After months of waiting and speculation, the newest installment of Legendary’s Godzilla has finally hit big screens worldwide. “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire” is the fifth installment in Legendary’s Monsterverse. It follows Kong and his journey to discover more of his own kind.
Summary
After venturing through Hollow Earth, a mysterious realm at the center of the Earth where massive Titans similar to Godzilla and Kong dwell, the giant monkey discovers that he is not the only one left of his kind. Kong finds hundreds of massive apes living in an extremely deep part of Hollow Earth.
Unfortunately for Kong’s fellow brethren, they are ruled by the ruthless Scar King: a power-hungry monarch with a lust for killing. Scar King rules his subjects with an iron fist, never relinquishing control. In addition to his power over all the apes, Scar King also controls the all powerful Titanus Shimo who is a dragon-like ice Titan. Although Shimo is the very Titan who plunged Earth into its first ice age, she is at the mercy of Scar King and his staff which he uses to control her.
While Kong tries to take on this new foe, Godzilla prepares for battle. Godzilla hopes to empower his abilities and make himself stronger, by scouring all of Earth in search of radiation.
All of these storylines eventually culminate in an epic battle between Godzilla, Kong, Scar King and Shimo.
The Review
In theory, this is an epic plot for an epic movie. In practice though, how well does it actually work?
After watching the movie, I believe that everything flowed properly. Random things were not just thrown into scenes and additional characters were not just added for the sake of adding them. Every scene felt like it had a purpose that was crucial to the overarching storyline of the movie.
Regarding the pacing of the film, I felt the movie did a superb job of not rushing scenes. If a scene needed to be longer or shorter for any reason, the directors took the liberty of allocating time to those scenes. I never felt as though any particular scene stayed on screen for too long or too little.
Just like in all other Monsterverse movies, the fight scenes in “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire” are extremely entertaining to watch. Whether it’s Kong fending off Godzilla in the Egyptian desert, or Godzilla taking on Shimo inside Hollow Earth, all fight scenes feel delivered in a strong manner.
The choreography is also done very well. Every monster feels massive and heavy as they interact with each other and their environments. The CGI present in these scenes does not feel janky or unpolished.
On the other hand, character building left more to be desired. Due to Kong and Godzilla being present in other movies, their characters were perfectly fine and required no further development. However, the same can’t be said for Shimo and Scar King.
Scar King had some great moments throughout the film. He was introduced as this maniacal king who rules over his subjects mercilessly. He even had an amazing fight scene with Kong that was easily one of the best in the entire movie. However, Scar King is killed off quickly by the tandem of Kong and Shimo immediately following Shimo’s inevitable betrayal of him. This felt like a complete waste of an extremely awesome character. Scar King deserved to have a climatic final stand in which he could display all of his power and might. Instead, his final fight felt more like an execution rather than an actual final resistance.
Shimo’s character development is even more underdeveloped than Scar King. Shimo was hyped up to be an extremely powerful Titan, almost akin to the likes of Godzilla. Unfortunately, Shimo only had about 15 minutes of screen time throughout the movie. If she had had more screen time, her character would have felt like she actually made a legitimate impact on the conclusion of the movie. Instead, she only shows up for the main fight scenes. If her character was more interwoven with the plot of the story, I think her presence in the movie would have felt significantly more impactful.
Overall, “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire” is a movie that all kaiju enthusiasts should consider watching. Although the movie is not perfect, it still has some amazing scenes that display the immense power of Godzilla, Kong and all of the other Titans. I would highly recommend this movie to anyone seeking an action packed science-fiction thriller that has a whole lot of fighting between truly massive monsters.
The Torch rates “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire 4.5/5
