This prologue is going to take a bit, so stay with me. The one attribute that Japanese Godzilla fans will always have over American ones is that they’re significantly more loosey-goosey with the often highly variable portrayals of the King of the Monsters on-screen. Is he an expression of Japan’s fears and the memory of cultural traumas (the atomic bombings, Fukushima, etc)? Yeah. Is he a goofy planet-protector with many silly friends and a weird little troll-son fighting against creatures from Planet X? Yeah. Is he cuddly enough that a Japanese TV show literally did an entire segment in which they granted a teenage girl her wish – to go on a date with Godzilla? Oh, you bet. He’s a cultural figure with many thematic applications and tonal variability, which is why Western audiences struggle so much with him – deprived of the original message of Ishiro Honda’s work thanks to self-imposed censorship by the importing studios, and we learned only after we headed into the campy joy of the Showa era, free from Raymond Burr interference, at American drive-ins of the original fable’s profundity.
Now, there will always be purists, but one would think this would have led Western audiences to a similar acceptance of the character’s pliability. Yet we seem only able to tolerate different perspectives if they’re not the dominant ones at the multiplex: Cornball (re: fun) shit struggles to co-exist with the serious. Perhaps it’s because of our self-identification with our media – Godzilla is a part of Japanese culture, but he’s not the totality of it – or that he’s primarily limited to one medium rather than having to compete with different ideations of himself in the pages of Shonen Jump (Joel Schumacher made campy, fun, gay Batman movies, and comic book nerds hated him so much for it that they spent the better part of a decade infecting all of culture with “grittiness” in an effort for people to try and take their shit seriously). Or it’s because we’re still ashamed about how badly we fucked up our first attempt back in ’98, or that Cloverfield beat Legendary to the punch when it came to making the franchise relevant again when the conditions were pretty much primed for it a decade later.
When Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla arrived in 2014, it marked the first real Western project to use the character as originally intended – cultural fears metastasized into a giant lizard creature whose wanton destruction is infinitely more preferable to the focused destruction of the other monsters out there – and single-handedly fucked everything up for whoever had to follow that up with a real sequel. King of the Monsters assumed that famous faces, heaps of melodrama, and a sprinkling of First Reformed apocalyptic ennui would be able to sustain the movie while the four monsters at its core weren’t duking it out, and it was about as wrong as one could get. The legwork hadn’t been done to build up any of these characters or any of the monsters not named “Godzilla” or “Ghidorah” – in essence, it was a sacrifice bunt meant to advance another runner to second. That runner was Kong, who got a highly-silly Monsterverse debut in 2017 when half the MCU headed to Skull Island, and whose presence set up the inevitable West vs. East showdown in 2021. We all knew Godzilla would win that fight in a heartbeat, but what people didn’t expect was that it would be one of the true-blue hits of the pandemic era, raking in dough hand-over-fist at the meager COVID box office (making $30 million opening weekend with half of the damn theaters in the country closed and the film being simultaneously dropped for free on a streaming service is an accomplishment). So, when Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire was announced, there was plenty of unearned skepticism about its prospects.
And now we’re in the present. Thank you for your patience; here’s the out-and-out hot-take that you’ve been waiting for: Adam Wingard is the strongest franchise-minded filmmaker that has ever worked within these parameters, and the bleating of people like me (but not as attractive) online doesn’t change the fact that audiences are responding to his work with the character. Sure, we may be in a strike drought when it comes to new releases, but this thing – a fourth sequel with a quarter of the stars of the second in the cast, a no-name villain, essentially retreading the premise of the last movie, and it’s an Easter-Weekend release – is outperforming Gareth Edwards’ juggernaut at Thursday night previews. You can only handwave away the differences so much (and God help you if you bring up fucking inflation) – the proof will come in the receipts, and regardless of its quality, Wingard is doing something to make Western audiences interested in a domestic blend of a cultural import. My explanation for this is that Wingard, who trained in horror and genre and who has made masterpieces (You’re Next, The Guest) and flailing failures (Blair Witch, Death Note), fundamentally understands how to reach a plurality of his audience in a way not seen since the early days of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The average person who likes seeing a big lizard and a big gorilla hit each other real hard will be entertained. The child who is astonished by city-wide carnage will be… entertained. The nerd motherfucker saying the word “Kaiju” in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Twenty-Four will not cop to it, but he will be entertained, at least in some part of his soul, even if he’ll find some way to screech about Godzilla Minus One’s Oscar win to everyone in shouting distance in the lobby afterward.
The question is, ultimately, why has Wingard succeeded where others have failed? There are several possible answers, but chief among them is that he has a proper non-human protagonist, one that exists as a counter to the sheer-force-of-mysterious nature that is Godzilla while preserving the King’s ambiguities. Kong’s value to these movies is absurdly underrated – he’s the lone monster (excuse me, Titan) who can emote, which makes him an emotionally resonant asset, but he’s also, in this interpretation, full of enough wit and guile to make up for what he lacks in strength. I remember people dunking on Wingard’s approach when he compared Kong to John McClane, but it’s true – when you’re a big-ass ape trying to land a TKO punch on a nuclear lizard’s jaw, it’s going to take every bit of the range of motion that those opposable thumbs give you to overcome that massive disadvantage. But he’s also just more openly relatable – Wingard’s perspective on Godzilla is that he’s essentially a gigantic cat, rousing from his bed (the Coliseum in Rome) to take care of mice (giant spider creatures and such) when they get too close to his nest – so watching him suffer through a toothache or scratch his ass or whatever is just close enough to our perspective that we feel close enough to him. Besides, all the guy wants is to find a family, and that’s where the emotional fulcrum of New Empire’s story. The only problem is that that lost family, hidden in yet another Hollow Earth within the Hollow Earth itself, is under the rule of a tyrannical despot who has managed to find himself a means to control one of the most powerful monsters glimpsed on screen yet. So, Kong, Godzilla, and an unnamed third monster have to team up in order to cut this guy down to size.
You may have noticed I haven’t mentioned the human characters, primarily because they’ve never been more irrelevant in the Monsterverse’s scheme of things. If you want mild human drama, Apple TV’s Monarch has you covered, but New Empire is wisely focused on the widescreen possibilities of its conflict. That’s not to say the cast is bad – any ensemble with Rebecca Hall, Bryan Tyree Henry, and Dan Stevens (doing his Ace Ventura best) is a pretty solid one – but they’re fundamentally filler in a way that doesn’t dominate the feature like it did in King of the Monsters, or how people think it does with the Edwards Godzilla (I’ll put up with dogshit dialogue for that perspective any day of the week, folks). They’re supporting roles, and although the Western takes on these movies have never really figured out that they can be swell color commentators, their main purpose is to enable our giant monsters to punch each other. So, what you get is action-packed fun that refuses to steep to Spielbergian profundity in an attempt to try and be something it is incapable of being: serious. Once a second monster comes into the mix, you have transcended the original limitations of the parable and stepped firmly into the ridiculous, and Wingard understands and embraces that. This isn’t a “turn off your brain” movie or whatever; it’s just aiming for a different pleasure center – the kind that gets you jacked up when, say, a wrestler pulls off a plastic Sting mask to reveal that it is, in fact, Sting, in full face-paint, beneath the mask. It’s clever and rewarding in a way that audiences can quantify but which can elude people who spend too much talking about the number of acts in a given story structure for a film like this. Three acts? Five acts? Eight acts? Oh, sorry, no one was paying attention — the rest of the world was paying attention to the radioactive dinosaur body-slamming a giant ape into one of the Pyramids of Giza.
Please don’t think I’m dismissing intellectual endeavor here — lots of fantastic scholarship has been written about these films, but it typically comes after the fact, once the thrills have faded and culture has moved on to the next shiny blockbuster on the calendar. Indeed, this defense understands and acknowledges the frivolous nature of this type of entertainment. But is that frivolity really a bad thing? The spirit of the Showa era in the Godzilla canon was one of tightly budgeted excess, in which the way forward was through increased absurdity – a testament to the cultural creativity of the Japanese in an era in which, in the aftermath of atrocities perpetuated by and against them, they forged a new national imagination through boundless creativity. A national icon of nuclear terror (and a proverbial horseman of death, tormenting a rebuilding nation for their sins) becomes a guardian of the Earth with an array of colorful pals at his side and an entire island to house them like a big ol’ happy family. The Heisei era offers another perspective for Japanese audiences, transforming the character for a rebuilt Japan.
But those original stories became meaningful enough to people worldwide that he became an icon: cartoons, comics, even squaring up against Charles Barkley in the ‘90s for a Nike ad before getting paid the highest compliment: A terrible American remake. This is Wingard’s true accomplishment: He is the lone Western filmmaker who tries to synthesize all of these eras into one specific international entertainment without any given element overwhelming the rest and his two films in this universe succeed at evoking that sustained creativity that is where the franchise gets its reputation for “fun.” There should be no guilt in indulging in these pleasures because the Puritan notion of edification-through-art is a functionally conservative one that wholly omits aesthetics, and to deny New Empire‘s successes at crowd-rousing is to ignore the hum of delight emerging from a late-night crowd as they watch a mini-van-sized tooth sail through the streets of Rio or the laughter that follows when Kong smirks at the giant ape-man whose mouth he’s just knocked it out of. This may not be the best American Godzilla film, or anywhere close to the best Kong, but it is certainly the best evocation of the Toho spirit to emerge from these shores.