‘Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire’ review: Monster-sized chaos

Movie review

Godzilla is pink.

Say what?

Pink!

A snarling, stomping monster the color of frosting on a 5-year-old’s birthday cake? What’s up with that?

“My favorite color’s pink.” 

Says who? Adam Wingard, the director of “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire,” that’s who.

Well then. He’s the big cheese on the picture, and what he says goes. And so pink it was. 

They let you do that in Hollywood when your previous movie, “Godzilla vs. Kong,” the direct predecessor to this one, raked in $470 million at the worldwide box office.

“I always wanted to be on the edge of absurd and real,” Wingard amplified in the picture’s production notes, “and the movie’s constantly playing with that — Godzilla’s new design does that.”

To be fair, the pinkening of the megalizard doesn’t happen until late in the movie. And it’s his dorsal plates and eyes that get the primary treatment. Yep. Godzilla has pinkeye.

He’s his usual grayish self until the transformation. And to be fairer still, he’s not really in the movie overly much. Despite his top billing in the title, this is mostly Kong’s story. 

It’s Kong who we see at the start, battling snarling prehistoric saber-toothed critters, ripping them to pieces and spraying the landscape with their gooey green blood.

And it’s Kong reestablishing his psychic connection with Jia, a young deaf girl played by Kaylee Hottle who taught him sign language in 2021’s ”Godzilla vs. Kong.” 

Kong, it seems, is a lonely fella, wandering solo through a subterranean realm called Hollow Earth, a vastly more spacious venue than his ancestral home of Skull Island.

He’s the last of his kind, supposedly, which gives him an even tighter connection to Jia, who as far as she knows is also the only surviving member of the Hollow Earth tribe called the Iwi. Outsiders, both of them, in a world they never made.

That, and the introduction of a rambunctious little kid ape for whom Kong develops paternal feelings, makes him a kind of touchy-feely beastie. As opposed to the ill-tempered Godzilla, who is a stompy-squashy creature. 

While Kong and Jia are in the underworld seeking their roots, they’re accompanied by other human characters played by Rebecca Hall, as Jia’s mother figure, and Brian Tyree Henry, as an annoying blogger (both returnees from “Godzilla vs. Kong”), and newcomer Dan Stevens playing a, believe it or not, dentist. On tap: tooth extraction and a dental implant for an injured Kong. 

Meanwhile, Godzilla is up on the surface world crashing and trashing the landscape. Eventually, the two team up, and the smash-crash action goes into hyperdrive.

Look, with that pairing, you know what you’re going to get. And in this picture you get it. And get it. And get it.

The CGI is off the leash. The manufactured chaos is unrelenting. Monsters punching monsters. The pyramids are peril. Awesome deconstruction there. 

Cities are laid waste. Sorry about that, Rio de Janeiro. Such a shame, Cairo. 

People look up. Gape. Then run screaming for their lives.

At least Tokyo is spared this time. Imagine the relief in Japan. 

Within the past year, Tokyo got the Godzilla treatment in the Japanese-made “Godzilla Minus One.” Best Godzilla movie ever. Its human characters are well developed and sympathetic. Its script is coherent. Its special effects are first class. It’s serious. The Oscar it won was eminently well-deserved.

When Hollywood gets its mitts on these characters, “Godzilla x Kong” is the result. Serious? No way. No how. 

Pink!