Date night! Which means going to a used bookstore and then a combo dinner / late run movie since we had watched all the other ones again recently. Can’t always pick when babysitting will happen, and so.
Anyway, how does one even say this movie? Godzilla ex Kong? Godzilla times Kong? Godzilla and Kong? Do even the producers of the film know the answer to this question? (Do they care? I posit that they do not, since they have brand recognition regardless.) Anyhow: Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is about how things are going since Godzilla and Kong had some fights to determine who was the alpha giant monster and ultimately decided, hey, you stay up here and you stay down here, and everything’s cool, right?
Right?
A brief digression, if you will indulge me, to discuss spoilers for the Monarch series up to this point. See, they’ve been trying to make a Hollow Earth theory happen forever. And once they got there, it’s… weird and not fully thought through. Somewhere between ten and X miles beneath the earth’s surface, there’s another land. That land is full of Titan sized animals, which makes sense in context, and is maybe a quarter of a mile deep before gravity flips and there’s more land, which makes no sense. Like, you’re on a mountain, and above you some few hundred yards off, is a different mountain, whose top could poke you in the head if it fell. Also, there’s no obvious source of light, and yet everything is extremely well lit. Is there a night time? no clue, neither if nor how.
Anyway, below that area are caves leading down another mile or three (or X; how would I know?) to another land, which I think is also double sided in the same way? I forget. So I guess we’re dealing with the Honeycomb Earth theory at this point.
What’s important is the movie is following three divergent plotlines. In the first, Godzilla is wandering around on the surface looking for energy sources because he’s planning to be in a really big fight soon, which obvs terrifies everyone. In the second, some of the characters we’d recognize from the last movie but none of the earlier ones (as usual) are chasing a signal underground that has agitated Kong (and maybe Godzilla?). In the third, Kong is following what could just possibly be his family, deeper into the honeycomb. And eventually he follows Gollum into the land of Mordor[1].
Later (and also earlier), some titans fight each other. No, it’s true! And in the end, there is what I think can fairly be called a new empire. The things I still don’t know are if I’ve spoiled myself for the Apple+ TV show and what they might possibly do with yet another sequel.
[1] This is more factual than you believe it to be.