 |
| Courtesy: Warner Bros. Pictures/Legendary Pictures |
Each of Legendary Pictures recent English-language kaiju epics has taken a different path, and "Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire" movie continues the tradition. It's a direct sequel to "Godzilla vs. Kong," a straightforward film inspired by 1962 Toho Studios film "King Kong vs. Godzilla" that pitted the Great Lizard and the Great Ape against each other before pairing them with a robotic enemy. But instead of simply repeating the "New Empire" template, the film director Adam Wingard and his two co-writers offer a more fragmented and sometimes intentionally silly narrative, crossing lines of action in multiple locations that all lead to a huge confrontation with many creatures.
Artistically, it's the most haphazard chapter in the current MonsterVerse, lacking the sense of cohesion and distinction that animated all the others, including 2014 "Godzilla" (essentially "Godzilla-style close encounters"). "Kong: Skull Island" a disturbing riff on Vietnamese films, "Godzilla: King of the Monsters" the first "team-up" film, sparking many family melodramas, or Adam Wingard's original and glorious Godzilla-Kong, an exploration of the years 60 of Science Fiction: Science fiction owes something to American action films of the 1980s like "Journey to the Center of the Earth", in which the two protagonists must fight a dangerous villain.
Rebecca Hall's anthropologist, Ilene Andrews turns this time to the main character, her adopted daughter Jia (Kaylie Hottle) and attempts to find the connection between the Monarch Project's monster measurement technology and the mysterious energy vibrations detected in the frenetic drawings that Jia analyzed finished doodle on school desks and scratch sheets. The answer revealed with the help of another character from the last film, crackerjack/conspiracy podcaster Bernie Hayes (Brian Tyree Henry), is the return of the idea of "close encounters with Godzilla", a combination what I want to experiment. Signs of distress and warnings of impending disasters. As revealed in the trailer and other promotional materials, there is a secret civilization of giant Kong-like primates trapped in an unexplored part of the Hollow Earth, planning to escape and conquer the surface world. Their leader is a sadistic, scarred dictator who creates his own form of slavery during a mining expedition in a hellish volcanic cave, a setting that ensures the filmmakers have seen "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" more than once.
As a proponent of this franchise since the beginning, it's my sad duty to point out that "Godzilla x Kong" is all over the place, barely building any real momentum before moving on. This makes “King of the Monsters” seem singularly relevant and the make sure everyone in the audience still understands what's going on explanation is even more redundant and wooden than in previous films. The fights are exciting and often brilliantly choreographed, especially the finale, a multi-monster main event with many other creatures wandering around the edges. The live-action and motion-capture performances are mostly excellent, despite Baum's dialogue and Adam Wingard's tendency to run through sequences and entire relationships that could have been great if presented with patience and grace.
Dan Stevens is a nice but functionally useless addition to the cast. He plays Ilene's poetry-quoting ex boyfriend, famous for being the first and so far only kaiju veterinarian and is known for removing an abscessed tooth from Kong's mouth from a hovercraft. (I don't know if it was Shakespeare or Freud who said that a man with a toothache cannot fall in love, but this movie gives one result that a giant ape with a toothache cannot save the world on the surface). Stevens has real chemistry with Henry. Whose dialogue often seemed improvised even though it wasn't. There are times when they risk making fun of each other and ruining a take. But the film fails to capitalize on their connection and make it into something truly memorable.
Kong's relationship with a small, wide-eyed scoundrel as he explores the Hollow Earth is a huge missed opportunity, even if the parts we see are executed with imagination and care by the motion capture artists and FX team. The little monkey is basically an abused, treacherous, selfish and cowardly child because he grew up in a sect. Now he suddenly has a good parental role model thanks to Kong, a furry and strong single friend who lives alone, an orphan himself and who has had no parental role models (at least not that we know of), even though he they were still young. The monkey with patience and compassion even when it is not deserved and makes him a decent primate. Adam Sandler had told a version of this story several times. As presented here, this mirrors what is happening between Ilene and Jia: the latter reconnects with her roots and Ilene becomes increasingly saddened by the prospect of the girl overcoming her needs. Two adoptive parents and two different types of challenges but the same basic story: a lot could have been done, but it wasn't done.
Plus for the minus column: The computer-generated animal skins appear more cartoonish than previous entries and the storyline introduces its truly terrifying and charismatic villain Skar King, belatedly giving him and Kong a chance to built and express their antagonism, when the previous film did with Kong and Godzilla's relationship. It's fascinating to watch the slow unfolding of Kong's value system and realize how it contrasts with the behavior of his evil doppelganger, a jerky, preening rotter who appears to have been played by Gary Oldman through a time warp of the Kong's victory here should have felt cathartic: a triumph of decency over authoritarian cruelty rather than narrative control.