In another new departure for the column, let's venture forth into the world of experimental phonetics, with film director Adam Wingard as our guide. Wingard's last film was Godzilla Vs Kong; his new film, in a bit of a continuation of pace, is called Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire. How exactly are we supposed to say this? Well, according to Wingard, the X is silent. You don't get a great many single-letter words in English, and this is the first instance I can think of of a single-letter word where the letter is not actually pronounced. As it doesn't seem to mean anything anyway, one can only assume it's there because Elon Musk needs the publicity and has some dirt on Wingard or the script-writers.

Anyway, in a world where so many promising films have been clobbered by the makers' insistence on setting up a raft of sequels and spin-offs, there was something genuinely refreshing about the makers of the Monsterverse films admitting they really didn't have anything in mind to follow Godzilla Vs Kong   – it was the one the previous three films had all been building up to, to some extent, and they would happily have stopped at that point. But some surprisingly good reviews and healthy box office returns put an end to that, so here we are.

The state of play at the start of the film is that giant ape Kong has taken up residence in the interior realm of the Hollow Earth, where he seems to spend most of his time eating other, smaller monsters, while Godzilla is topside killing any monsters that cause too much trouble. (The plot device from the TV show where the Hollow Earth lives in a sort of time warp quietly gets forgotten about here.) But something is clearly afoot as the adopted daughter of chief Kong researcher Rebecca Hall is having strange visions of a looming catastrophe: Hall is so desperate for answers that she calls on nutty monster conspiracy theorist Brian Tyree Henry (it's very hard to shake the suspicion that this is just because Henry was already contracted for the film). With the help of Dan Stevens, whose character is a vet specialising in the dental care of giant monsters, and the daughter (Kaylee Hottle), the four of them set off into the interior of the planet to try and work out what's going on.

Meanwhile, also in the centre of the Earth, Kong finally meets some other mega-quasi-gorilla-ish beasties, including a cute little one (only about the size of a bus) whose name, research tells me, is Suko – presumably derived from �son of Kong', although there's no suggestion Kong ever knew Suko's mother. But something nasty is dominating this population of really big apes, with evil designs on the surface world. So possibly it's all for the best that Godzilla has been on a sort of backpacking tour of Europe, munching on a few nuclear reactors to build his strength up, and generally preparing for some major exertion. Now if our heroes could only get in touch with someone who has a track record in making Godzilla behave sensibly and team up when the situation demands it. . .

So, Godzilla x Kong (the New Empire bit of the name is basically a fridge subtitle, it not being at all clear what this refers to) finds itself as the seventieth anniversary Godzilla movie – the 'official' anniversary film, for contractual reasons, had to come out the year before, which may actually explain why it's called Godzilla Minus One. Godzilla Minus One deservedly won an Oscar; Godzilla x Kong almost certainly won't, or at least not one that anyone really cares about. The division of labour between Legendary Pictures (makers of the Monsterverse films) and Toho (creators of Godzilla) seems to go something like this: these days, Toho do thoughtful, sombre, allegorical films with the big G, while the Monsterverse films are just big, silly wall-to-wall CGI popcorn monster mashes (it's worth mentioning that Yoshimitsu Banno, director of Godzilla Vs The Smog Monster, amongst other things, still gets an exec producer's credit on the Monsterverse films, despite dying in 2017 – now that's what I call a legacy credit).

And currently it does seem to be working, for if you happen to enjoy films which mainly revolve around giant CGI monsters dinging each other in head with their fists, rocks, chunks of skyscraper, etc, then Godzilla x Kong will probably do the trick for you. There is a gratifying level of property damage at several points, with Godzilla in particular saving several photogenic cities by flattening their landmarks as collateral damage (the next movie may feature UNESCO hiring Kong to protect the few World Heritage Sites left standing by the end of this one). The various monsters are characterfully designed and animated, and the days when Gareth Edwards was rather too coy about showing the monsters fighting at all are long gone. There are lengthy scenes in this film where the camera just follows a monster going about its business, with no dialogue or any sign of human activity. Now, there is a potential problem here in that it does rob the scenes of any sense of scale – a giant monster without people running away from it screaming is just a monster – but it's generally pacy enough for this not to be significant.

I think the plot and internal logic of the film do make marginally more sense than in Godzilla Vs Kong, though this is admittedly an extremely low bar to clear, and the scenes with the human characters are generally reasonably interesting too – mainly due to a lively and fun performance from Dan Stevens, who makes his entrance being lowered on a rope into Kong's mouth. The only problem is that both Stevens and Henry seem to be the comic relief character, which results in another turf war on a slightly smaller scale than the one in the main plot.

It's not deep, it often verges on the silly, and you can forget about any notion of the monsters having any kind of allegorical function here – sometimes a monster is just a monster, it seems. But on the level of computer-generated crash-bang-wallop it does the business more than acceptably, with a few very pleasant surprises for long-term fans of the ape and the dinosaur and their respective franchises. It's not close to being the best film in the Monsterverse, but it's entertaining enough in the way it does all the things you'd hope.

Also Showing. . .

. . . but coming to the end of its theatrical run in the UK, is Thea Sharrock's Wicked Little Letters, which is (yet) another based-on-a-true-story hats-and-fags period film set in the early to mid 20th century. Small-town spinster Olivia Colman is receiving obscene and supposedly libellous letters from persons unknown; the finger of suspicion lands quite heavily on Irish immigrant and single mother Jessie Buckley, and she is packed off on remand. But disregarded local female copper Anjana Vasan thinks it isn't quite such an open and shut case as her male superiors do, and makes her own quiet enquiries.

Some potential here for an interesting piece of social history, I suppose, but it's clobbered by a script which is notably lacking in subtlety in several key areas, and also suffers from a major uncertainty of tone – is this supposed to be primarily a drama, and a rather bleak one, about the plight of women in the 1920s, or is it more of a feel-good knockabout comedy with amusing profanity and occasional slapstick bits? The director and scriptwriter seem to think the former; the advertising department appear to have reached a different conclusion. Colman and Buckley are as good as ever but it's quite on the nose and not quite the film it's being advertised as.

Awix

08.04.24 Front Page

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