The Anti-Awe of Godzilla x Kong

The MonsterVerse has become the Transformers franchise of the 2020s

Warner Bros.’ MonsterVerse franchise has long wrestled with an identity crisis.

Its first film, Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla (2014), approached its subject with a patient grandiosity that, while veering into po-faced pomposity, at least tried to justify its own existence. Its successor, the entertaining Kong: Skull Island (2017), leaned into earnest, pulpy action adventure, while the dire Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) half-heartedly attempted to bridge the two.

With the arrival of Adam Wingard, who directed the lockdown hit Godzilla vs Kong (2021) and the now-in-cinemas Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, the franchise seems to have landed on its tonal sweet spot, stripping away any pretence of mystery or thematic ambition in favour of sugary slugathons between weightless CGI avatars.

Following an *IT. ENDS. HERE.* showdown in the previous film (*spoiler - it didn’t), Godzilla and Kong have adopted a carefully managed zoning system whereby Kong patrols The Hollow Earth, a fantastical world that, despite being thousands of kilometres deep within the Earth’s molten core, is somehow bathed in warm sunlight. The heroic Godzilla, meanwhile, patrols the Earth’s surface, periodically emerging from the sea to catastrophically devastate densely populated areas of rich historical and cultural significance to fight other giant monsters who look like spiders and are, therefore, the bad ones (?)

This careful balance is thrown into doubt when an ancient force (like Kong, a giant monkey, but this one has LONG ARMS AND CAN USE A WHIP!) threatens to emerge from his Mordor-adjacent prison and conquer the Earth. Faced with destruction, frenemies Godzilla & Kong must TEAM UP, an unheralded event (except for when they did the same thing at the end of the last film).

Thrown into the mix is a collection of richly drawn, multi-dimensional characters. I defy anyone not to find themselves entranced by the grounded, thoughtful work put into the portrayal of Mute Girl with Ill-Defined Psychic Powers (Kaylee Hottle), Conspiratorial Wisecracking TikTokker (Brian Tyree Henry), Hawaiian Shirt-Wearing Monster Vet (Dan Stevens), and Perpetually Distressed Business Lady (Rebecca Hall).¹

Ever since the demise of Bryan Cranston’s short-lived protagonist in Godzilla, the series has been flailing around like King Kong in ice skates in search of identifiable human characters. Cranston, at the time on his post-Breaking Bad victory lap, held within his recursively creased face sufficient pathos to deliver some semblance of emotional weight. With the latest instalments, the series has resigned itself to the Marvel formula of replacing personality with ‘quippiness,’ leading to a conveyor belt of stone-cold zingers which land with all the grace and deftness of a sledgehammer squashing a slug.

“Fine”, I hear you saying, “but no one goes to watch a film like this for its intricate plotting or delicate characterisation.” True. The trouble is, the film spends SO MUCH TIME with these characters. Yes, there are more sequences than in previous instalments that leave things to the monsters (Kong’s silent, weary hunt for companionship is the most compelling part of the movie), but by and large, the humans and their exposition-on-steroids black-hole of a plotline hang around like a fart in an elevator.

These issues would be forgivable if the film delivered what the audience is there to see: Big Monster Fights. It’s here that Godzilla x Kong really disappoints. There are A LOT of showdowns, but they are staged so unimaginatively and defined by such an absence of stakes that these supposedly seat-shaking scenes float right past you.

As other reviews have noted, Wingard makes the frankly baffling decision to stage much of the film in the Hollow Earth. Here, everything is big, meaning we lose the DEFINING trait of these monsters: their scale. Eventually, their battle spills over to the real world, which heralds some cool moments, but these sequences are cut disorientingly sharply and quickly, and not in a Jason Bourne visceral way but in a ‘tacky theme park ride that looks like it is about to come loose, and you can see the previous person’s vomit crusted onto the bottom of the seat’ way.²

These films are at their best when they capture street-level awe at the destructive majesty of these gargantuan creatures. See, for example, 2014’s Godzilla, a 2-hour tease of a movie that didn’t lift the camera from the street until a final climax at the end. In Godzilla x Kong, there are barely any shots of the monsters from a human POV.³ Without this grounding mechanism, the monsters resemble what they are - weightless CGI waifs.

About 90 minutes into the film, I’d finished my beer and was beginning to question whether this was the way I wanted to spend my Friday nights. At around the same time, I realised that under the careful stewardship of Adam Wingard, the MonsterVerse franchise is turning into the Transformers of the 2020s, complete with characters so thinly drawn that to call them one-dimensional would be an insult to dimensions, CGI violence that forces you to watch with all the enthusiasm of doomscrolling Twitter and one-liners so unfunny that I can feel my sense of humour contracting just through exposure. These are films that seem to openly mock you for hoping to experience awe in the cinema.

And yet, I’ve been here before. Even at 30, and despite longstanding attempts to throttle him, Teenage Ed is a resilient little chap and still emerges from his cocoon at the sound of the clarion call of Big Monsters beating the crap out of each other. Here I am sitting and typing this alone in between screenings at 9.31 pm on a Friday night while THE COMPANION sits comfortably at home (she gave it a miss).⁴

When the inevitable next film gets made, guess who will be turning up…

---

1. Perpetually Distressed Business Lady, naturally, is also the adopted mother of Mute Girl with Ill-Defined Psychic Powers and the ex-lover of Hawaiian Shirt-Wearing Monster Vet, the latter being a plot point the screenwriters appear to have forgotten about a third of the way through the movie.

2. A guy sitting next to me gave a little “fuck yeah” at one part, so I’m glad he had a good time.

3. There is one cool birdseye (monkey’s eye?) shot of the Bad Monkey’s perspective of ant-like humans running in terror.

4. The next screening was Drive (2011). This was my first time seeing it on a big screen, and it still slaps.