Apparently it’s the done thing at the moment for Godzilla movies to have really bizarre titles. What, exactly, does Godzilla x Kong actually mean? Godzilla Multiplied By Kong? Surely Godzilla + Kong would have sufficed. Still, Godzilla Minus One had a strange title as well (yes, it does make sense once you’ve heard the director’s explanation, don’t yell at us) and that ended up being one of the best movies of 2023, so even accounting for the American Godzilla films’ varied track record, we should give the benefit of the doubt to The New Empire.

A few years have passed since Godzilla vs. Kong. Kong is firmly established in his new home in the Hollow Earth, searching for other members of his species, while Godzilla continues to roam the surface world, getting into fights with other Titans and generally making a nuisance of himself. But when a new threat emerges in the Hollow Earth that’s too powerful for either of them to take on alone, these two rivals have to join forces to save the world.

On the most basic level, Godzilla x Kong does deliver what it promises. Nobody coming to see this is here for the human characters; they’re here to watch gigantic, skyscraper-sized monsters punch each other really hard in the face and smash things to smithereens. And the fights do live up to expectations for the most part: they’re well-choreographed and mostly clearly shot, with the different monsters’ various abilities allowing for plenty of clever flourishes and fun grace notes, like Kong bodily lifting another of his species by the ankle and swinging it around like a club. There’s genuine wit to some of the brawls, particularly when Godzilla and Kong finally reunite and inevitably have to duke it out before the movie can continue, with Kong dragging the big guy by his tail like a sack of radioactive potatoes.

The sense of scale falters here and there: sequences involving whole groups of giant CGI gorillas in CGI landscapes really could be about gorillas of any size because there are no human-scaled environments to offer perspective, and on the whole these enormous creatures just move far too quickly. 300-foot-tall beasts should end up with their thighbones poking out of their shoulders if they try to sprint, and it means that, for all that we’re constantly reminded how big they are in the dialogue, they never feel as big as they should. Contrast Godzilla Minus One, where he never really moves faster than a lumber and feels absolutely colossal as a result.

And speaking of the dialogue, it might be best not to. Godzilla x Kong is good fun when the kaiju are on screen, less so when the human characters are. The actors are gamely giving it their all, but nobody could mine compelling drama from the scene here where the movie comes to a screeching halt so they can literally read the backstory off a wall for five minutes. It’s some of the most leaden exposition in recent memory; we’re firmly in “tell, don’t show” mode, which is a particular shame in a genre that inherently provides so many opportunities for epic blockbuster visuals.

The prevailing attitude for kaiju movies has historically been “who cares if the humans are rubbish as long as the monsters are good”, and there’s merit to that argument. It’s been an issue with this franchise ever since the 2014 Godzilla, when they killed off Bryan Cranston at the end of Act 1 in favour of an agonisingly generic soldier boy, and people coming to see Godzilla x Kong knowing what to expect are unlikely to be disappointed. But things are different now. Godzilla Minus One has better – and legitimately terrifying – Godzilla action as well as genuinely moving human drama about characters we like and care about, and it did all this on about 1/10 Godzilla x Kong‘s budget. Godzilla x Kong is certainly good enough for what it is, but why should we settle for good enough when we’ve so recently seen that these movies can be truly great?