A giddily cartoonish box office behemoth that didn’t get enough credit pulverizes George Miller’s golden goose on streaming

There was perhaps no worse time to release a Monsterverse film than late 2023/early 2024. For the most part, Legendary’s spectacle-heavy monster movies make for perfectly passable outings, but when the world is still having a torrid love affair with a film like Godzilla Minus One (which actually understands why Godzilla is so awesome in the first place), throwing in the towel is no shameful move.

And yet, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire cleared its throat and stepped onto the world stage anyway, delivering the exact breed of profoundly silly, glitzily choreographed monster mashing it promised without so much as lifting a finger in the realm of theme or storytelling. Or so one might think.

Regardless, it’s no question that the former aspect is responsible for its streaming success. Per FlixPatrol, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is currently the third most-watched film on the United States’ Netflix charts at the time of writing, leaving the likes of Mad Max: Fury Road (fourth place) and Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (10th place) in their own, bullet-riddled dust.

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire stars Rebecca Hall, Brian Tyree Henry, and Dan Stevens as a hastily gerrymandered expedition team who bear witness to King Kong’s latest plight; teaming up with his best frenemy Godzilla in hopes of freeing Hollow Earth from the tyrannical Skar King and his cryokinetic slave Shimo.

Many have pointed to the atrociously-written human characters as a key downfall of The New Empire, as we don’t spend enough meaningful time with them to either set up or pay off the thoroughly forgettable emotional arc. The actual infraction, however, was trying to include such an arc in the first place.

Indeed, while a traditional Godzilla or King Kong story rightfully ensures that the monsters are in service to the human story, this is a film where the humans need to be in service to the monster story, or simply just the monsters’ nature. This Godzilla isn’t defined by any sort of WWII allegory, and this King Kong isn’t a vehicle to explore our destructive addiction to spectacle; these are monsters that need to fight to save the planet because they live in on it and want to continue living on it. The human characters, then, need only enable these two to do exactly that; The New Empire mostly understands that.

Unfortunately, it didn’t seem to understand that quite enough, and loses points for trying to fine-tune an emotional core that was never going to be any good anyway; certainly not in the context of a film whose prime directive was atomic carnage. Nevertheless, the filmmaking lessons that can be learned from The New Empire makes it a surprisingly valuable piece of work; Godzilla Minus One may have been a sensational piece of humanist storytelling with awe-inspiring monster sequences, but The New Empire is a perfect case study of understanding what makes your film worthwhile, but not understanding that enough. That counts for a whole awful lot.