Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire promises mindless fun but lacks the imagination to fire up the senses

King Kong and Godzilla are back and this time they’re besties. (Supplied: Warner Bros.)

If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.

Last time we encountered King Kong and Godzilla (or Hollywood’s lesser version of him, anyway), in the self-explanatory Godzilla vs Kong, they ended up putting aside their differences to defeat Mechagodzilla in a brawl that laid waste to half of Hong Kong.

In Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire — which somehow skips over “Godzilla 4 Kong: The Honeymoon Years” — their relationship has evolved into a precarious détente.

The great ape has made a home for himself monkeying around in Hollow Earth, the mythical fantasy world beneath the planet’s crust, while the radioactive reptile remains on the surface, helping ward off beastly threats to an otherwise ungrateful humanity. (To be fair, he is accidentally stomping their major tourist destinations.)

As always, poor Godzilla is just misunderstood. When he curls up like a kitten for a nap in the Colosseum after a hard day’s fight, he has our hearts in his clammy little claws.

The same can’t be said for the movie’s returning human characters, who are once again tasked with delivering thankless exposition and feeble stabs at comedy.

Rebecca Hall is back, sporting a chic new ‘do and grim new expression as Kong expert Dr Ilene Andrews, as is Kaylee Hottle as the doctor’s adopted daughter Jia, a hearing-impaired Skull Island native with a psychic connection to the big gorilla. Also collecting another pay cheque is Brian Tyree Henry, who’s saddled with the movie’s most impossible task: making a podcaster funny.

Responding to a distress signal from deep within Hollow Earth, the team are joined by Dan Stevens’s Trapper, a monster vet in a douchey Hawaiian shirt who the movie introduces like he’s the second coming of Snake Plissken.

Back beneath the earth’s crust, Kong clashes with a hostile army of apes led by the villainous Skar King, an aggrieved simian with questionable grooming habits, a whip made of dinosaur bones, and an ancient vendetta against Godzilla. He also keeps a pet radioactive kaiju — that’d be Shimu, if you’re playing titan bingo — chained up and ready to rumble.

Kong won’t be alone for long. Godzilla has soon picked up the scent of a skirmish, and the intrepid humans discover an ancient civilisation of old-timey tribal tropes — led by Fala Chen’s Iwi Queen — who worship the series’ most iconic diva, Mothra. (Alas, nobody shouts “Mothra is mothering!”, which seems like a missed opportunity.)

Godzilla vs Kong was something of a surprise smash during a respite from lockdown in 2021, when the prospect of seeing epic monsters square off on the big screen seemed like the perfect balm after months of house arrest.

But the sequel arrives after years of the usual mirthless Hollywood spectacles, which promise mindless fun but lack the imagination to fire up the senses. (It doesn’t help that the great, Oscar-winning Godzilla Minus One, while obviously very different in tone, is so fresh in our memories.)

Directed, like its predecessor, by American genre filmmaker Adam Wingard (You’re Next; The Guest), Godzilla x Kong is a blur of noise and colour that does have its moments of charm.

Kong’s grunting and growling smackdown with the Skar King, set against a smouldering subterranean landscape, feels like a wrestling match waged between ancient gods. And his table manners, or lack thereof — snacking on a serpent’s neck as though it were a sushi roll — continue to be a nice running gag.

As in the previous movie, the netherworld of Hollow Earth casts a shimmering, multi-coloured spell, giving the impression of being trapped inside a magic crystal or a stoner’s panel van, circa 1977.

Less impressive is Wingard’s reliance on an aesthetic schtick that felt played out five years ago: oodles of lazy neon, a synth score, and the sort of FM radio needle drops that even the Guardians of the Galaxy or Thor might think twice about using (nobody needs to be exposed to KISS in 2024).

Godzilla x Kong shouts fun — splashes it across the screen with every tool in its digital paintbox. Still, for a movie that features Kong and Godzilla going up against a super-ape riding a radioactive dinosaur, it’s surprisingly dull; devoid of much in the way of wonder, soul, or the genuinely strange.

By the time the monster tag teams are soaring toward each other in embarrassing slow motion, even two giants of the cinema have been reduced to something as common — as lacking in invention — as Marvel superhero spectacle.

With all respect to the talented visual effects team, who are only operating according to their brief, I spent most of the movie wondering how easy it may soon be to re-create all this generic commotion in Open AI generative video, with a few text prompts and a general knowledge of monster lore.

At what point will it merely be easier, and cheaper, for studios to farm out this kind of product to anonymous AI servers — or even let audiences create their own versions? When big-screen spectacle becomes lacklustre, can viewers be blamed for not knowing the difference between AI and the real deal?

Godzilla x Kong isn’t exactly the death knell of the blockbuster — and it’s unfair to ask that a simple story of friendship between a nuclear lizard and a 50-foot ape bear the brunt of cinema’s woes. But it might be a sign that Hollywood needs to watch out, lest it become the next extinct species.

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is in cinemas now.