Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire

The Weightless Titans of a Hollow Earth

The sight of Godzilla curling up for a nap inside the Roman Colosseum like some radioactive tabby is still rattling around in my head. It's ludicrous, obviously. (Also a pretty grim day for world heritage preservation.) But that one image gets at exactly what Adam Wingard is doing with *Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire*. Coming right after the bruised, Oscar-winning Japanese triumph *Godzilla Minus One*, this American chapter feels cut loose from the nuclear-age anxieties that once defined the creature. We're not in metaphor territory now. We're in the ring.



Wingard knows the assignment and has zero interest in pretending otherwise. A decade ago he made *The Guest*, an icy little synth thriller built on restraint. Here he has gone full neon cartoon. The camera doesn't cower at street level the way Gareth Edwards' 2014 *Godzilla* did, using human scale to make the monsters feel enormous. This time the virtual lens zips beside them, skimming around punches and diving through Hollow Earth's candy-colored sky. The result is that the titans feel weirdly nimble, almost weightless. Depending on your tolerance for this sort of zero-gravity bombast, that's either the whole point or the whole problem.

There's a run in the second act that genuinely won me over. Kong, lonely and looking for his own species, trudges through that hostile underground jungle. For nearly fifteen minutes the movie drops human dialogue altogether. We just watch an aging ape communicate through grunts, posture, and facial animation. When he runs into that hostile young ape—a bratty little mirror of himself—the sequence plays almost like silent comedy. Kong's shoulders sink. He looks exhausted. At one point he seems to roll his eyes at the kid. It's such clean visual storytelling, and for a while the movie gets unexpectedly tender.



The human actors, as usual in these things, have a rougher time. I always feel a bit bad for performers in monster movies, asked to emote at tennis balls and green screens. Dan Stevens, though, finds a sly workaround. Reuniting with Wingard for the first time since *The Guest*, he plays Titan veterinarian Trapper as if the apocalypse is just another errand. Rebecca Hall gets stuck hauling heavy exposition. Brian Tyree Henry has to sprint around delivering the jokes. Stevens simply ambles through it all in a Hawaiian shirt. His body stays loose. He smiles like nothing here can surprise him. He leans on control panels as if he's killing time at a bus stop. By refusing to compete with the CGI hysteria, he ends up grounding it.

I keep circling back to how hard it is to mix awe with complete goofiness. The Showa-era Godzilla films eventually turned into glorious nonsense—rubber suits, impossible kicks, all that stuff—and *The New Empire* is very clearly after that same Saturday-morning buzz. But when you scale camp up to blockbuster size, the strain shows. The Guardian's Benjamin Lee nailed the mood when he called it "a still fun yet far sloppier outing, a second round that's less of a win for us and more of a draw." And yes, the exposition in the back half is brutal. I'm still not convinced anyone needed ancient prophecies to explain why a giant lizard wants to punch a giant ape.



By the time the last fight arrived—floating rocks, spinning monsters, the whole thing—my brain had more or less clocked out. The noise just washes over you. Even so, there is something endearing about a movie this committed to its own nonsense. It doesn't pretend to be profound. It only wants you to grab the popcorn and enjoy the pink atomic breath. Some days, that really is enough.