“Godzilla vs. Kong” on HBO Max." AT&T owns HBO Max. I own lots of shares of AT&T. So this movie is a good thing.

                    April 16, 2021

On Godzilla, King Kong and Other Monsters

By Alan Burdick

It’s fair to say that the premises of both Godzilla and King Kong — much less “Godzilla vs. Kong” — are scientifically absurd.

On the one hand a colossal, amphibious, radioactive T. rex. On the other, and only slightly more plausibly, a colossal ape on a small island in the middle of nowhere, with no progenitors or potential mates in sight. Godzilla at least has the atomic-bomb tests of the 1950s for an origin; King Kong somehow arose de novo, with zero help from natural selection.

Both began, like all good monsters, as walking parables. Godzilla, a synthetic creature at heart, is what we humans get when we tinker with the fundamental forces — a supersize Frankenstein with nuclear breath. (Blue Oyster Cult said it best: “History shows again and again / How nature points out the folly of men.”) Kong is all unadulterated nature, fated to be roadkill on humanity’s rapacious drive across Earth. Together, they are two visions of our relationship to nature writ very, very large.

So what happens when these two morality tales collide? Which would prevail: the product of plunder or the byproduct of invention? That’s what I found myself asking, not very hopefully, a couple of nights ago as I watched “Godzilla vs. Kong” on HBO Max. The winner was, well, neither the viewer nor the bystanders. The face-off involved yet a third human-relationship-to-nature trope in a plot so convoluted that I couldn’t explain it to my teenage son when he showed up near the end. The one takeaway came from my other teenage son, who gleaned it from a year of remote learning on the sofa: “Dad, why were special effects better 30 years ago?”

Really, who needs imaginary monsters anyway? Science is constantly turning up evidence of actual organisms that defy common sense: azhdarchids, enormous pterosaurs that had necks like giraffes; modern-day ants that shrink their brains in order to become queens; slugs that chew off their own heads; octopuses that punch fish. This week the Times reporter Kenneth Chang spoke to researchers who calculated that roughly 20,000 adult T. rexes roamed the planet at any given moment in time. They weren’t radioactive or even colossal, but they reigned for 2.4 million years, all 2.5 billion of them. If cinematography is what you want, why not watch one of the many nature documentaries now sprouting up like weeds: David Attenborough’s “Life in Color,” “My Octopus Teacher,” “Tiny World.” (Here’s a whole list.) Except that these serve up a different fiction, insofar as they mostly leave humans off screen. “By consistently presenting nature as an untouched wilderness,” Emma Marris noted recently in The Atlantic, “many nature documentaries mislead viewers into thinking that there are lots of untouched wildernesses left.” What Hollywood monsters offer is the fantasy of a physical force vastly more powerful than us that might keep our own in check. But aside from natural disasters and perhaps microbes, that luxury is unavailable; it’s just us versus us. The only true, living monsters out there are we humans: both of nature and lonely in our impression that we alone are above it. I thought about all that as I turned off the TV, said good night to my kids and crawled into bed beside my wife on our little island in the middle of the dark.