In 1960, anthropologist Jane Goodall documented the ground-breaking discovery that chimpanzees make and use tools. In 2024, Dan Stevens gifts a giant monkey a robotic fist that it uses to punch lizards! Eat your heart out, Jane!

Some three years since they last traded blows, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire follows our titular titans as their primordial war continues. When a new threat rises, our titans must join forces or fall together.

Godzilla x Kong does what it says on the box; barely fifteen minutes pass without one of our titans stomping another to death. Back at surface level however, the ever-expansive Monsterverse still fails to offer an engaging human story.

There’s an old adage: show don’t tell. Godzilla x Kong beats this adage senseless like a silverback gorilla hammering a plate of glass separating it from a schoolchild who made eye contact. When asked if you would rather listen to exposition or monkeys howling and hurdling feces at each other, many would opt for the former, but twenty-minutes of Rebecca Hall explaining monster-mash mumbo-jumbo to 80’s porno-star Dan Stevens, and schizophrenic twitch-streamer Brian Tyree Henry, is a long time to spend in dull company.

Writer/director Adam Wingard clearly spent more time at the Zoo than film school, and to his credit, he knows exactly how and when a giant lizard should decapitate a giant crustacean (though these grand-slams do get exhausting). One can marvel at Wingard’s colourful aesthetic and Tom Holkenborgs/Antonio Di lorio’s synth-laden soundtrack, but eventually the computer-generated imagery burns your retina blind, and clearly burns-out it’s visual effect artists.

With such a disconnect in its scale, scope and imagery, Godzilla x Kong wears its viewer down as it bites, tears and beats its way through its two-hour runtime. Much like the first, Godzilla surfs the sidelines whilst Kong embarks on an odyssey. All the while, our homosapien heroes are silenced by animalistic shrieks, for better or worse.

If you came solely to see giant-creatures duke it out and destroy landmarks, you’re in luck. If you came for anything else, perhaps try a different film.

1.5 / 5