So I just watched "Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire", the latest film in the so-called MonsterVerse franchise. How do you make a sequel to a series of overwrought monster flicks? Why, you throw in even more overwrought monsters with extremely convoluted intra-monstrum relations...and off we go! Apparently, a lot of cringe and some silly Hollywood jokes are also part of the concept. Cringe as in "teenage angst", "mum-with-a-teenager angst" and "the myth of the noble savage". But OK, the Black conspiracy theorist is still kind of cute. The former love interest of the mum-with-a-teenager, not so much.
The x in the title is supposed to be silent, and is a wink to the Japanese entertainment industry where the cross sign in a movie title means "crossover". Seriously, does anyone even care at this point that a titanic production featuring both Godzilla and King Kong is technically speaking a crossover? Didn´t think so either.
Besides, the real "crossover" (or rather near-plagiarism) is with "The Planet of the Apes". I can´t have been the only one who noticed certain relevant similarities. Since Kong has become the good guy, another primate has to be the bad one: Skar King, who is apparently based on gibbons and orangs. Our man Kong has to work overtime to show his competitor that hylobatids are the *lesser* apes!
Oh, and the special effects department had a lot of fun with this one, especially the scene where Kong and Godzilla have a little misunderstanding, destroying the pyramids of Giza in the process (although I think the Sphinx barely made it). Then it´s off to Copacabana for some new creative destruction! Humanity as a whole muddled through, however. So how do you make a sequel to *this* installment of the Titan saga? Well, the next MonsterVerse movie will be called "Godzilla x Kong: Supernova". I think we all get the drift...
Still, fun to watch. After a fashion.
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