Directed by Adam Wingard
Starring Rebecca Hall, Brian Tyree Henry, Dan Stevens, and Kaylee Hottle

The MonsterVerse has officially entered crazy town and its creatures have never been more confident. Ever since 2014s Godzilla, the franchise has been creeping closer to full-blown unbelievability and now it has arrived. It’s a bold move to invest this heavily into sci-fi schtick but taking the slow burn approach to easing audiences into it certainly helped. However, humans still stubbornly grip onto a vast portion of The New Empire’s total runtime.

Director Adam Wingard promised this fifth entry would finally let the monsters ‘tell their story’, but the hour-plus human-packed drag injected into the middle of this movie was not very subtle. It seemed obvious that it was just to bide time while the titular Titans walk around Hollow Earth and slept in Rome’s Colosseum.

In this second Godzilla x King Kong team-up, the big lizard gatekeeps earth while Kong meanders around a prehistoric below-the-surface world (Hollow Earth) where his family might be hiding. Humans, in the meantime, are scurrying around in the background trying to figure out the source of some funky soundwaves coming from who-knows-where before a podcaster, a dentist, and a mother struggling to connect with her daughter set out to save the day. These four spend more time in the spotlight than the movie’s namesakes, to the detriment of the monsters.

The New Empire’s extensive world builds and the fleshing out of Hollow Earth is prioritised above all else. As Kong roams around looking for more giant monkeys we see enemies like what was seen in 2017s Skull Island before the draw of the film, Baby Kong, is introduced. Baby Kong accomplishes two terrific things: firstly, the franchise finally starts building its non-human recurrent characters, showing a commitment to genuinely shifting focus to the monsters, and secondly the little Kong is picked up by the ankle by the bigger Kong and used as weapon at a point which shows that nothing is going to get overly serious again any time soon.

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire continues the burdensome work of getting audiences used to the surprisingly complicated lore of its two main monsters, but this has undoubtably been the boldest leap thus far. A promising feature of The New Empire are a few all-monster scenes that didn’t feature a single human. Although it was odd see a five-ish minute scene with nothing but guttural screams between monsters, it’s promising to see that the filmmakers are giving the idea of a non-human cast a test-run.

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is showing in cinemas across Australia from March 28th.

Moviedoc thanks Universal Pictures for the invite to the screening of this film.

Reviewed by Zak Wheeler for Moviedoc

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