Buckle up, planet Earth: The monsters are getting ready to rumble.
“Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire” (in theaters Friday) is the second installment in director Adam Wingard’s monsterverse epic. Feel free to call it the mother of all tag teams. By the time the mayhem is over, the cleanup bill surely runs into the trillions.
Tokyo? Trashed. Rio de Janeiro? Ripped to shreds. Cairo’s pyramids? King Tut is spinning in his tomb. Guess where Godzilla curls up to rest, like a Lab puppy in a dog bed? Rome's crumbling Colosseum.
“Well, I figure the greatest homage a filmmaker can pay to a city is having Godzilla destroy it,” Wingard says.
In 2021’s “Godzilla vs. Kong,” the “versus” said it all. The iconic supersized beasts have a colossal showdown, but a moment of détente between them hinted at the next film. Now, "x" marks the moment when the iconic Titans team up to fight their evil doppelgängers. Oh, and there’s a baby Kong.
Mega-monsters “seem to be having a cultural moment,” says Wingard, a nod not only to his films but the recent Oscar-winner from Japan, “Godzilla Minus One,” and the Apple TV+ series “Monarch: Legacy of Monsters." “Big pop-culture films like ‘Star Wars’ are always multifaceted. That's why I wanted to tell the story from the monsters’ perspective."
Wingard and star Rebecca Hall (Kong-lover Dr. Ilene Andrews) spoke with USA TODAY about the making of “Godzilla x Kong.”
After making “Godzilla vs. Kong,” Wingard had a critique for his own film: Too many people, not enough monsters. So this sequel pares down the human story and doubles up on the Titans while imbuing them with, dare we say it, some personality.
“I felt it was time to make the movie I wanted to see, where the monsters’ point of view is guiding us,” he says. Cue the scene in which Kong figures out what to do about his giant toothache, for example.
Godzilla, it must be said, stinks as an actor. No emotion, just pure rage. But thanks to leaps in computer graphics, Wingard was able to truly infuse Kong with a deep longing for home and yearning to belong. He even seems to crave parenthood (hence Baby Kong, named Suko).
Hall says the shoot took the cast, which includes Brian Tyree Henry (comic-relief podcaster Bernie), Dan Stevens (scientist Trapper) and Kaylee Hottle (Kong-whisperer Jia) – deep into real Australian rain forests. But working with Kong took imagination.
“Often, you’re acting to a tennis ball on a stick,” she says of effects-heavy movies. Hall describes one emotional scene that she and Stevens almost ruined with their laughter.
“Kaylee is reaching out her tiny finger to touch the huge fingertip of Kong, and while she is a consummate pro, Dan and I could barely keep it together, because she was touching one of those giant foam fingers you get at a sporting event,” she says. “We were losing it.”
Wingard is a big fan of the fantastical, ignited by “Star Wars” and fueled in the ‘80s by everything from Thundercats to Transformers. And while he enjoys the superhero franchises, he thinks monsters may soon have their moment.
“Right now, you have movies such as ‘Dune 2’ doing really well, and I think that’s because people like stories you can sink your whole being into,” he says, noting how even the smallest droids in the “Star Wars” saga often came with complex backstories.
“My mission is to create a world where you believe monsters really coexist with humans, and then deliver a character study of, in this case, Kong, and his emotional journey,” he says. “Plus these movies take a long time to make, so they won’t be saturating the market.”
Because “Godzilla x Kong” is not entirely a computer-generated film, the cast often found themselves in jungle locations that doubled for Kong’s Hollow Earth lair.
During one such foray away from base camp, Wingard was shooting a scene in which Hall had to walk around taking readings on the flora. The only trouble was, they forgot to bring the prop for the metering.
“But we had a focus puller with us,” says Hall, referring to a crew member who uses a mechanical device to keep the camera’s lens focused on the subject. She was handed that. “So I’m pretending I’m doing something important, but every camera department in the world will be going, ‘Why is she using a focus puller?’”
“Never say never,” Wingard says about another foray into the monsterverse. “When you do two movies like this back to back, you do wonder, do we make it a trilogy?”
While he says the answer to that question is “above my pay grade,” he has deliberately sprinkled “a number of Easter eggs into this movie that, if you spend some time freeze-framing, you might catch some hints of where we can go from here.”
We’re willing to bet a bushel of bananas that little Suko could swing into action next. Throughout “Godzilla x Kong,” Suko evolves from being a supremely annoying and immature thorn in a very patient Kong’s side to a charming sidekick.
Note to Wingard, we have your title: “Godzilla x Kong x Suko: Three’s Company.”
