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SPOILER WARNING: This section may contain major plot and/or ending details. Proceed at your own discretion. |
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The Hollow Earth, known to the Iwi as the Long Ago Below,[1] is a location that was discovered in the 2019 film Godzilla: King of the Monsters.
It is an ancient subterranean ecosystem deep within the Earth, close to its core. Its gravity is unique and inverts at the halfway point, allowing Titans to walk freely on both the floor and ceiling of the Hollow Earth without fear of falling from one to the other. It is surrounded by a gravitational-electrostatic "membrane" anomaly inside the Earth's mantle.[1] The ecosystem continually radiates radioactive energy, allowing the creatures that inhabit it to evolve to titanic sizes. A fortress belonging to the Great Apes also exists there, with a throne once held by his ancestors.
History[]
Backstory[]
The Hollow Earth is believed to be the natural habitat and evolutionary place of origin of all Titans and the Iwi. In ancient times, a malevolent Great Ape known as the Skar King enslaved his kind and the ancient Titan Shimo to conquer both the Hollow Earth and the surface world. The Skar King's ambitions caused him to wage war with Godzilla and his Iwi followers. Godzilla eventually imprisoned the Skar King and his army in the depths of the Hollow Earth, while some of the Great Apes and their Iwi followers who survived the war fled to Skull Island, an extension of the Hollow Earth, on the surface world.[1]
Monarch: Legacy of Monsters[]
After learning that the Titans traveled around the world using the a tunnel system, William Randa, Keiko Randa, and Lee Shaw searched for rifts across the globe. They found one in 1959 at an abandoned nuclear power plant Kazakhstan. However, their excursion took a darker turn when hatching Endoswarmers took Keiko to a world between Earth and Hollow Earth. Keiko later named this place Axis Mundi.
Godzilla: King of the Monsters[]
After nearly being killed by the Oxygen Destroyer, Godzilla retreats to his temple located within the Hollow Earth to rest and regenerate. A Monarch expedition team follows the Titan in, confirming the organization's theories of an entire world located beneath the surface. Ishiro Serizawa detonates a nuclear warhead in Godzilla's temple, effectively reviving him but destroying the temple and the surrounding area.
Kingdom Kong[]
Monarch discovers a Hollow Earth vortex in a massive cavern beneath Skull Island, and plans to send a drone in to investigate for structural integrity and potential hazards. During the expedition, a remnant of one of Ghidorah's storm locks over Skull Island and shrouds the island in darkness. This causes the Titan Camazotz to emerge with a swarm of smaller bat-like creatures. After a hard-fought battle, Kong defeats Camazotz and throws his body back down into the Hollow Earth vortex.
Godzilla Dominion[]
Though the Hollow Earth itself doesn't appear in the comic, a Genitor swarm emerges from a Hollow Earth breach in Godzilla's old lair, that was opened by the bomb that Ishiro Serizawa used to heal him. Godzilla has a brief battle with and defeats the swarm's massive alpha. The smaller swarm members proceed to feed on their alpha's mutilated corpse before Godzilla vaporizes it with his atomic breath, killing off the remainder of the swarm.
Godzilla vs. Kong[]
Kong sits on his ancestral throne.
A joint expedition team of Monarch and Apex Cybernetics use three HEAVs to follow Kong into the Hollow Earth in order to find and secure an energy source capable of subduing Godzilla, using the ape as a sort of navigator. Those who have been watching over Kong at Skull Island, including Nathan Lind, Ilene Andrews and Jia, are brought along on the expedition, but the true purpose of the journey is hidden from them.
Kong explores Hollow Earth at a rapid pace before stumbling across an ancient fortress built by his ancestors. He enters the structure, claiming an ancient axe from a unidentified Titan's corpse. The group observes Kong and realizes that he is home there. At this point, Maia Simmons of Apex orders the extraction of the ancient energy radiating from the ground, directly from the planet's core. After angering Kong, Simmons and the rest of her team are killed, but not before the energy is sent back to the Apex facility in Hong Kong and used to power Mechagodzilla.
After destroying Mechagodzilla and resolving his rivalry with Godzilla, Kong decides to return to the Hollow Earth, making it his new home.
Godzilla x Kong: The Hunted[]
As Kong wanders around his new home, he is attacked by a Spineprowler and easily beats it. The fleeing Spineprowler is then caught in an electric trap created by a Titan hunter named Raymond Martin, who then had the unconscious creature taken to the surface for a very specific reason. Martin lost his family during female MUTO's attack in San Francisco and since then, started to hunt down the Hollow Earth's superspecies and adding their corpses to his collection as a way of avenging his family. As Kong continues to explore the caverns of Hollow Earth, he finds many different cave paintings on the walls. However, the painting that gains the ape's attention is the one depicting Godzilla facing the larger Shimo.
Upon finishing and testing his Titan Hunter Mech, Raymond travels down into Hollow Earth into once again, now with his mech for a real hunt. Once there, Raymond starts slaying every creature he found with his mech, easily killing a Warbat and a Sker Buffalo, until his carnage got Kong's attention and went to check on what's happening. The Titan Hunter eventually kills a female Spineprowler who jumped in to save her cubs as Kong discovers Raymond's subordinates and slaughters them. As the Titan Hunter attempts to kill the two Spineprowler cubs, Kong appears to end the mech's killing spree once and for all. The two have a brief battle, which ends with Kong dropping the Titan Hunter from a precipice, destroying it. Raymond manages to survive, only for the two Spineprowler cubs to find and devour him as Kong hears his screams from afar.
Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire[]
Ilene Andrews revealed that Monarch has only managed to map around 5% of the Hollow Earth following the destruction of Mechagodzilla, and Monarch has set up Outpost 1 to monitor Kong's activities. However, ever since Hollow Earth's existence was revealed, the governments of the world attempted to use evidence against Monarch so they could take over operations and collect Hollow Earth's resources for their own benefit. But Monarch continued to oversee these operations despite said claims as mentioned by Ilene Andrews.
Local flora and fauna[]
As observed by Monarch, all of the creatures in Axis Mundi, on Skull Island, the other islands around it, and the Siren Isles, originated from the Hollow Earth. Two examples of this are the Titanus Kong superspecies and the Leafwings, who could be found on both Skull Island and the Hollow Earth at different points in time, respectively.
- Shimo
- Godzilla
- Mothra
- Kong Tribe
- Tiamat (deceased)
- Camazotz
- Genitor (deceased)
- Ion Dragons
- Endopedes
- Frost Varks
- Brambleboars
- The Rival (deceased)
- Skullcrawlers
- Leafwings
- Sker Buffaloes
- Mother Longlegs
- Spore Mantises
- Psychovultures
- Death Jackals
- Sirenjaws
- Magma Turtles
- Warbats
- Hellhawks
- Rockclaws
- Hollow Earth lizards
- Spineprowlers
- Vertacines
- Wart Dogs
- Parrot Frogs
- Drownvipers
- Tree Mimics
- Diraffes
- Coralmouths
- Sporeflies
- Skull Ants
- Magma Jackals
- Volt Panthers
- Genitor swarm (deceased)
- Camazotz's Minions
- Unidentified giant Titan skeleton
Notable locations[]
Vile vortexes[]
- Alaska's vile vortex (destroyed)
- Antarctica's vile vortex[2]
- Barbados' vile vortex
- Brazil's vile vortex
- Egypt's vile vortex
- Hong Kong's vile vortex[2]
- Kansas' vile vortex (destroyed)
- Kazakhstan's vile vortex (destroyed)
- Skull Island's vile vortex[3]
- Several underwater vile vortexes[4]
Other locations[]
- Malenka
- Underground tunnels
- The Mountain Hill
- Hollow Earth waterfall
- Subterranean Realm
- Living Caves
- Skar King's Stronghold
- Kong's temple (destroyed)
- Godzilla's temple (destroyed)
- Godzilla's lair
- Kong Monitoring Station
- Monarch Oupost 1
Gallery[]
To be added...
Trivia[]
- The idea of a Hollow Earth in a Godzilla film is in fact an old one and would have appeared in the cancelled Godzilla film Bride of Godzilla. Its portrayal, with both an inhabitable "ceiling" and "floor", is closest to the description of 19th century crackpot John Cleeves Symmes, who believed the Earth was hollow with another sphere inside of it (and another sphere inside that, and so on).
- In Godzilla vs. Kong - The Official Movie Novelization:
- It is heavily implied that the Hollow Earth is the source of global myths and legends about people emerging from the earth, due to Titans and the Iwi having lived there at one time before coming to the surface world.
- Nathan Lind at one point speculates that life on Earth originally evolved in the Hollow Earth rather than on the surface, and that it's where life survived and recuperated after every mass extinction before returning to the surface. He also speculates that humanity's hominid ancestors might have really originated there.
- The vile vortex is explained to be a space-time distortion when Nathan Lind, Ilene Andrews, and Jia escape through the hole Godzilla made.[5]
- The vile vortex in Antarctica is located only a few miles from the site where Ghidorah was originally frozen, although the ice on the vortex entrance is thirty-million years old and is older than the ice encasing Ghidorah, and it's implied to be no coincidence that Ghidorah was frozen so close to the entrance.
- It is heavily implied that the Hollow Earth is the source of global myths and legends about people emerging from the earth, due to Titans and the Iwi having lived there at one time before coming to the surface world.
- There is ambient light in the atmospheric space of the Hollow Earth, giving the appearance of sunlight. According to Adam Wingard, this light emanates from ethereal crystals found along the surfaces, which is shown in the opening scene of Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire.[6]
References[]
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 Keyes, Greg. Godzilla vs. Kong - The Official Movie Novelization. Titan Books. ASIN: B08R6PKDFS
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Godzilla vs. Kong
- ↑ Kingdom Kong
- ↑ Godzilla Dominion
- ↑ [1]
- ↑ Weintraub, Steven (April 1, 2024). The Bizarre Way Elon Musk Influenced 'Godzilla x Kong' (Video). Collider.
