In Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire, Kong gets a new upgrade, a heavy-duty power glove, officially listed as the B.E.A.S.T. glove — the short-form of gobbledygook “Bio-Enhanced Anatomech Seismic Thunder” — that augments his strength with enough muscle that it can pummel sense into his raging frenemy Godzilla, when the giant green lizard loses its ability to distinguish between friends and foes.

Godzilla, though, doesn’t play second fiddle to anyone. It too gets an upgrade: a mauve-coloured atomic breath with 20x power. The two need their enhancements to break their new monster-villain Skar, a lean orange-furred tyrant orangutan who seems to have stepped out from a Sergio Leone-directed spaghetti Western.

A distant cousin of Gabbar from Sholay (also a byproduct of old cowboy films), who often whipped his bullet-holding belt to keep his minions in a state of frightened acquiescence, Skar wears the spine of a long-dead monster like a sash that he too uses as a deadly whip. A gem fixed at the end of his weapon lets him boss over Shimo, a mostly benevolent ice-breathing Komodo dragon-ish monster that caused the last ice age!

With the help of another fan-favourite monster (whose name I won’t give away), and the few humans they trust (Rebecca Hall, Dan Stevens, Bryan Tyree Henry and the young Kaylee Hottle), Kong and Godzilla battle Skar and Shimo from Kong’s domain, Hollow Earth, to Rio De Janeiro’s beach side, where their tussle rubbles the city’s buildings.

Preposterousness reigns as the order of the day in Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire

The screenplay by Terry Rossio, Simon Barrett and Jeremy Slater from the story by the film’s easy-going director Adam Wingard is hardly original, but it is a lot of fun.

Rossio, by the way, also has story credit with his writing-partner Ted Elliott in 1998’s Godzilla, and the rest of their filmography includes the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, Disney’s animated classic Aladdin, the first Shrek, the two Zorro films with Antonio Banderas and the Lone Ranger, so you know what you’ll be getting.

Even though he has top-billing in the title, for the most part, Godzilla is a side-character who sleeps inside the Colosseum in Rome. The emotion of the film, therefore, is burdened on to Kong and his big emotive eyes.

The big ape, who also finds a lost tribe of apes and becomes a big brother of sorts to a youngling chimp, carries the weight of the film quite well, without the need for dialogues; the humans, on the other hand, explain away the plot just fine for those of us who don’t understand grunts and roars.

Besides, with allowance to the ape named “Ape” voiced by John Cleese from the George of the Jungle, a speaking ape would be preposterous. Then again, with mechanised ape gloves that have gibberish titles, zero-gravity tussles between giant monsters in a sea of floating debris (a fun sequence, by the way), advances in science that throw away the laws of physics, and screw-ups with history on how our world came to be, preposterousness reigns as the order of the day.

But then again, who says one can’t enjoy wholesale idiocy once in a while.

Playing in cinema screens across Pakistan since Eid-ul-Fitr, Godzilla X Kong is rated U, and is suitable for audiences of all ages who want to see a feel-good blockbuster

Published in Dawn, ICON, April 14th, 2024