Review of the movie Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire

The sequel to Godzilla and Kong: The New Empire” / Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, a crossover that united the American monster King Kong and the Japanese monster Godzilla into a single world. It is worth recalling that the story of the former began as a drama about a large animal that seems to be a predator but actually falls prey to the predatory human species; and the story of the latter began as an allegory of the horror caused by nuclear experiments. In other words, in both cases, the true nightmare was not the “monsters” of the ancient fauna, but the “civilized” homo sapiens.

The first Godzilla vs. Kong crossover changed the configuration of the conflict. Or rather, it changed even earlier, in the movie Godzilla: King of the Monsters”. People in this game became pawns: neither villains nor heroes, but mostly just observers. And when they, i.e. we, i.e. humanity, fell out of the central formula, the confrontation unfolded between the monsters. The franchise received its own mythology, as if “written” in cave paintings: the generalized world religion returned to polytheism. The monsters that awakened from the bowels of the Earth were called “titans” (the name of the older generation of deities in Greek myths, children of Heaven and Earth, who in turn gave birth to the Olympic gods).

It is interesting that people who have always been both gods and monsters in the metaphorical rhetoric of “gods and monsters” have fallen out of this equation in the Warner franchise. The gorilla Kong quite logically joined the universe of titans-not because he is also colossal, but because on his native Skull Island he was also a deity worshipped by the natives. In fact, in the context of the allusion to ancient legends, people can be compared to the Olympians who, in a series of battles called the Titanomachy (also known as the Clash of the Titans), defeated the older generation of titans and threw them into the Tartarus (underworld), after which they themselves began to rule and continue to wage strife and war among themselves. The original fall of King Kong from a New York skyscraper, as well as the original attempts to defeat Godzilla, can be called such a conditional “throwing into tartarus.”

But as alternative realities are now very popular, the reality of Kong and Godzilla has also been rewritten. Their recent history, begun with the films Godzilla (2014) and Cong: Skull Island” (2017), erased the fall from the spire of the Empire State Building as if neither the fateful violent trip to New York nor the great drama that made everyone cry had ever happened. So it was not the Olympians with their destructive sacred fire that won the battle, but the titan King Kong (literally, fire in Skull Island was personified by Samuel L. Jackson’s character, a pompous warrior with a huge firearms arsenal, obsessed with blowing up, burning, and destroying everything).

The era of humanism and peaceful symbiotic coexistence has begun. Kong has moved into the category of “always alive,” and Godzilla has turned from a monster that turns megacities into ruins into a literally and figuratively charged defender of the human race from other less friendly monsters. In the first crossover, the authors successfully used two relatively new storylines: an old-school adventure in the spirit of Jules Verne’s classic science fiction travel novels (instead of stumbling around with safe and dangerous giants, they “discovered” another world in the hollow of the planet, using the well-known pseudo-scientific “hollow Earth theory”) and a clash between two protagonists (the “titanomachy” of two alpha males), who at first cannot divide the territory, but then begin to fight side by side against a common one hundred percent pagan enemy (this algorithm is called the “your mother’s name is Martha too” meme that appeared after the release of Batman v Superman).

In the crossover sequel, the humanism has become even stronger, but somewhat more subtle. Here, Kong has his teeth treated, i.e., a literal dental operation of extraction and implantation. And Godzilla is sleeping a sweet dream not in a hole somewhere, but right inside the Roman Colosseum (as if it’s okay if he wags his tail in his sleep or turns over on his other side and smashes something slightly, because it will look like it happened). The writers didn’t come up with anything fundamentally fresh, so they exploited previous inventions: the same cavity where you can endlessly find unexplored areas with new monsters, and the same union of two rivals, two alpha individuals who forget about their enmity in order to overcome the third alpha, who is really evil and threatening. At the same time, the creators made recognizable allusions to Planet of the Apes and The Lion King, two other brands about the domination of animals instead of humans (the latter does not have any human characters at all, and sometimes when the surrounding human characters in New Empire fuss and fool around too much, you also want to remove the human component completely and watch only CGI).

You know how in action movies and rom-coms, the protagonist often has a silly, clumsy friend, like the taxi driver Dopinder (Karan Soni) in Deadpool, or the former cellmate Louis (Michael Pena) in Ant-Man, or the whole trio of Tom, Jude, and Shazza in Bridget Jones’s Diary? These auxiliary clowns mostly shade the protagonists’ cleverness and are responsible for the kringle. So the Warner monster franchise has relegated the entire human race to the category of auxiliary dumbasses, so that the “love” or swinging of the main characters, gorillas and lizards, looks serious against their background. And so it is, only the animals look serious and hardcore here, while homo sapiens is just a sideman.