How do I even begin to explain the latest film in Warner Bros.’ current series of Godzilla/King Kong movies? After seeing the spectacular Godzilla Minus One last year, I was kind of dreading this movie. It was more evident than ever to me at that point that American filmmakers are not who should be tackling the Godzilla brand. So, essentially I went into Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire expecting to not enjoy it very much. And while it is a better time than I expected, it does fall prey to a lot of what I was worried about going into this film.

I am not even going to bother writing a synopsis of Godzilla x Kong. There are human characters here. They are less important than ever. They are here to explain the lore of these monsters to you. And then they go away and the monsters fight and stomp on things. And that’s what you’re here for, right?

So, it’s important to note here that Godzilla vs. Kong came out in March 2021, and it was very much the first big movie released theatrically (it also streamed day-and-date on HBO Max), since the beginning of the pandemic. Looking back at my initial review for Godzilla vs. Kong, and then the general consensus of reviews, I think we may have been a bit too kind to that movie. We were all probably so excited to see a movie like this on a big screen again, we had that starry-eyed big cinema thing tricking us into thinking that was a good film.

And while there is an inherent chutzpah and childlike joy baked into these movies, I was still mainly bored here. You would think a movie that’s two hours of monsters fighting each other and stomping on monuments in various European cities would be more fun than this. I will say it’s an improvement over the last few movies in this universe, namely Godzilla vs Kong. There is even a weaker focus on the human being characters here, and that seems like a smart choice. And I do respect a movie that has Rebecca Hall first on the call sheet and lets the always charming Dan Stevens use his real accent. But again, the people don’t really matter here. The product placement seems more important than any living, breathing human being in this film.

The story here is remarkably stupid, what there is of a story. The visual energy here is kind of fun – there’s like a very 1980s neon color palette and very on-the-nose needled drops here that makes me think director Adam Wingard is going for some kind of Guardians of the Galaxy thing here. And that’s fun for a while. And yet, I also felt myself fighting the urge to nod off during the big, loud punchy-punchy fighty-fighty scenes…more than once.

Ultimately it’s a bit of a chore to force oneself to care about anything going on here. Nothing in this story really makes sense. But of course, for some viewers this is more feature than bug. That’s not why we do any of this, right? You just want to see the CGI monsters attack each other. It’s just kind of underwhelming after the singular Godzilla Minus One, we’re back to this kind of movie. The argument could be made those two films are doing very different things, and it’s a fool’s game to compare them. And while I would agree with that, and while I’m sure this very well could be everything fans of this franchise want it to be, as a whole I was just kind of bored throughout.