Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire – proof of subpar cinema
Another episode of the never-ending monsterverse around a gigantic ape and a radioactive lizard is the best example of why Hollywood gives us almost exclusively uncreatively presented movies that taste like thrice-heated food, the plot of which is so uncomplex that it could be written on half a page of a napkin. I wouldn’t even consider it a disaster that Godzilla and King Kong have been on the screen for several decades. It’s just terrible the way these movies are made these days. Honestly, the Godzilla or King Kong films were never the most profound creations of the filmmakers, none of the scripts were metapsychic masterpieces, and the plots of all the films were more similar than eggs to eggs. But the latest installment is much (really much) worse.
The point is that the whole movie is too similar to other movies. It’s as if the screenwriters had a several-hour marathon of different movies and made their own work out of them. Kong gets a super gauntlet that looks too much like Thanos’ powerful gauntlet from “The Avengers.” The film features a large group of other giant apes behaving just like the primates in “Planet of the Apes”. Well, the archenemy of our two titans is called Scar – like from “The Lion King”.
Another massive problem is (in my eyes) the over personification of the monsters. Even the black and white monsters from the last century, played by people in costumes, were not as humanized as the current duo of giants. For example, Kong. Originally, it was just an overgrown gorilla who fell in love with a blonde woman and wanted peace on his island. Now a brave warrior, he walks more upright than most humans, can wield a shield deftly, and wields his weapons as if he were Aladár Gerevich reborn. That’s just not Kong, that’s a completely different Kaiju that has nothing to do with King Kong. The same goes for Godzilla, who can suddenly run like Usain Bolt.
Why is Hollywood doing this to us?
So… Good plot? No. Creative ideas? No way. Is there at least some good CGI? But mushrooms. CGI often looks like something out of a cheap computer game, and physics has been grossly ignored for some reason. So why is Hollywood doing this to us? Why don’t we get better movies, why are we always bombarded with sub-par films whose sole purpose is to dazzle the audience with big images so much that they don’t notice the plot and sensory void? Unfortunately, the answer is very simple… We want it that way.
Just look at Rotten Tomatoes and the critics speak for themselves. The tomato meter of film connoisseurs shows 55% – so not much, the tomato is legitimately rotten. The audience score is 92% – this is an incredibly good result, not even “Pain of Shame”, “The Green Mile” or “Jurassic Park” have that much.
This unrealistically good result lies in the fact that the audience already needs incredibly little to like it. It’s spectacular, there’s color, it’s booming, I can eat popcorn with it, it’s great. And let’s face it, I also partially belong to this group, but usually one such episode is enough for me. “Pacific Rim” was fine, “Pacific Rim: Uprising” was garbage. I liked “Birth of the Planet of the Apes” but every sequel got dumber and dumber. But mostly people say, “Hey, I know that, so I’ll do it again.” And that’s exactly why Hollywood prefers to show us slightly adapted but still the same stories with the same characters doing the same thing they’ve done a hundred times before, rather than producers “taking risks ” and tried something completely new. And that’s a huge shame, because the new stories are. It’s just that no one implements them.
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/godzilla_x_kong_the_new_empire
