Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire

ZERO STARS/****
starring Godzilla, King Kong, Rebecca Hall, Brian Tyree Henry
screenplay by Terry Rossio and Simon Barrett and Jeremy Slater
directed by Adam Wingard

by Walter Chaw Maybe this is how it starts, though I know we must be in the middle if not at the end. More to the point, maybe this is when we notice how close we are to the door to the processing house–to the slaughter. I want to be clear, for posterity’s sake, that I believe we are at the very edge of it. I want it to be on record that I’m afraid. I think we may even be inside, in the stench of its fear and blood and shit, pop-eyed with the too-late realization that all this time, we were waiting in this line for this outcome, and we’ve known it all along. We have been conditioned to be surprised every single time it swims to our attention for a few minutes (which used to happen infrequently, first years, then months, then days, then hours apart; soon it will be seconds) that our lives hold no value to the machineries running us save for the material weight of our flesh. We have been conditioned to forget this every time we’re accidentally confronted with it again. They did it by teaching us to question–and discount–the suffering of others. Not completely; not everyone and not yet. But mostly, and some of you are making me a little worried. I feel like Kevin McCarthy in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, although I’m not as sure I’m who I used to be anymore, either.

Adam Wingard’s execrable Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is too foul and hamfisted to be the cause of anything, but it, like sputum when examined under a microscope, might point to the root malady spreading through us like fire through dry brush. It is an exercise in nihilism, in anti-empathy. It is a punishing, bludgeoning sensory device punctuated at regular intervals by the wholesale annihilation of monuments to human achievement while laying waste to cities without also showing the agony of people in the seconds before they’re turned to paste and buried under rubble. In 2015, the terrorist group ISIS broke into a museum and destroyed artifacts of the Assyrian Empire; I remember it was referred to as an act of “cultural genocide” in a campaign to eradicate traces of pre-Islamic culture in areas they controlled. The images of it left me nauseous. Using American weaponry, Israel is now levelling landmarks and universities in an area they would like to populate with settlers, and we’re not allowed to call that anything other than righteous. When I see the Parthenon vaporized in a big-scale “entertainment” intended for a mass audience, I think about the trailer for Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor and how crowds cheered the technical wizardry that gave us a bomb’s-eye view of ordnance dropped on American servicemen. At least this was seen as tasteless and problematic at the time. I doubt Godzilla x Kong will inspire any dialogues of the sort.

Part of that is because Godzilla x Kong is inoculated against criticism. Lob any at it, and you will be identified as a humourless scold incapable of joy. The joy of an animated baby gorilla having an hours-long “conversation” with an animated adult gorilla through gestures, wet eyes, and yawps. The joy of glimpsing Toshiro Mifune’s performance from Yojimbo as it’s surreptitiously mapped onto the face of a giant ape. The joy of seeing the Great Pyramids reduced to bricks and sand as part of the grand spectacle of erasing any evidence of spiritual aspiration from the face of this soulless wasteland. Speak of how Godzilla and King Kong, both, are loaded relics of the American Empire–artifacts of war crimes committed against the Japanese and chattel slavery here at home, respectively–and be crowned King Wet Blanket at the bread and circus of the moment. The minimum requirement is that this film be accepted; the urgent demand is that it be enjoyed. If you don’t enjoy it, there’s something wrong with you. If you don’t enjoy a cacophonous, invasive, unimaginative slog, a two-hour strobe light of a thought-eradicating mindwipe that teaches us to watch the Rio de Janeiro beachfront get flattened along with a substantial portion of its six million inhabitants like a spectator at a wrestling match, then there’s something wrong with you. You are too sensitive. You wonder about all those people when the movie, dummy, is giant things engaging in inscrutable battles using your lives as collateral, justification, and cannon fodder all at once. King Kong rides Godzilla for a second in slow-motion as they launch themselves, also in slow-motion, into battle with a red ape and its servant, a frost lizard.

The red ape, by the way, wields a whip and controls hundreds of Black apes (like Kong) in a quarry where they’re treated like slaves. I mention this because you might tell me I’m reading into the Kong character and not out. If I’m doing it, the filmmakers are doing it, too–the difference being they don’t want you to think about it. The mystical native earth child from the last film, Jia (Kaylee Hottle), returns to again be the “pure,” Avatar-like stereotype who serves as a bridge between Man and Beast, with the added issue of interracial adoption in a horrifyingly glib subplot about her relationship with her new mom, Dr. Andrews (Rebecca Hall). If the demand is that I not dwell on things like this in a movie that is such garbage you must not think about it before, during, or afterwards to fully enjoy it, I wonder why this was even included. There is a band of natives in the film, all portrayed by Asian actors who don’t talk–not even their leader, played by Hong Kong actor Fala Chen, who found her most tremendous success recently in a television soap in which she plays another non-verbal character. Is this providence or a play at acceptance into the Chinese market? Whatever it is, it’s a lot of Asians in mystical outfits doing magic among the apes in the middle of the planet. If you are bothered by any of the racial dynamics of Godzilla x Kong, you’re obviously doing it wrong. Do not be bothered by anything, that’s the first step. The next is to enjoy the thing that is bothersome. Like it. Slurp it up.

None of this is to say that I loathe this movie for its shoddy politics and abhorrent timing. I loathe it because it’s terrible in every other conventional way as well. The dialogue is appalling, slack and rhythmless–a conductor using an old piece of celery in place of a baton to beat you into thundering, exhausted submission. Fwap! Fwap! Fwap! To liven things up, Wingard attempts a James Gunn-ism, randomly dropping Badfinger and Kiss into incoherent action dumps, but the tracks are witlessly curated and employed (just like the previous entry’s insertion of a Dobie Gray classic that saw Kong longing for the “freedom of [his] chains”). Comic relief Dan Stevens and Brian Tyree Henry have whatever timing comes naturally to them neutered by lousy editing and worse writing, while poor Hall can’t save her character from being the thing that says, “I forgot to tell you…” to introduce one loud deus ex machina after another. She’s the ring girl who tosses a folding chair into the cage match. Eat it up, paying customers! I will say that the monsters don’t destroy Christ the Redeemer, even though it’s right there to be used as a cudgel or a sap. Why doesn’t Godzilla x Kong demolish a Catholic relic the way it destroys Egyptian, Asian, and ancient Roman ones? Didn’t I tell you to stop thinking? It’s not a plot that drives Godzilla x Kong, it’s a march of chryons and establishing shots identifying what they’re going to pulverize on the way to a touching scene where Kong adopts red ape baby and Jia tells Dr. Andrews that, despite all the contrary evidence of her actions and convictions, she would rather be in Dr. Andrews’s white upper-class world than in middle-of-Earth with her fabulous Asian children of the planet savouring their Cirque du Soleil matinees and revues. You are allowed to feel touched by this cheap, unearned, and dishonest sentiment. You are allowed to wallow in the majesty of the eradication of hundreds of thousands of human lives, vanished at your pleasure. You are not allowed to think about who you were when things bothered you or who you’ve since become. At least until the door closes behind you and you hear the blade meant for you sharpen against the strop. Then you can think about that all you want. Go ahead.