Finally saw Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire today with my wife, and… I have some issues. And they can all be traced to the director, Adam Wingard. Spoilers below, but they are not marked, so skip the whole thing if you don’t want to know anything. This is a long post with a big rant at the end, so TL;DR, I loved it, but also hated it for one reason.
The movie, overall was better even than I thought it would be. The usual stuff was said about the human characters being boring and useless, and that Godzilla is barely in the film, and I found neither to be true. Godzilla’s appearances were spaced out throughout the movie, but it’s not like the ones where he doesn’t show up until late into the film, only has a few scenes, and he’s not onscreen for very long when he is. The 2014 film can make that claim, as can Godzilla vs The Sea Monster, and possibly Godzilla vs Kong too, but I think we got just the right amount of him. And the human characters were actually funny, and involved with the story. Yeah, they did the usual unbelievable exposition about things they couldn’t possibly know about while bringing along people on a mission who have no business being there (like a kaiju vet and a podcaster), and use the stupid cliche of a smart person having more than one PhD (nobody does that!), but this was probably the most enjoyable that the humans have been in the Monsterverse, or at least on par with the cast from Kong: Skull Island.
My wife even enjoyed the film, and she’s not a Godzilla fan. She enjoyed Godzilla Minus One (because, really, who wouldn’t, it’s the Godfather Part II of Godzilla films), but I didn’t expect her to get invested in this movie at all and to just be there to humor me. To both our surprises, she enjoyed it a lot, with the only thing she didn’t like being that she felt the final battle wasn’t long enough. Me personally, my only issue that isn’t part of my problem with the director is that the main villain wasn’t seen until halfway through the movie and I expected him to have a bigger role. That’s it, and we both enjoyed ourselves.
But, that leaves the issues that I have with where Adam Wingard has taken this series, and it’s an issue I had with the last movie, too. I do not like that Wingard has taken what started off as a fantastic but mostly grounded series and turned it into a full sci-fi series bordering on fantasy. What I mean by that is, in the first movie, there were giant monsters, yes, but their existence was given a grounded if implausible explanation. The second movie established the idea of Hollow Earth, but it was just giving the impression of some cavernous regions below the Earth’s crust that had ecosystems that some monsters fled to and thrived in as Earth cooled. The third film, while establishing the ideas of tunnels in the Earth for travel, ancient civilizations older than written history, monsters turning into energy beings, and the existence of aliens, it was still presented in a way that didn’t really break away from what the first two films set up. Fantastic, but still in the realm of believable if you were willing to stretch far enough.
But then, with the fourth film, Wingard made this bizarre world within our world that looks like something that would belong more in a Star Wars film, including a wormhole/warp-drive that exists inside the planet. This was taking it too far, I felt. And now, he’s gone even further, with the whole concept of the humans who live in the Hollow Earth manipulating gravity, using energy crystals, Mothra being summoned purely out of energy instead of being reborn through her egg, and telepathy between humans, as well as prophecies coming true. One character in the movie even uses the word “magical” to describe this whole thing, and yes, that’s a good description. Adam Wingard has taken this series with only a few science-defying conceits, and has built two films around throwing any sense of being grounded to a set of rules out the window.
But while I dislike these points, they don’t ruin anything for me; I still love the movie and the story being told. Those points, while disappointing in how things could have gone differently, more serious, in the last two movies, it’s not a deal breaker for me.
However, there is one thing, one very briefly seen thing in this movie, that not only ruins the movie for me, but also retroactively ruins the entire Monsterverse series. There is a moment in the film where Kong is walking across a chasm on the skeleton of a dead monster that is so big, the size difference between it and Kong is the same as the difference between Kong and humans. A skeleton of a creature that existed so large that it could eat any two monsters that have already appeared in this series in one gulp at the same time.
What. The. Fuck? This is beyond not acceptable, this is infuriating; this is insulting; this is a slap in the face! Congratulations, Wingard, you just reduced Godzilla and Kong and every other monster to utter irrelevancy in their own series by including this scene! I know there are creatures way larger than these monsters that exist in other franchises, but you do not put monsters into this franchise that are on another order of size from the main monsters. You don’t. Even monsters that are twice Godzilla’s size in total mass like Ghidorah, Biollante, or Destoroyah, they are all still on the same general size scale. Godzilla’s size compared to normal animals, on top of his power when fighting other monsters, is his main feature, and Wingard just shit on it and on the perceived enormity of these monsters in all previous films by making them share a universe with a creature that could treat them like mice.
Adam Wingard’s ideas are too silly and fantastical and go against the order established by his predecessors, and he should not direct any more films in this franchise before he does any more damage. I know that’s not gonna happen because he’s made huge money off both films he’s done, so I guess I’m just gonna have to tell myself that that wasn’t an actual skeleton but a stone and wood bridge built by the Kong apes made to look like a skeleton to seem scary to intruders, but dammit, this is gonna leave a sour taste for a long time.
I didn’t even realize. Maybe because he still had some hair. 
