King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962)

directed by Ishirō Honda

Japan

97 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Last time I watched this movie was the first night I came down with covid and I felt like a ghost that had been hit by a car. Back then I didn't want to wait a billion hours for the super-duper HD 4K restoration to download, but I had the time last night and am currently covidless, so I finally watched it in far and away the best quality I've ever seen a Godzilla movie in. I would highly, highly recommend getting your hands on that restoration by any means possible.

This is my third rewatch and I'm finally appreciating this movie for what it is. It was one of the last Godzilla films I got around to, due to an irrational prejudice I have against King Kong. (I just think he's silly. What pathos has a giant ape? Mechani-Kong, on the other hand, is a whole different story.) But anyway. This is only the third Godzilla movie to have been made. Prior to this, the tone of Godzilla was grim and monochrome; Godzilla Raids Again was a bit middle-of-the-road, but it still retained at least something of the pessimistic, dread-filled tone of the first movie. And then, seven years later, King Kong vs. Godzilla comes out the gate swinging, the first Godzilla movie in color, and by god what colors they are.

I think there's undoubtedly a self-referential quality to the storyline in this film. Helmed by Ishirō Honda, who was famously disappointed with Godzilla's evolution into a children's hero, it's hard not to see a statement being made in the fact that the driving force behind the film's plot is Godzilla and Kong being used as pure spectacle to make money. But it does not at all feel like it's talking down to the audience or doing anything that it doesn't want to do: this movie is saying "You want a good time? Fine, we'll show you a good time", and it absolutely delivers.

We're probably all familiar with the plot, but to recap: the CEO of a pharmaceutical company, frustrated at lack of sales, catches wind of a legendary beast living on an island somewhere in the South Pacific and orders his employees to go catch it so that he can use it to drum up publicity for his company. This is of course King Kong, who is towed back to Japan on a big raft (or that's the plan, at least; the Japanese government itself catches wind of this and is like "We don't want that thing over here"). At the same time, mysterious lights are spotted coming from an iceberg - Godzilla, hibernating in ice since the end of Raids Again, has woken up and his first act is to sink a ship that was unfortunate enough to be in his vicinity. So we've now got two monsters on the playing field, and when Kong gets unruly and escapes his raft, they make their way inexorably towards each other. Which is great! Stage a fight between the two, sponsored by the pharmaceutical company, and it'll make money hand over fist. But despite the CEO trying his damndest to worm his way in, Godzilla and King Kong resist commercialization, making them perhaps the real heroes and the humans the villains once again.

The blackface in this one is really egregious and takes me out of the movie every time I watch it. Personally I don't think Honda had any lack of respect for indigenous peoples, because he repeatedly uses them in his films as a way to convey the message that modern civilization is making us blind and ignorant to mysteries and miracles that still exist in "untouched" places, and doesn't ever cast them as stupid or silly. This is a movie of its time and I doubt anybody had any problem with the depiction of the Faro natives when it came out. But in 2023 I can say with confidence that it sucks and I hate it. I understand where it's coming from, but it still sucks. I'll leave it at that.

Watching this in such incredibly clear quality allowed me to appreciate the suits and miniatures even more than I already did. The problem with talking about the practical effects in this movie is that they're so good I occasionally missed them. Almost every time there's a miniature vehicle shown on screen, the care is taken to put tiny little fake people inside it. It is noticeable, but only if you're really focusing on it. A lot of the green-screening and optical printing is extremely rough, with some figures becoming transparent or having a thick border around them showing where they were overlayed with the background image, but considering when this movie came out, I'd say putting that stuff in at all was extremely ambitious. I think it's also deliberate that one of the main characters' invention of super-strong, super-thin, invisible wire ends up being an important plot point - I don't think tokusatsu as a medium would be the same if not for super-strong invisible wire.

The Godzilla suit in this - referred to as the KingGoji suit - is my favorite of all time. I watched this series out of chronological order, so it's easy for me to forget that before this film, the Godzilla suit looked like this (jumpscare warning). I absolutely adore the early Godzilla suits, they are very special and beautiful and I wouldn't change a single minuscule thing about them, but the KingGoji suit was the first time that awkward puppet-like motion of the first two suits was absent. KingGoji looks like an animal. Again, that invisible string plays a large part in this: I love the way his tail twitches, it's very naturalistic. 

I guess people don't like this Kong suit because the proportions are weird or whatever. Personally that doesn't bother me; no, it doesn't look like an ape, but it looks like a King Kong and that's good enough for me. Shoichi Hirose is in the King Kong suit and he puts some real character into it. I love when Kong picks that woman out of the train, he's got such a look of "Huh. What should I do with this thing?" Both Kong and Godzilla in this film have a really interesting characterization: they're neutral, not good or bad, just large animals fighting each other. Godzilla steps on a train and it's not even a big dramatic stomp, he's just walking, but his size means everywhere he goes gets destroyed. I'm a big fan of the darker narrative within the Godzilla franchise, but this turn away from the nihilism of the first two movies allowed for a lot more experimentation with writing kaiju as characters.

So I can finally say that I really do love this one. It's colorful and crowd-pleasing but aware of itself in a way that only Honda can pull off. The cast is super fun, the plot is silly but not too silly as to feel fantastical, and the practical effects are gorgeous. It's great. Don't sleep on it, if you currently are.