'S NOT ALONE and they find the Iwi tribe in Hollow Earth and she suddenly fits in and can communicate with everyone with her find and she plays with the other kids and the Mom has a bunch of moments where she panics about having to leave her behind with what is essentially an uncontacted tribe on the most dangerous part of the whole planet... and guess how it ends?
"Whaaaa, you thought I wanted to stay here? Where you go, I go, just like we said at the start the movie!"
It was SO ****ing predictable, just a complete non-dilemma from start to finish, wholly unnecessary and insubstantial human drama getting in the way of my kaiju movie.
I recognized all of one 1 human character in this whole movie, and it was the Conspiracy Radio Jockey, because he's feels like an appropriate character in the universe, he's the only one with any funny lines, and he best represents the audience's perspective as just wanting to be present for the spectacle of things.
Everyone else I either completely forgot about or have never seen before because they were only in movies I hadn't seen.
The movie wasn't outright bad in any way, but there were no surprises, no stakes, and no new kaiju to get hyped for. I'd say this wasn't as boring as Godzilla (2014), but I also cared a lot less.
Final Verdict: [Meh...]