Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire Finally Stopped Pretending Godzilla and Kong Were the Same Kind of Monster

The title promises equality. The movie does not. And that turns out to be one of its smartest decisions.

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is sold as a two-monster event, a neon-lit rematch turned tag-team spectacle in which cinema’s most famous radioactive reptile and its most famous giant ape eventually discover that hitting each other is less useful than hitting somebody else. But watch the film rather than the poster and the arrangement is much stranger. Kong gets a story. Godzilla gets entrances.

Kong is lonely. He is ageing. His tooth hurts. He wants company and, more importantly, he wants to know whether there is somewhere he belongs. He discovers Suko, encounters an entire society of apes, recognises what Skar King has done to them and becomes involved in a conflict that changes his place in Hollow Earth. Godzilla, meanwhile, wakes up, destroys whatever threatens the natural order, absorbs more power and goes back to work.

That sounds like an imbalance because it is one. The mistake is assuming the film ought to correct it.

Kong can carry a scene. Godzilla can change one.

Kong has always been the easier of the two Titans to humanise. His face invites close-ups. His hands can touch, protect, hesitate and threaten. He can look embarrassed, irritated or wounded without the film needing somebody in a control room to explain the emotion. The New Empire understands this so completely that some of its best stretches are essentially dialogue-free character scenes.

The visual-effects team understood the assignment in unusually literal terms. In a detailed discussion of the film’s creature work, Wētā FX animation supervisor Ludovic Chailloleau described developing a distinct behavioural language for each Titan, while overall VFX supervisor Kevin Smith called Kong and Suko the film’s “heart and soul.” The team used performance reference and motion capture to maintain personality and body language across extended fully digital sequences. Their account of the process confirms what is already apparent on screen: these scenes were being approached as acting, not simply effects animation.

Watch Kong’s first encounters with Suko. Their relationship is funny before it is affectionate. Kong is not instantly paternal, and Suko is certainly not instantly trustworthy. There is suspicion, irritation and physical comedy. Gradually, something resembling responsibility takes shape.

That gives the film an emotional engine requiring surprisingly little spoken language. It also gives Kong something Godzilla does not need: development.

Godzilla works almost in reverse. The less the film asks him to explain himself, the more imposing he becomes. He is not searching for a family. He does not need a surrogate child. His psychology is expressed as purpose. A threat emerges; Godzilla prepares for it. If that requires turning Rome into a bedroom, attacking Tiamat or changing his own body into a more powerful form, so be it.

Kong gives the MonsterVerse someone to follow. Godzilla gives it something to fear, admire and wait for.

The film finally understands that partnership does not mean symmetry

Godzilla vs. Kong had a wonderfully simple problem built into its title: sooner or later, somebody had to win. Adam Wingard’s follow-up no longer has to sustain that rivalry, which frees the monsters from performing identical jobs.

The official Legendary synopsis presents the film as an adventure that pushes further into the Titans’ histories and the mysteries beneath the surface world. In practice, most of that expansion belongs to Kong. Hollow Earth stops being merely a spectacular environment and becomes his dramatic territory.

Skar King is crucial to this because he is not just another animal large enough to punch Kong. He is a distorted answer to Kong’s search for his own kind. Kong finds community and discovers domination. He finds other apes and learns that shared species does not mean shared values.

The contrast is built into movement as much as plot. Wētā’s artists described Skar King as physically opposite to Kong: longer, more evasive and manipulative, where Kong confronts problems with brute force. That difference makes their first meeting more interesting than a simple strength contest. Skar King has social power. Kong has moral authority almost by accident.

Shimo complicates it further. She initially appears to be another escalation in the MonsterVerse arms race — bigger threat, colder breath, more destruction — but the film eventually reveals her as another creature living under Skar King’s control. Kong’s conflict therefore becomes less about defeating a rival alpha than breaking a system of coercion.

Godzilla is better when the film resists turning him into Kong

There is a temptation in franchise storytelling to believe that every recurring character needs more interiority. Godzilla is evidence that this is not always true.

He has personality here. Plenty of it. His territorial irritation is funny, his fights are expressive, and the image of him curling up inside the Colosseum has an absurd charm. But Wingard does not force him through the same emotional grammar as Kong.

Godzilla is closer to weather with preferences.

When he enters a sequence, the atmosphere changes because everybody else has to respond to him. That is why his relatively limited screen time can feel larger than its duration. The film does not need us to wonder whether Godzilla has found himself. It needs us to wonder what happens when he arrives.

Wingard’s increasingly playful approach to the MonsterVerse is central to that confidence. In a 2024 interview, he discussed approaching new kaiju partly through the visual excitement he remembered from toy designs as a child. That conversation with Inverse helps explain the film’s unapologetic pulp energy. Pink atomic power, mechanical gauntlets, subterranean kingdoms and zero-gravity Titan wrestling are not treated as embarrassing concessions. They are the movie.

There is liberation in that. The 2014 Godzilla found awe by withholding its monster. The New Empire finds pleasure by refusing to apologise for showing him. Those approaches are almost opposites, but a franchise that lasts long enough should be allowed to change its cinematic vocabulary.

The humans are no longer carrying the entire burden

This is where the film is both stronger and weaker than some earlier MonsterVerse entries.

Rebecca Hall’s Ilene Andrews, Kaylee Hottle’s Jia, Brian Tyree Henry’s Bernie Hayes and Dan Stevens’ Trapper provide the human route through the mythology. Jia’s connection to Hollow Earth also gives the human material a direct emotional relationship with Kong’s story. But there are stretches where the people mainly explain information that the Titans make more interesting by simply behaving.

That is not necessarily a failure of the actors. It is the consequence of the franchise discovering that its digital characters can now sustain scenes themselves.

Production VFX supervisor Alessandro Ongaro described roughly half the movie as effectively a large silent film, with story communicated through body language, expressions, timing, framing and virtual cinematography. His breakdown also shows how Wētā FX, Scanline, DNEG and other teams divided enormous sequences and creature assets while maintaining continuity. The production account makes the achievement clearer: the monsters are not interruptions to the drama anymore. In significant portions of the film, they are the drama.

That is also what separates The New Empire from Monarch: Legacy of Monsters. The television series demonstrated that the MonsterVerse could slow down and build human drama around the shadow cast by Titans. Wingard’s film takes almost the opposite route. It asks how much narrative can be transferred directly to the creatures themselves.

Both approaches are useful. More importantly, they suggest the MonsterVerse does not need one fixed formula.

Suko is not comic relief. He is proof of concept.

Suko could easily have been unbearable: a smaller, cuter version of an established character introduced into a franchise that sells toys. The film is smart enough to make him troublesome first.

He attacks Kong. He misleads him. He has survival instincts formed inside Skar King’s world. Their eventual bond therefore has texture. Kong does not simply acquire a child-shaped accessory; he encounters someone who has learned the wrong lessons from the only society he knows.

This matters because Suko proves the film’s larger idea. If a Titan can lie, fear, improvise, test boundaries and gradually trust without speaking English, then the MonsterVerse’s creatures are capable of carrying more narrative than the franchise once allowed them.

Wētā’s work is doing character writing at the level of posture and timing. A look held for half a second longer can replace a line. The way Kong handles Suko can move from threat to exasperation to protection. Skar King’s loose, asymmetric movement tells us something before exposition does.

Big monsters acting is more interesting than big monsters merely arriving.

And yes, sometimes it is gloriously ridiculous

Any defence of The New Empire that pretends it is restrained would be dishonest.

Kong gets a powered gauntlet. Godzilla turns pink. The pyramids become part of a Titan wrestling match. Gravity briefly stops being an obstacle. Rio de Janeiro becomes the arena for a finale involving an enormous ape, an atomic reptile, an ice Titan and a smaller ape whose usefulness eventually becomes alarmingly practical.

The question is not whether this is silly. Of course it is. The question is whether the film knows what kind of silliness it is pursuing.

Mostly, it does.

Wingard shoots the Titans with a freedom that would have been difficult to imagine in the comparatively solemn 2014 film. Scale becomes flexible. The camera can move with the creatures rather than always observing them from a human viewpoint. Hollow Earth allows the film to treat them as inhabitants rather than intrusions.

That shift occasionally weakens the old sense of enormity. If everything around a monster is enormous, “giant” becomes less meaningful. But it gives the filmmakers something in exchange: speed, choreography and character interaction.

The film chooses momentum over reverence. It is a defensible trade.

The New Empire’s real trick is knowing which monster needs us

There is a lovely contradiction at the centre of this franchise. Kong becomes more compelling the closer we get to him. Godzilla often becomes more compelling the less completely we can possess him.

Kong wants things we recognise: home, connection, dignity, relief from pain. His scale is extraordinary; his needs are not. Godzilla’s appeal comes partly from the opposite sensation. We can read his intention without reducing him to a person in a monster suit with a conventional emotional arc.

The New Empire works when it lets that difference remain visible.

It is why the eventual team-up is satisfying even though the movie spends so much time keeping its stars apart. They are not two interchangeable superheroes waiting for the third act. Kong arrives with a conflict that has become personal. Godzilla arrives because something has become unacceptable.

One needs help. The other is help, assuming you can survive it.

For more on the film itself, its production context and Little Schmidt Productions’ production record, see our Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire production page.

The MonsterVerse has spent years asking how humans should live in a world of Titans. Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire stumbles onto a more entertaining question: what happens when the Titans are finally allowed to have the movie to themselves?

Kong, it turns out, has quite a lot to say.