As if monsters had poster problems ten years after the saga began, Godzilla and Kong: The New Empire In the title there are the two titans, but here the radioactive mutant dinosaur is relegated to the background before the sweetness of his former rival. Adam Wingard (The guest and Caccia Macabre) decides to start the fifth film of the series where he himself left off Godzilla vs. Kong: The ape was confined to the Hollow Earth while his then-rival dominated the planet’s surface.
Kong shows signs of depression into their daily lives as the constant search for a survivor of their species continues. The monkey is already combing the gray hairs in his beard and, between one clash and another with the monsters that compromise his survival at the center of the Earth, he suffers a traumatic infection in a tusk.
A strange alarm signal emitted from the center of the planet launches a motley pseudoscientific expedition inward and also awakens Godzilla, who was sleeping peacefully like a kitten in a makeshift crib inside the Roman Colosseum.
The monster spots an important future mission and decides to recharge its energy at a French atomic power plant and defeating a titan that dominates Antarctica, and thus acquires an attractive pink tone in the brightest film of the entire franchise.
Godzilla immediately goes back to bed to continue sleeping while he awaits the ape’s summoning, which will not arrive until the third act.
Kong’s discovery
In Godzilla and Kong: The New Empire, the ape discovers that he is not the last of his kind. Photo: WB.After emerging for a makeshift root canal, post, and crown, Kong discovers this to his shock he is not the last of his kind while the human expedition has a similar revelation with an underground civilization.
Wingard takes advantage of the well-known parallel between man and ape to comment on the identity and breeding of all primates until, finally, he returns to steaks.
The film has little dialogue and a lot of action, thanks to a low presence of homo sapiens. The human role here is relegated to the progressive message about the future of the planet, to a few short gags to decompress and to the useless mansplaining (man’s need to explain how things are), which here abandons its genre form to expand to the entire human species when each specialist highlights what happens to the titans on the screen by expressing it in words.
Throughout the history of cinema, a clear sign of early extinction usually appears over time in the monster movie cycle. Their films usually integrate the initial phase, in this case the two Godzilla and Kong: Skull Island.
So monster crossovers are used to exploit the synergy between them, as in this chapter and its predecessor. The last phase of horror, a decadent emblem of the end of a franchise, is usually characterized by titles that begin with “the son of…” or “the girlfriend of…”.
Wingard shows the Titans still full, but already lays the foundations to take the last step by crossing Kong with a little monkey who will be his companion.
After a fight in which Kong eats an underwater titan into two sandwiches and swallows it like a sausage, the macaque introduces his new adoptive father to a civilization of enslaved apes, very much in line with the Planet of the Apes, who do the bidding of the tyrant Skar King, a red-haired orangutan who dominates others thanks to the subjugation of an ice-spitting female Godzilla species called Shimo.
In “Godzilla and Kong: The New Empire” there are parallels between the fate of humans and that of primates. Photo: WB.Thus the foundations were laid for the showy final battle, after the return of a titan who intervenes so that the monsters of the title finally make peace. Wingard presents the clash as a sort of wrestling match on the beaches of Rio de Janeiro a film that heralds the end of the franchisebut he manages to hide the signs of tiredness behind crazy visual ideas resolved with clarity.
File
Godzilla and Kong: The New Empire
Qualification: Well
Action. United States, 2024, 115′. SAM 13. Address: Adam Wingard. With: Rebecca Hall, Dan Stevens, Brian Tyree Henry. Rooms: Hoyts Abasto, Cinemark Palermo, Multiplex Belgrano, Cinépolis Recoleta, Showcase Norcenter.
Source: Clarin
