Godzilla and King Kong: the fascination with clod-ripping monsters never ends | Culture

Every time a Godzilla is released, a comment is repeated: we don’t want to see humans talking about government conspiracies and family problems, but monsters attacking each other and destroying cities. If viewers had a remote control, some would fast-forward when Millie Bobby Brown or Bryan Cranston appear chatting about internal conflicts as if they were starring in a shakespeare in the end of the world. So much so that in the three-minute trailer for Godzilla and Kong: the new empire —which arrives this Wednesday in Spanish cinemas—, people didn’t even take up 20 seconds. It showed, however, the gorilla carrying a giant ax and riding on the back of the kaiju (as the giant Japanese monsters are called) to fight together. The point of view of the film is that of the monsters. They know their audience.

If the viewer fills an IMAX theater (maximum image) they will do so to see the monster spit out violet rays, buildings collapsing and bridges under siege. Even though he knows the broken San Francisco Golden Gate better than the standing one. Charlton Heston suffered the destruction of an icon at the end of Planet of the Apes, but the chaos in recognizable cities like New York is a warm and happy place for the audience, unlike the reality of Ukraine and Gaza. That grandiloquence with which everything falls is one more reason not to watch the movie at home. The fake apocalypse with computer monsters and more and more visual effects ensures a collective experience in theaters. Something key for studios that fight for their blockbusters to occupy quality screens premium which, being more expensive, inflate box office data.

Destroying is not new in Hollywood either. “There were disaster films in silent cinema. It had a boom in the 1930s, its heyday in the 1970s, and a resurgence in the 1990s. Nowadays, they don’t stop,” recalls Sintu Amat, author of the book Disaster Movies. “Whether there are wars or not, we will always be drawn towards destruction and chaos. Although we are convinced that it will not happen in the near future, we like to fantasize about visualizing it and recreating it. We have a dark side when faced with catastrophic issues. They are works that put normal characters in extreme situations with which we can identify,” he adds. Sigmund Freud called repetition compulsion the impulse to replicate painful situations that leads us to control our imagination and thus deal with our fears, finding comfort.

Amat highlights classics like San Francisco (1936), Green Dolphin Street (1947), When the mob roars (1954) and The devil at four (1961), where, he explains, “brilliant arguments, characters and dialogues stand out. His catastrophes helped resolve the plots and outline the fate of the protagonists.” He points out that the effects have improved and that technology has made them more attractive and easier to produce, although perhaps it has been to the detriment of other qualities.

This sale of spectacularity has something prosaic in human psychology and also an economic factor. In 2023, IMAX theaters broke a record by bringing in more than $1 billion, with all-time high grossing in 54 countries. Its ticket sales rose 24.4% largely due to Oppenheimerabout the creation of that atomic bomb that gave birth to Godzilla as a nuclear metaphor in 1954. The much more introspective Godzilla: Minus One It was the largest IMAX release in Japanese history.

In Hollywood everyone is fighting for these rooms, even Tom Cruise, who was frustrated because Mission Impossible I couldn’t take advantage of so much super screen because of Oppenheimer. The CEO of IMAX had to mediate: “I feel sad, but Nolan has a special place in our hearts.” In January, Warner, putting its pieces together, brought forward the battle of King Kong and Godzilla (shot in this technology) by two weeks to take over from Dune: part 2 and not having to share IMAX theaters with Civil WarAlex Garland’s political post-apocalypse (Ex Machina) which from the poster shows the golden flame of the Statue of Liberty converted into a bunker amidst destruction.

Destroying an architectural icon is an unalterable cliché. The creators knew it The burning colossus in 1974 and Independence Day in 1996, where one of the most famous plans of the White House appeared, destroyed by a laser from space. Two years later, his director, Roland Emmerich, filmed his Godzilla. They knew it when a huge octopus scaled the Golden Gate in Emerged from the bottom of the sea (1955) and also when Michael Bay, an expert destroyer, destroyed the New York Grand Central in Armageddon (1999). This time Kong and Godzilla take on Napoleon’s legacy and dare to conquer the pyramids of Egypt, exactly as the film predicted. Team America in his parody of the US’s desire to destroy icons in cinema. Along the way they stroll through Cádiz and Gibraltar without regard.

Also in the theaters it continues to be projected Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, a saga that shares a glacial motif and opens the door to the Empire State to its monsters since 1984, although Marshmallow Man does not produce as much terror. Almost as little as Sharknado, which delighted trashy cinema in six television films. Positively, Sintu Amat stands out from the golden age of catastrophes: Earthquake (1974) and The adventure of Poseidon (1972), as well as A town called Dante’s Peak (1997), the Norwegian Wave (2015) and Contagion (2011), which was ahead of covid.

Internationally, some directors have taken the opportunity to imprint their style on the monster and destruction genre. Guillermo del Toro pitted robots against monsters in Pacific Rim; Nacho Vigalondo turned it into a toxic love story that destroyed cities in Colossal; Marc Forster besieged the capitals with zombies in World War Z (David Fincher wanted to make the sequel but it never came to fruition), and Bong Jon-hoo created one of the monuments of the genre kaiju modern in The Host. Some managed to get humans interested too, as he masterfully did Shin Godzillaupdating topics in a bureaucratic reinvention that had so much of The west wing like kaiju. Although it was inspired by the Fukushima disaster, today it has another reading after experiencing how governments dealt with covid. Sometimes unreality is better understood through exaggeration.

Even if the viewer does not want to see humans, the monsterverse Godzilla/Kong has brought together John Goodman, Brie Larson, Tom Hiddleston, Kurt Russell, Dan Stevens and Rebeca Hall in its four films and two series. And the biggest Hollywood sagas keep calling the hotline in the face of attacks by monkeys and amphibians. In May, kingdom of the planet of the apes gives his tenth battle in cinema. The franchise Jurassic Park will now travel to the city with Jurassic City, where the dinosaurs will try to tell something new about a disaster that we have seen hundreds of times. Meteorites will also return greenland and the tornadoes Twisters.

When climate change and wars bring destruction closer to us, unreality is comforting. “We are all worried about the future of the planet and the human species,” says Amat. If Godzilla and Kong fail to deliver their lesson of unity in the face of phenomena to our real battles, it will be time to hunker down and retort to Charlton Heston by shouting: “You destroyed him! “I curse you all, I curse the wars, I curse you!”