Godzilla x Kong: The new Empire 2024 Movie Dawnload
Director:Adam Wingard
Writers:Terry Rossio,Simon Barrett,Jeremy Slater
Stars:Rebecca Hall,Brian Tyree Henry,Dan Stevens
GODZILLA x KONG: THE NEW EMPIRE Review
It felt like Legendary Pictures had worked out a solid plan to launch its interconnected Monsterverse of films into the stratosphere. By going big on spectacle and bringing so many of Toho’s classic kaiju together, the Monsterverse films captured the spirit of the Shōwa era. They stayed “true” to the franchise in a way that made them sit comfortably alongside Japanese films like Godzilla Minus One. But that same approach is also why director Adam Wingard’s Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire feature often feels like it’s hopped up on way too much of a good thing.
You don’t exactly need to have seen the past Monsterverse movies or the Apple TV Plus spinoff series to follow The New Empire. But it definitely makes it easier to understand the story of how Godzilla and King Kong once again find themselves locked in a battle that will determine humanity’s fate.
After years of Godzilla being generally seen as a terrifying threat, The New Empire opens at a point when the radioactive amphibian has become something of an unruly hero to people across the globe. In one of The New Empire’s first set pieces, the big man causes just as much destruction as his enemy as he chomps, punches, and tail whips the other kaiju to death while untold numbers of people die in the crossfire. But with the memory of King Ghidorah, Rodan, and Mechagodzilla still relatively fresh in people’s minds, they’re willing to accept that Godzilla belongs on the planet’s surface to keep other Titans down in the Hollow Earth — the mysterious realm where giant apes like Kong originated.
Despite The New Empire involving human characters like anthropological linguist Dr. Ilene Andrews (Rebecca Hall) and podcaster Bernie Hayes (Brian Tyree Henry) who were directly involved in the events of previous Monsterverse features, almost all of the new film’s human protagonists move through this story with an awkward greenness that doesn’t seem right for people you’re meant to believe as survivors of multiple Titan encounters.
It was during those encounters that Monarch researchers first discovered Titans could consume radioactive energy as well discharge it and that the monsters would instinctively battle for dominance when sensing one another. But when Godzilla starts seeking out nuclear reactors to feed on, there’s widespread confusion within Monarch as to why — in part because Kong, the only known potential threat to the lizard’s supremacy, has been living in the Earth’s center.
By making many of its human characters seem strangely unfamiliar with the Titan-tracking business, The New Empire gives itself an easy but clunky way to get Monsterverse newcomers caught up on how the monsters operate. Rather than asking the sorts of questions you might expect from someone who has spent significant time studying kaiju, Ilene’s more of an audience surrogate who speaks almost exclusively in exposition dumps. Something has Godzilla worried, and Monarch knows it should be concerned, but it isn’t until Ilene’s adoptive daughter Jia (Kaylee Hottle) begins having alarming visions that anyone up top stops to consider whether Kong might have something to do with the situation.
The humans in Monsterverse films have never been particularly compelling, but in The New Empire, their thinness is reflective of the fact that they’re really the supporting characters. Godzilla and Kong are the stars here. And because the franchise has already spent so much time focusing on the former, The New Empire makes the smart choice to dig deeper into the latter’s mysterious connections to Jia and the Hollow Earth. It’s always been interesting to imagine what a Monsterverse film entirely focused on the Titans might look like, and The New Kingdom experiments with the idea as it turns its attention to Kong’s new life in the Hollow Earth.
The New Empire feels almost like a larger-than-life nature documentary as it uses snapshots of Kong’s new normal to wordlessly convey the loneliness Kong feels as — he thinks — the last of his kind. Though Kong doesn’t speak, his eyes and facial expressions are animated with an uncanny humanness that makes his emotions readily apparent. The Hollow Earth’s a wondrous, terrifying place, but you can see how forlorn Kong feels encountering groups of other wild Titan species. You can see how reluctant but tempted he is to travel up to the surface, where he knows Jia and Godzilla are both waiting to welcome him. But Kong’s emotions become even more complex and impressively animated when he meets Suko, a young Titan hailing from a new group of ape monsters.
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