Starring Rebecca Hall, Brian Tyree Henry, Dan Stevens, Kaylee Hottle, Alex Ferns, and Fala Chen

Directed by Adam Wingard

Warner Bros./Legendary Pictures

A threat this large needs two Titans to deal with it…

There’s a lot of Godzilla content in the world right now. We’ve outstanding movies from Japan, Monarch on Apple and this new movie from Warner and Legendary. They do not all tie up and the cultural differences between them are pretty stark (more on which later).

This new movie comes to us on a trail that promises a buddy cop movie of some kind where Godzilla is the by the book career cop and Kong is clearly the maverick who’ll be suspended at the end of the second act.

Instead, the two titular characters spend almost no time together through the two-hour run time. Baffling for a movie which sells itself so strongly on their relationship.

What’s bizarre is that they don’t even start in the same world as it were. Kong’s in the ‘hollow world’ (that appears to bear no resemblance to the other world from the Monarch TV show which itself is based on the first Godzilla movie of this series…) while Godzilla is sleeping his way through ancient monuments.

The story primarily follows Kong with a strange subplot that feels like it was ripped from Avatar the Last Airbender which is designed to give the humans something to do other than sit around as titans beat the hell out of each other.

The human scale plot is the least believable thing in the movie. Kids are taken on suicide missions, machinery and resources are available upon demand, vets are secretly ace test pilots, and telepathy and gravity-defying technology play their parts in what is, frankly, a story that makes every effort to be incoherent. Honestly, there’s no point at which someone has to make a decision where they don’t decide to take the obviously dumb or inexplicable route.

After laughing out loud several times as it grew more absurd I felt myself warming to just how hard it was committed to making no sense whatsoever. You can admire that kind of leaning in.

With the humans making nonsense decisions for the sake of staying in the movie and Godzilla mainly attending to an all you can eat buffet accompanied by plot exposition from said humans it’s left to Kong to move the story along and give us a sense of someone to root for.

This strategy largely works – after all Kong is well animated and given quite a lot to do including getting himself a mini-me (which really should have been named Godzuki and belonged to Godzilla but hey, there’s no open goal this film doesn’t miss).

The special effects upon which ninety percent of the films relies range from excellent through to shonky as a student film made on an iPhone 6. This kind of wild inconsistency also has its charms and definitely its hilarity.

Beyond a story that makes no sense, the film also lacks any sense of stakes.

The antagonist is an immortal ape who wants to conquer the surface (because apparently 300 ft titans want to rule over humans… I know but I refer you to my point about this film making no sense). He’s busy being a capitalist despot under the earth but yearns for sunlight. Maybe he just wanted a beach holiday. We never really find out anything except he’s a bad’un. A bad’un with an army whose size fluctuates depending on the scene to ensure our heroes get a chance to win.

On which point it’s worth mentioning that Godzilla and Kong appear to change size depending on what the movie needs from them. Sometimes they’re 300 foot tall, others they’re barely larger than a block of flats. Worse still is that the movie has no sense of its own daftness. At one point Kong is stood in Cairo and Godzilla in Gibraltar and they can, according to the magic of movies, see one another directly… just to be clear that’s a distance of c.4,500km. Call me daft but I think that’s unlikely.

You might say I’m quibbling about a film in which big monsters are fighting one another and destroying cities as they do so.

I’d nod at your wisdom and than point at the Godzilla content coming out of Japan and even Monarch on Apple TV where they, at least, understand the absurdity of the concept and try to keep that the centre of the silliness.

This is a film that would have been immeasurably improved by having Kong and Godzilla’s CGI replaced by people in suits actually punching each other out.

Which brings us back to the central conceit – that Kong and Godzilla are working together. They’re not. They spend the very last moments of the 3rd act together fighting different opponents because of a McGuffin whose power is never explained. Otherwise they’re not on screen together at all. It’s like the movie Heat where we were promised De Niro and Pacino together and instead got one scene where they weren’t even on set together for. At least Heat had some tension.

The New Empire is without any tension because no one ever believes Kong or Godzilla are going to get beaten. No one watching this film will care about the humans.

The only character whose future you might worry about is a giant moth I fully expected to fly into a flame or get trodden on.

This film is terrible. Absolutely rubbish. It is, however, silly, fun and made me laugh several times because of how bad it is. On that basis I can only recommend it on the platform of ‘so bad it’s good’.

All this brings me to the weirdness of Godzilla and Kong in this movie. They are cuddly, cute and never one unbridled or terrifying. Sure they smash cities apart but it’s all so bloodless, all so without weight or consequence I was reminded of my experience with Monarch.

In the west filmmakers and studios have turned Godzilla into a tool. A Deus Ex Machina whose main duty is to protect humanity. We can do whatever we will and face any kind of threat but we have the great nuclear powered lizard and his giant ape pal to look after us.

The Godzilla of Japan is no such cutie. It remains a force of nature, uncontrollable by definition and unbeatable not least because of our interference in the world’s climate with technology we didn’t understand. It’s not simply that Godzilla in Japan is a monster, it’s a monster of our making that we are now at the mercy of. As a metaphor for existential threats (first nuclear war and now climate change) it is unparalleled in its bleakness.

The western psyche appears unable to face this in the mainstream so we flatten the origin of Godzilla and pretend that nature can be controlled and enslaved to serve humanity. It’s the biggest delusion of them all and infects this kind of film in a deeply unfortunate way. The entire point of Godzilla, of Kaiju in general, is that they are greater and grander and not in the service of humanity. Indeed, we are nothing more to them than ants are to us.

This stark contrast has given me pause for a couple of reasons. The first is how an insistence on refusing to contemplate the existential threat of a creature like Godzilla renders its presence nothing more than cute and kitsch. As if our teddy bear was also secretly hench and could protect the house from burglars.

I think there’s a straight line between that contortion and the kind of film we have in The New Empire which is saccharine, nonsensical and has no emotional weight whatsoever.

Verdict: I love watching titans bash each other’s heads in. But there are much better films that achieve it than this one.

5 Godzillas out of 10. 

Stewart Hotston