Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire (2024)

 

We have a winner for the stupidest movie of the year. It will take something colossally awful, like "Five Nights at Freddy's" to displace this from the list of dumb movies of 2024.  This is a perfect example of making up stuff as you go along. It's as if we are listening to a story being told by a parent to a small child, and every time the kid's attention starts to wander, the parent throws in something else that they hope will keep the kid entranced. Well, I am not a little kid, and most five year olds I know will see that this is a bunch of nonsense.

There are at least five movies in this franchise, and it feels like they are racing one another to be the most forgettable. One reason that this is true is that there are no characters that you can care for past a superficial level. I literally had no memory of the main characters in this film, being in the previous movie. There is an attempt to make us care about Kong, by having him bond with a mini Kong, but that did not work the way it should. I did sort of enjoy Godzilla curling up in the Coliseum in Rome, like it was a cat bed, but it did not endear him to me.

Every location in the movie has to have a title card, because we would not otherwise recognize Egypt with the pyramids or Rome. The real reason that there are so many label cards is that there are so many hidden worlds that we keep traveling to. Not only is there a Hollow Earth, but there is a subterranean Hollow Earth,  which has its own secret valley of giant apes. That section  is different from the hidden world of the Iwi people and the Temple of Mothra. How are they all collected, well get ready for an exposition dump when the scientist starts translating the hieroglyphics they find. It reads like a pretty sophisticated and detailed narrative, in spite of the fact that they are barely pictographs. 

It is so convenient that the Monarch Research group was working on an enhancement for Kong, that just happens to fit the one part of his body that is nearly destroyed by a Titan he encounters. Oh and it was very thoughtful to have it at the observation station that was destroyed, since no contact with the surface world is possible. This is just one incredulous moment followed by another. Unfortunately, none of them is very interesting.

Do you remember how impressive the dinosaurs were in that first "Jurassic Park"? Well now everything on the screen is supposed to impress you, and it looks cheesy.   When I had students discover PowerPoint, they all wanted to use every feature, the the presentations lose focus as a result. Same effect here. There are too many creatures, in too many environments, doing too many things that it just becomes boring.

It sounds like I hated this movie, I don't. I would only hate it if I had high expectations and cared about any of it. That was not the case. Go stream "Godzilla Minus One", and save this movie to put your toddlers to sleep by.