Monster Mash

Watching Pacific Rim for the first time not so long ago it struck me that while I’ve pretty much reached peak superheroes smash up cities, or see cities smashed up by various entities around them, by contrast I’m still enjoying monster movies where myriad monsters smash up cities. Kong Skull Island, Jurassic Park IV, Godzilla, even the so so Pacific Rim, all of these I like a bit or a lot. It’s not that all monster movies are great, the remake of King Kong by Peter Jackson in the early 2000s was shockingly bad. And nor do I like Transformers in the slightest (albeit those are more giant robot movies), but in general show me the likes of Cloverfield and I’ll go for it. Pacific Rim was far from best in show but there were aspects of it which were pretty good.

Mention of the Monsterverse is made elsewhere, but thinking more about it I wonder is it that these films, which are rooted in military and science are reminiscent of, but superior to, of 1950s and early 1960s monster and science fiction, that the beats in them echo those earlier films?

Perhaps it is simply that the monster films are more science fiction based than their superhero led counterparts. Or perhaps there’s simply too many of the latter. Very possibly were a similar number of Monsterverse films in the pipeline I’d feel likewise. But as noted above, so far so few so good.

As noted already another thing I like about the Monsterverse films is the underlying concepts – in particular the idea that ‘this planet isn’t ours’, that there are creatures and entities that were here long before us and likely long after us. There’s a sort of intrinsic humility to that which seems a world away from MCU and DC (or many fictions) where for all that the stakes seem existentially high also seem oddly banal – does life, the universe and everything really turn on a handful of superheroes?

But then the concept of the superhero post-dates the original monster films – such as King Kong. And the concept is, for all the hand-waving, fundamentally unscientific, almost it seems to me on occasion, religious. Whereas that of monsters is almost intrinsically a function of the dawn of the nuclear age. The original Godzilla film could hardly be more explicit about that fact and the connections to the atom bombing of Japan.

Now just to be clear, this is purely a matter of taste, but I kind of see how that taste was formed. If I suggest Quatermass in all its iterations is much closer to Kong et all that superheroes I think that explains where my sympathies lie (and now I mention Quatermass I think of 1970s Dr. Who too, particularly the Pertwee years). These are much more recognisably science fiction than anything else, even if the science is ahem…a bit unlikely.