Retro Review: King Kong vs Godzilla

Three years ago while we were suffering the worst of the Global Bastard, one thing which united us was the fact that Warner Bros. released all of their movies on HBO Max. This gave the masses a sense of something in common as everyone tuned it to watch movies which normally cost a good chunk of change were now being watched by everyone. One of the first big movies of this release method was Godzilla vs Kong, a showdown between two of cinema’s biggest baddest monsters. Except this is not the first time Toho’s biggest and scaliest star would throw down with the King of Skull Island. In 1962, producer John Beck would oversee a collaboration between Toho and Universal to create the crossover King Kong vs. Godzilla.

Hoping to find truth in the legends of a giant monster on Faro Island, two explorers are dispatched to capture Kong and bring him back to be paraded on television by greedy capitalists. Why King Kong would be a huge deal on TV in a world where giant monsters attack Japan on the regular is beyond me but I digress. While this is happening an American nuclear submarine in the Pacific accidentally unleashes Godzilla from an icy prison. With Godzilla naturally heading towards his usual stomping grounds of Japan and Kong being brought to the metropolitan city by scumbags with dollar signs in their eyes, a confrontation becomes inevitable.

This story actually began life as an idea from Kong’s storied co-creator Willis O’Brien, only his idea featured the great ape battling a massive Frankenstein monster. He passed this outline onto John Beck who shopped it around the different studios catching the eye of Toho, who had long wanted to bring Kong into their stable of monsters. Naturally with their involvement, the Frankenstein creation was chucked out and their own King of the Monsters was put in that place for a titanic showdown. In a way this makes sense as both monsters have long been tied together as giant movie monsters who, beyond entertainment purposes, served as vessels to tell stories resonating with the cultures and countries of their origin at specific points in their history. King Kong served to tell of the exploitation of the working class during the Great Depression, while Godzilla was the personification of fear for the only nation to suffer a nuclear attack during war. This movie even sees echoes of this as Kong is captured by a greedy pharmaceutical executive and Godzilla is unleashed by a nuclear sub.

Of course such thought out social commentary can easily be pushed to the side for the fact that this is King Kong vs. Godzilla, and chances are those popping this into the DVD player just want to watch a monkey and a lizard slug it out. On that front, this flick does not disappoint as the two behemoths get chances to show off what they can do in solo action, before the main event. The film itself even uses narrative tools, like in-world media coverage to build up this match-up like an AEW Pay-Per-View. As was common practice in Toho’s kaiju films, suitmation was utilized to bring Kong and Godzilla to life and while the powers that be were by now well-practiced in the Godzilla aspects of this, King Kong does not fare as well. The work Willis O’Brien put into bringing Kong to life in 1933 is still heralded to this day as a high point in cinematic visual fx, and to see the regression from that to a guy in an obviously cheap ape suit is disappointing in all honesty. Visual aesthetic aside, it is clear that the crew at Toho does have respect for the Kong mythos with several nods to the original RKO masterpiece.

While King Kong vs Godzilla was merely an excuse to see the two biggest cinematic monsters of East and West throwdown it is a far better movie than one would expect. Aside from the costume utilized for Kong and the natives of Faro Island clearly being Japanese actors in brown-face make-up, director Ishiro Honda has a great visual style and sense of pacing, while cinematographer Hajime Koizumi truly overachieves on his front. While it is far from Godzilla’s best outing during the Showa Era, and the difficulty translating King Kong to this style of cinema, King Kong vs Godzilla is still a highly entertaining monster flick.