Culture Crash: Heading To The Movies? Avoid This Blockbuster

WELCOME TO CULTURE CRASH, WHERE WE EXAMINE WHAT’S NEW AND OLD IN ENTERTAINMENT.

When’s the last time you went to the theater or fired up a new show… only to be completely disappointed by what you saw? For me, it just happened. It was this gloomy day, and I decided to go check out Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire in theaters.

I had seen the movie was doing unexpectedly well at the box office and since I liked Godzilla vs Kong back in 2021, I figured I might really like it. I got to my seat, settled in for some good old fashioned gorilla and nuclear lizard fun and then the movie started. Right off the bat, I thought it looked bad. The CGI was distractingly wonky, Kong’s size never seemed consistent, and the oversaturated colors felt like overkill.// I love Rebecca Hall, Brian Tyree Henry, and Dan Stevens, so I was excited to see them in action but, it turns out the human characters barely have anything to do, mostly they seem like they’re just there to magically intuit story beats and then deliver them to the audience in large exposition dumps.

As soon as enough story has been spoonfed to the audience, it was right back to the wonky CGI. It was one of those movies where I kept looking at my watch. I went there hoping to love it, but.it just felt like a waste. A waste of a good cast and a waste of two iconic characters. Or maybe my disappointment came from the fact that an actually great Godzilla movie, called  Godzilla Minus One, just came out last year and won an Oscar. Something about seeing such an artful, evocative story about Godzilla followed so closely by such a nonsensical movie just left a bitter taste in my mouth.

A woman who was sitting near me in the theater put her coat on and left about halfway through the movie, and I kept wondering if she’d come back to finish the movie. She never did. I hope she had a nice night because mine was pretty boring.