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
at the end of the world.
So much so that in the three-minute trailer for
Godzilla and Kong: the new empire
- which arrives in Spanish cinemas this Wednesday - people did not take up even 20 seconds.
It did show, however, the gorilla carrying a giant ax and riding on the back of the
kaiju
(as 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 that 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 film 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
premium
quality screens that, being more expensive, inflate box office data.
End of 'Planet of the Apes'.
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 such as
San Francisco
(1936),
The Street of the Green Dolphin
(1947),
When the Marabunta 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
Oppenheimer
, about the creation of that atomic bomb that gave rise to Godzilla as a nuclear metaphor in 1954. The much more introspective
Godzilla: Minus One
was the biggest IMAX release in Japanese history.
Poster for 'Civil war'.DeAplaneta / A24
In Hollywood everyone is fighting for these rooms, even Tom Cruise, who was frustrated because
Mission: Impossible
could not take advantage of so much superscreen 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 have to share IMAX theaters with
Civil War
, Alex 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 of
The Burning Colossus
in 1974 and
Independence Day
in 1996 knew it, where one of the most famous shots 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
It Came From the Bottom of the Sea
(1955) and also when Michael Bay, an expert destroyer, destroyed New York's Grand Central in
Armageddon
(1999).
This time Kong and Godzilla assume Napoleon's legacy and dare to conquer the pyramids of Egypt, exactly as the film
Team America
predicted in its parody of the United States' desire to destroy icons in cinema.
Along the way they stroll through Cádiz and Gibraltar without regard.
Also in theaters
, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire
continues to be screened , a saga that shares a glacial motif and opens the door of 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 Poseidon Adventure
(1972), as well as
A Town Called Dante's Peak
(1997), the Norwegian
The Wave
(2015) and
Contagion
(2011). , which was ahead of covid.
Destruction of the White House in the film 'Independence Day', by Roland Emmerich.
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, city-destroying love story in
Colossal
;
David Fincher laid siege to capital cities with zombies in
World War Z
, and Bong Jon-hoo created one of the monuments of the modern
kaiju
genre in
The Host
.
Some managed to also make humans interested, as
Shin Godzilla
masterfully did , updating clichés in a bureaucratic reinvention that had both
The West Wing
and
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 Godzilla/Kong
monsterverse
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
fights its tenth movie battle.
The
Jurassic Park
franchise will now travel to the city with
Jurassic City
, where the dinosaurs will try to tell something new about a disaster we have seen hundreds of times.
The Greenland
meteorites and
Twisters
tornadoes will also return
.
Image of destroyed New York from 'Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire'.Sony pictures
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 in 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!"
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