Did We Really Need Kaiju to Get All Cute?

Godzilla has pink highlights in Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire. We see the process by which he gets them, a laborious level-up quest that involves the destruction of some French countryside and the murder of a fellow Titan. He’s supercharging himself for a coming battle, though instead of emerging from his efforts looking more formidable, the result — fuchsia dorsal spines, eyes, and an overall glow — is disconcertingly adorable, like someone tried to dye a very angry cat. Godzilla may be a massive reptilian creature, but in the world of the MonsterVerse, he’s definitely feline (semi-domesticated at best, comes for food but otherwise does his own thing). Kong, giant ape though he may be, is a dog (follows basic commands, has unexpected dentistry needs, must be crated in the secret prehistoric kingdom in the middle of the planet). The only memorable image in Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, the fifth installment in this lackadaisical franchise, is an early one of Godzilla curling up inside the Colosseum in Rome to sleep like a tabby claiming an empty box as his bed.

Godzilla and Kong are our friends, or so the MonsterVerse would have it, though they do still lay waste to landmarks, buildings, and hundreds of lives in the course of their lumberings, which is the price you pay for kaiju-on-kaiju action. Godzilla x Kong — the x is silent — brings the former rivals together to fight a new and deeply underwhelming baddie who, as though aware of how disappointing he is, doesn’t show up until halfway through the movie. The Scar King, as he’s called, is just another big-monkey guy, though he does wield a nifty chain whip made out of a spine, command a simian army, and ride an enslaved ice kaiju like a steed — or like his own personal My Little Pony, because, honestly, that kaiju has prismatic skin and sparkly spikes and is downright pretty, even with its deadly ice breath. The cuteification of the monsters reaches its apex with a (colossal) baby chimp who’s initially hostile to Kong and then becomes his sidekick after being won over by Kong’s kindness. The baby has the type of expressive face that made Gollum such a vivid digital creation and does a lot of mugging with it. I hate him. He’s a winsome abomination, and I hate him so much.

There’s room in the kaiju genre for the silly and the serious, but it’s telling that the American Godzilla franchise is leaning so hard into the former just as the recent Japanese reboots, including last year’s startlingly great Godzilla Minus One, have returned to the monster’s horror origins. In the Japanese movie, which won an Oscar earlier this month for its visual effects, Godzilla is a disaster arriving on the shores of an already broken Japan at the end of World War II — a compounded nightmare mutated by nuclear tests carried out by an indifferent U.S. but also a symbol of despair. The kaiju of Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire don’t stand for anything but themselves. They’re just giant monsters that occasionally fight one another, which would be forgivable if the fighting in the movie weren’t so torpid. Godzilla x Kong comes from Adam Wingard, who also directed the previous installment, Godzilla vs. Kong. While the 2021 movie at least had its Day-Glo disco showdown in a neon-lit Hong Kong, the new one’s big idea is a zero-gravity fight in the Hollow Earth that renders the earth-shaking scale of its participants incidental. Without humans around to flee in terror or get crushed under humongous feet, the kaiju are just standard-issue blockbuster digital figments crashing together on a computer screen.

The human half of these movies has been their glaring weakness since the 2014 Godzilla, which was awe-inspiring and terrifying when its monster was onscreen and utterly stultifying for the long stretches he was off. Godzilla x Kong features a new character, a swashbuckling kaiju vet named Trapper who’s played by Dan Stevens, as well as returning ones: Rebecca Hall as Kong specialist Dr. Ilene Andrews, Kaylee Hottle as the Indigenous daughter Ilene adopted from the wreckage of Skull Island, and Brian Tyree Henry as whistleblower turned conspiratorial podcaster Bernie Hayes. It’s a great cast, mostly wasted. Hall is tasked with delivering gouts of exposition and staring in feigned wonderment at screensaver-resembling new regions of the center of the Earth. Stevens gets a fun entrance, but he and Henry have both been cast as the wacky guy in the expedition, and all their scenes together have the awkwardness of two people who have shown up to a party in the same outfit. The contradiction of these movies is that the people are just a means to enable the monster-matchup goods, and yet the more we see of the monsters, the less special they become. In Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, they don’t feel special at all despite Godzilla’s pink tips and the mechanical glove that Kong starts wearing. As the title implies, they’re just two brands doing a collabo at this point, making room for more tedious world-building and lore. After all, they’ve got a whole cinematic universe to support now — maybe the cuteness is just in service of selling more merch.