King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962)

King Kong vs. Godzilla (hereinafter KKvG) is a silly little satirical sci-fi B film. It’s also 16 minutes shorter and about a million times better looking and less fucking stupid than Godzilla vs. Kong. Practical special effects will always trump computer-generated imagery, and seldom does that superiority become more apparent than when you put these two movies side by side. Moreover, writer Shin’ichi Sekizawa and director Ishirō Honda weren’t afraid to declare a clear winner in the end. 

Original King Kong director Merian C. Cooper reportedly called KKvG “a belittling thing to a creative mind.” I can only wonder how much lower his opinion of the so-called MonsterVerse (dumbest fucking name for a shared universe ever) would have been.  

Cooper also took exception to the use of “a man in a gorilla suit, which I have spoken out against so often in the early days of King Kong.” I get it. He felt about suitmation the way I do about CGI (the shock of which might have sent Cooper to an early grave had he not died long before its emergence), and with the benefit of hindsight, he’s still at least half right. 

A man in a gorilla suit — especially this gorilla suit — is not as a good as stop motion, but it nevertheless beats the shit out of motion capture/CGI any day of the week.

In the movies, it’s not so much ‘what you see is what you get’ as ‘what the camera sees is what you get;’ the camera can see a man in a gorilla suit, but it can’t see a computer-generated gorilla inserted digitally in post-production and, accordingly, any viewer of adequate intelligence can see right through it.

The MonsterVerse’s rendition may be a realistic simulation of what Kong might actually look like, and it wouldn’t feel at all out of place in a videogame cutscene or a wholly computer-animated film; the problem is that Godzilla vs. Kong allegedly takes place in a (mostly intangible) world with flesh-and-blood human characters who should be able to tell the difference between an organic ape and Optimus Primal from the late-90s Beast Wars cartoon. 

Is KKvG’s Kong realistic? Of course not; how could it be? There’s no such thing in nature as a double digit-foot tall gorilla, so what the hell are you even going to compare it to?

What truly matters, though, is that the titular foes and the world around them are real, so that they can physically interact with each other and with their surroundings — which in KKvG they do with a vengeance.

When the two monsters carve a path of destruction, they’re legitimately destroying stuff, and it’s an emotionally complex moment; on the one hand the devastation is exhilarating because it’s undeniably happening before our very eyes, while on the other you feel bad that these lovingly detailed, painstakingly built sets must be obliterated. 

Indeed, these aren’t just movie sets; they are epic playsets replete with wonderful toys — unsurprisingly, the film is brimming with a sense of childlike wonder and joie de vivre; the crew clearly had as great a time making it as the audience watching it. 

The sequence where Godzilla lays waste to a military base is nothing short of glorious, but any scene featuring helicopters, ships, tanks, or trains is a sight for sore eyes; sure, they’re miniatures but they’re also solid props. To cut from an interior shot of a vehicle to an exterior shot of that vehicle, even if it’s a model, as opposed to an unconvincingly rendered landscape added long after the fact, makes all the difference in the world in terms of scene continuity, in that it allows you to reconcile what’s going on inside with what’s going on outside as concurrent events unfolding within the same space. 

I mentioned contrasting KKvG and Godzilla vs. Kong, but you really need not go further than the parallel scenes in which Kong’s unconscious body is towed on a big-ass raft/barge. In KKvG, the ship pulling him is a scale replica sailing across honest-to-goodness H20; the only optical trickery takes the form of rear projection, which is hands down infinitely smoother than Godzilla vs. Kong’s wall-to-wall green screens (as are matte paintings). 

Now, the reason that the kaijus cross paths is pretty contrived (“King Kong instinctively senses Godzilla’s presence.” Yeah, let’s go with that); then again, anything’s better than that whole retarded “Hollow Earth” fucking bullshit.  

More importantly, because the monsters look like they can actually inflict damage upon one another, it’s not as much work to become invested in the outcome of their battles. Their counterparts from Godzilla vs. Kong can shadowbox all they want and never for a second will they ever persuade me that either is getting hurt for real.  

All things considered, Godzilla and King Kong flicks are always going to demand suspension of disbelief, but they should also make it easier, not harder, to suspend it — and that’s what KKvG and its marvelous mechanical effects do vis-a-vis Godzilla vs. Kong.