Ape and Lizard Fight Over Chinese Market and Conglomeration

Well, we finally get to see how the two different kaiju movie styles blend together. On one side, there's the American tradition of capturing the movie that is the racialized stand-in for the "other," King Kong. And on the other, there's the Japanese window-framed fiction made out of its horrific atomic-bombed past, Godzilla. How do these two national cinematic traditions react to each other? They fight over trade routes--shipping lanes, air cargo, and high-tech portals--and the ultimate destination of the Chinese market. Figures.

But doesn't Hong Kong have its own vibrant filmmaking industry, you may ask? Apparently, some seem to think it a multinational mess spearheaded by some foreign vague impression of a baddie that results in some abomination that's transparently mechanical and divorced of any organic origins. Is it a surprise that Legendary Pictures has become a subsidiary of a Chinese conglomerate. Draw your own conclusions about the shared destruction of Hong Kong, as the rest of the human audience to the monsters-as-movies sit comfortably (or try to, at least) behind their safety-glass screens and virtual-reality domes. Same-day premieres on HBO Max help there.

I don't know what one gets out of this stuff if not an allegory for the movie-making process of pitting CGI monstrosities against each other as they demolish virtual environments. This Godzilla and Kong have become so devoid of their original meanings that the giant lizard eats bombs, and the people mostly love them, too, and the giant ape slaves away to serve his colonialist captors battling whatever lizardy creature they insist he battles and is so sexless that he only communicates with a child. And the human so-called characters are as vacant as Godzilla and Kong's gazes into each others' digital eye holes (no wonder the biggest stars have since bailed on the series). They're the opposites of their former selves--Hollow Earth to be reformed by corporate social Darwinists in their machinations to wreak havoc over bigger and bigger markets. It's a disaster.

I do rather like, however, the beginning of putting Kong in a virtual-reality, or movie, dome that he begins smashing, which is later reflected in the shots of shattering glass. Note that in "Skull Island" (2017) and, indeed, in the original "King Kong" (1933) that the monster is "captured" by film. Hence, the characters who are filmmakers, photographers or otherwise exhibitors. In 1933, he literally broke from his shackles on a stage. So, in "Godzilla vs. Kong," they've since captured him in a movie. His own movie, or at least as best as they can pretend it, but he's soon to break out or be placed in the wider movie of the Monsterverse--the world or windows and international markets, as it was in the 2014 "Godzilla" and the 2019 "King of the Monsters." I've got to respect the consistency, if not the faint purpose.