Godzilla fans will be disappointed with the Legendary Pictures MonsterVerse outing, but movie goers looking for Alpha Ape action won’t be disappointed. “Godzilla x Kong” is really a Kong film featuring an appearance by the Big G. If you want to see big action without any woke concern from human deaths and destruction of cites, this is your deafening movie match.
If you’re concerned about diversity, Legendary Pictures continues on its White leads formula.
Quick Review of the Previous Films
This is the fifth American Godzilla film, but the four in the Legendary Pictures MonsterVerse. The first film, directed by Gareth Edwards, introduced us to MUTOs or Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms. That was a decade ago with “Godzilla,” a film that begins in 1954 at the Bikini Atoll where a prehistoric alpha predator named Godzilla was hit with a nuclear bomb. In 1999, Monarch scientists Ishiro Serizawa (Ken Watanabe) and Vivienne Graham (Sally Hawkins) find a skeleton in a uranium mine in the Philippines.
Monarch is supposedly a joint Japan-US governmental coalition formed to find and study the MUTO. Eiji Serizawa, the father of Ishirō, was the founding father.
In Japan, a nuclear plant has a disaster that is reported as an earthquake but is actually in invasion by a MUTO. The disaster kills Joe Brody’s wife (Juliette Binoche) and leaves Joe obsessed with finding out the reasons for his wife’s death. The story lines follows his son, a US Navy officer named Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), Ford’s wife Elle (Elizabeth Olsen), and Elle and Ford’s son Sam (Carson Bolde) in San Francisco. Godzilla saves the world from the MUTO.
The 2019 “Godzilla: King of the Monsters” (co-written and directed by Michael Dougherty) begins in China with White people: paleobiologist Dr. Emma Russell (Vera Farmiga) and her daughter Madison (Millie Bobby Brown). Her ex-husband and Madison’s father Dr. Mark Russell (Kyle Chandler) is an animal behavior and communication specialist who, with his ex-wife, invented a device that allows humans to communicate with the Titans. This is a battle between Godzilla and the Titans and the Titans end up acknowledging Godzilla as their new alpha. Appearing in this film are King Ghidorah, Mothra, Ronan, Queen MUTO, Behemoth, Methuselah and Scylla.
Zhang Ziyi plays dual roles of twins Dr. Ilene Chen and Dr. Ling. Chen is a mythologist working for Monarch while Ling is an operative. Watanabe reprises his role as Dr. Ishirō Serizawa.
The film was directed by Vietnamese hapa Michael Dougherty who co-wrote with Zach Shields.
In between “Godzilla” and “Godzilla: King of the Monsters,” Legendary Pictures (with distribution by Warner Bros.) produced “Kong: Skull Island,” a reboot of the King Kong franchise. The film begins somewhere in the South Pacific with a battle between a Japanese pilot and an American pilot, but their dogfight is interrupted by King Kong. In 1972, Bill Randa (John Goodman) heads a US government research mission to discover the strange creatures on Skull Island. His crew includes Lt. Colonel Preston Packard (Samuel L. Jackson), British Special Air Service Captain James Conrad (Tom Hiddleston) and photographer Mason Weaver (Brie Larson). Part of their exploration involved special seismic explosives developed by seismologist Houston Brooks (Corey Hawkins) who hopes to prove his Hollow Earth theory. The team encounters the island natives, the Iwi, and the the American pilot (John C. Reilly) who tells them that the Japanese pilot was killed by a Skullcrawler, and the bombings have made these creatures more active. Packard becomes obsessed with killing Kong, but Conrad and Weaver believe that Kong isn’t a violent creature and work to save him. Kong will defeat the Skullcrawlers and the Iwi will survive for now.
Jing Tian had a role as a Monarch biologist, San Lin, but rewrites saw this role significantly reduced. The post credits show San Lin and Brooks showing Conrad and Weaver cave paintings that depict Godzilla, Mothra, Rodan and King Ghidorah.
Despite my appreciation for Hiddleston, I don’t think going with a British hero in the Pacific was a good decision. Let’s think about the Iwi and the possibility that in 1972, there might be biologists or folklorists in the South Pacific who were native to the region or even an Iwi leader who could rise to the occasion.
Zhang Ziyi was supposed to reprise her role, but does not appear in the final cut of the film.
In the 2021 “Godzilla vs. Kong,” all the Iwi are conveniently wiped out from a storm, except for the deaf Jia (Kaylee Hottle), the adopted daughter of Kong expert, anthropological linguist Ilene Andrews (Rebecca Hall). Kong is living under a giant dome on Skull Island and Jia communicates with Kong through sign language. Madison Russell (Millie Bobby Brown) has been listening to the podcasts of Apex Cybernetics employee Bernie Hayes who has conspiracy theories about the Titans, but he also believes something sinister is going on at the Apex Pensacola facility. When Godzilla attacks that facility, Bernie makes a troubling discovery. He eventually teams up with Madison and Josh Valentine.
Apex CEO Walter Simons (Demián Bichir) recruits Hollow Earth theorist Nathan Lind (Alexander Skarsgård) to help find the power source of the Titans’ home, the Hollow Earth. Apex has developed a special aircraft to deal with the reverse-gravitational effect of the Hollow Earth. Kong leads the Apex team to the Hollow Earth where they find a glowing axe made from a Godzilla dorsal plate.
Elsewhere the son of the late Ishirō Serizawa, Ren Serizawa (Shun Oguri), has developed a telepathically controlled Mechagodzilla. Ren will die; Godzilla will defeat Kong more than once, but together Godzilla and Kong will defeat Mechagodzilla.
Ren, however, was an underwritten role. Director Adam Wingard said there was no time in the plot to explore the relationship between Ren and his father Ishirō or even the Serizawa legacy.
Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire
As a creature feature, “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire” delivers, but as an example of diversity, it does not. There are also laughable moments when you realize that the CGI creative team wasn’t synching well with the writers and the director, Adam Wingard, let it slip by. Godzilla also gets a makeover; he lights up Barbie pink.
The soundtrack tells us “Welcome to My World” and asks, “Won’t You Come on In?” Something mysterious is happening in the Hollow Earth, but first we meet Kong. Kong is being chased, or is he? He might be king in Hollow Earth, but he has a few detractors like the strange hyena-lizard like creatures that pursue him, but end up being his meal. Kong doesn’t have those green guts all to himself. He has to share them with a giant horny toad like creature. Kong still has his glowing axe.
We’re reminded that once “we believed we were Earth’s most dominant species” and then came Godzilla and the Titans as well as Kong so “what else were we wrong about?” Godzilla is “fighting the battles we can’t” with Titans that decides to crawl around human cities. Moreover, Hollow Earth is not a separate world. The ecosystems are linked.
At the Monarch Base Academy, Jia, now a teen, has a vision. We’re reminded that her culture isn’t displaced, she is what’s left of her culture as the last member of her tribe. Her worried adoptive and very White mother goes to Bernie (Brian Tyree Henry) for help deciphering Jia’s visions and mysterious trance-state drawings.
Kong is also the last of his tribe, continually searching in Hollow Earth for another like him. If you saw the trailers, you know, he finds others and they want war. Before that, Kong comes to the surface because he’s in extreme pain from a broken and infected canine. If you’ve been thinking that Dan Stevens is slumming, having given up “Downton Abbey” for creature features, he comes in with an infectious swagger. He’s an intrepid veterinarian in a Hawaiian shirt called Trapper and does dental work on Kong.
Stevens does have that rascally charm as the “Ace Ventura Hippy Dippy Sixth Sense” guy, but he comes in handy when this new team must explore the uncharted Subterranean Realm of Hollow Earth. In that realm, if you watched the trailers, you’ll know there will be East Asian-looking people. You might think that’s good for diversity, but where are the above ground earthlings of East Asian descent? Where are the Japanese, Chinese or Filipino researchers and scientists? Why do we instead have a British guy in a Hawaiian shirt instead of someone from an actual Pacific Island in the role of the hero? Why is the conspiracy theory podcaster African American rather than a person who has done research on myths of East Asia or the South Pacific? Yes, perhaps now one can use computer software to translate, but isn’t that just a plot device meant to rationalize the continued exclusion of people of East Asian descent?
Sure we have Asian Australian actors Ron Smyck as Harris and Anthony Brandon Wong as a talk show anchor, but why has the MonsterVerse Godzilla films continually chosen to have White leads and often diminish even secondary roles of people of East Asian descent?
From a look at the casting of the TV series “Monarch: Legacy of Monsters,” indicates the lack of people of East Asian descent has been addressed elsewhere in the MonsterVerse. New Zealand-born Anna Sawai (“Shōgun”) plays a San Francisco schoolteacher Cate Randa whose father Hiroshi Randa (Takehiro Hira) is missing. Ren Wattage plays Cate’s half-brother. Japanese actress Mari Yamamoto plays a scientist. Cate’s mother is Tamlyn Tomita. Cate is the granddaughter of John Goodman’s “Kong: Skull Island” character, Bill Randa. The series which was released on Apple TV+ began on 17 November 2023 with ten episodes. Episode 10 was released on 12 January 2024.
These last two films, “Godzilla vs. Kong” had Asian American representation on the production team. One of the writers of “Godzilla vs. Kong” was a Vietnamese hapa Michael Dougherty (with Terry Rossio and Zach Shields). Doughtery was also the director of the 2019 “Godzilla: King of the Monsters.” Rossio returned to write “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire” with Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett.
There are visual concerns as well. I’m pretty sure that anyone or anything with testicular dangly bits or even less exposed parts would not ride on top of something that has rigid dorsal plates of the Shimo. While I love the use of skeletons, including the skeleton whip you’ll see in the trailer, that’s not really how skeletons work and nothing we’ve seen has shown us that Kong or his cousins can engineer a solution to make the skeleton spine whip work.
The bionic hand device, while cool, is a bit too convenient as a plot device.
If Kong’s nearest known relates species are Gorillas, then the scenario in the Hollow Earth is more old views of alpha males, but that’s true for Godzilla as King of the Monsters.
There were concerns about representation on “Godzilla Vs. Kong,” and representation remains a problem in “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire.” While Legendary Pictures seems to follow the White explorer template of the 1940s and 1950s. Even the guardianship of Jia by a well-meaning White person might reverberate wrongly in countries that took indigenous children from their families and put them in White families and institutions run by White people.
“Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire” is really a film for Kong fans and people who don’t mind an alpha male ape melee between Kong and a few of his distant cousins as well as the continued promoting of the alpha male fallacy. “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire” premiered at the TCL Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles on 25 March 2024 and has a release date of 29 March 2024 in the US.
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