In Review: 'Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire,' 'La Chimera'

In this week's reviews, Godzilla and King Kong are tag-team partners again and Italian director Alice Rohrwacher finds treasure with her divining rod.

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire
Dir. Adam Wingard
115 min.

There are so many Godzilla movies being produced right now that the titles themselves have started doing the math, though it’s hard to say whether Godzilla Minus One plus Godzilla x Kong equals more than a lot of monster fights. Still, more than a little franchise fatigue has started to sink in with the Hollywood “MonsterVerse” pictures, even though iconic beasts with 38 (Godzilla) and 13 (King Kong) films made about them over the decades have proved their longevity. The five MonsterVerse titles got off to a promising start with 2014’s Godzilla, which sputtered through the build-up before unleashing a third act where the revitalized predator stomped through San Francisco with awesome, fire-breathing, seat-rattling power. And that’s been more or less the pattern with the subsequent entries: Half-written human characters, city-leveling monster fights. 

Released during that stretch of pandemic when Warner Bros. was premiering movies in theaters and on HBO Max simultaneously, Adam Wingard’s Godzilla vs. Kong improved slightly on its two predecessors in paying off the promised conflict between ape and lizard, especially in a climactic battle royale that pitted them both against Mechagodzilla. The new Godzilla x King: The New Empire wisely cuts back the number of relevant human characters to three or four, rather than hoping in vain that their conflicts will amount to more than a hill of beans in a world where monsters are ready to strike on and below the surface. All they can really do is contain them as best they can and hope they’re not squished like scattered ants. We live in a reality where a bridge collapse is a major human tragedy; here, Godzilla stomps through several bridges without so much as breaking his stride.

The expectation, as with all Hollywood franchises, is that audiences have either just watched the previous film yesterday or that they didn’t forget any of the storytelling beats from Godzilla vs. Kong. One scenario is unlikely, the other is impossible. Nevertheless, it doesn’t take much time to pick up on the important details: Our Titan frenemies Godzilla and Kong have gone their separate ways, with Godzilla curling up for a nap in the Colosseum and Kong searching the monster-strewn underworld of Hollow Earth for more members of his species. When Kong proves a little too successful in finding them, the tenuous stability of the two co-existing worlds breaks apart, leading various human experts to intervene. These include Dr. Ilene Andrews (Rebecca Hall), the Monarch scientist who adopted a native Skull Island girl in the last film, podcaster/conspiracist Bernie (Brian Tyree Henry), and daredevil adventurer Trapper (Dan Stevens). 

The reunion of Wingard and Stevens, the star of Wingard’s best movie by far, The Guest, promises more fun than it delivers, but Trapper’s wisecracking is more easily integrated into this nonsense than the drama around Dr. Andrews and her adopted daughter, who aches for her lost people like the mighty Kong. Godzilla x Kong is marginally worse than its predecessor, but they both operate in much the same fashion, with an excess of frantic and janky storytelling eventually giving way to satisfying WrestleMania-style effects showdowns with Godzilla, Kong, and an iconic Titan-to-be-named-later, among other beasties. Goodness knows these sequences should be easy to resist, given how quickly they’ll be jettisoned from memory before the next MonsterVerse movie. But there are dozens of these things for a reason. — Scott Tobias

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire opens in theaters everywhere tomorrow.

La Chimera
Dir. Alice Rohrwacher
133 min.

La Chimera, the latest film from Alice Rohrwacher (Happy as Lazzaro), takes place in an Italian coastal town in the early 1980s, but its true setting is a kind of hazy space in which the past and present bleed into one another— sometimes revealingly, sometimes heartbreakingly. It’s a spot where millennia-old Etruscan artifacts can be found just beneath the surface, for those who know where to look, and music flows from family manors, even as they fall into disrepair. It’s not the kind of place where those mired in the past by heartbreak should spend a lot of time, but it’s where Arthur (Josh O’Connor), an English archeologist, finds himself drawn anyway. He’s lost Beniamina (Yile Vianello), the love of his life. And though in some ways he must understand that returning to her home and a family headed by Flora (Isabella Rossellini)—a frail matriarch and music teacher with her own difficulty separating fantasy from reality—won’t bring her back, that doesn’t mean he can resist its call.

That it’s also a place where Arthur’s strange gift for finding buried treasure using a divining rod is especially useful doesn’t hurt. Reuniting with a merry band of outlaw tombaroli, a romantic-sounding name for grave robbers, Arthur descends—literally and otherwise—into a shadowy economy in which locals trade priceless items from the past to shady members of the art world (including a mastermind played by Rohrwacher herself). It seems harmless enough. After all, the items are just sitting there, even if those who left them would probably prefer they remain undisturbed. But it’s an uneasy enterprise, one whose attraction to Arthur seems to be a need to get lost in the past in one way or another. It’s an impulse put to the test by a burgeoning relationship with Italia (Carol Duarte), a student of / glorified servant to Flora whose vitality makes her a magnet pulling Arthur from the underworld. But whether it’s strong enough remains an open question for much of the film.

Collaborating with cinematographer Hélène Louvart, who’s worked with Rohrwacher for over a decade,who shoots La Chimera in a dreamy, aspect ratio-shifting mix of 35mm and 16mm, Rohrwacher builds a complete, beguiling world. La Chimera reveals only the barest details of Arthur’s story, but each one matters, as do offhand moments that seem like they’ll have no bearing on what’s to come—like one character casually mentioning hearing a baby’s cries—whose significance only becomes apparent later. She keeps a light touch, which proves to be a necessary counterbalance to Arthur’s glumness. O’Connor’s half checked-out performance doesn’t make him the most compelling protagonist, but it suits a character who’s seemingly come to view life as a waking dream and now struggles to find a reason to wake up, no matter what consequences his slumber might invite. —Keith Phipps 

La Chimera opens in limited release tomorrow.