‘Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire’ Review: A Godzilla Spectacle Minus One Thing: A Reason to Exist

variety.com:

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Watching “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire,” I realized that the movie, a standard overly busy and mediocre blockbuster with a pretty awesome wow of a clash-of-the-titans climax, was demonstrating one of the essential principles of Hollywood movie culture today.

Namely: All blockbuster movies are now connected! Kong, living in the Hollow Earth, where most of the film is set (the Hollow Earth is a place I’ve never much liked the idea of, since it seems like Earth’s version of a storage basement), is supposedly the last of his kind, but he discovers a child ape who actually looks like an homage to the cuddly creature in the 1967 Japanese film “Son of Godzilla.” This kid gorilla leads Kong to a tribe of scraggly hostile apes who are living in a slave society presided over by the Skar King, an evil ape with blotchy red hair who’s as tall as Kong and wields a skeletal bone whip that looks like it was fashioned out of the spine of a sea serpent.

He also commands, as a kind of personal weapon of mass destruction, a gigantoid creature who’s like a stegosaurus who got left in the freezer — and, in fact, his main power is a breath ray that can turn anything, including the mighty Kong, to ice.

In other words, Kong is facing a force who’s exactly like the villain in “Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire”! Then there’s Godzilla.