Several monsters from Kaiju films have been borrowed from yokai, “the often hideous creatures that populate Japanese folklore”. In Jason Barr’s The Kaiju Film: A Critical Study of Cinema’s Biggest Monsters (2016), the author tells us about some of these cultural connections. There is a definite lack of attention to the way elements of Japanese art and culture ended up influencing Kaiju films, both structurally and in terms of monster-lore. Many of these themes can be understood a little better in the context of the genre that Godzilla vs Kong belongs to - the Kaiju genre of cinema that began in Japan in the 1950s, but has since spread across the world, especially Hollywood.
Kong’s instincts tell him that notwithstanding Jia’s kindness, nothing good can come out of the lab coat-clad humans learning the true extent of his capabilities. There’s a lot to unpack here: the classic cinematic pairing of a ‘lethal weapon’ (the beast, the creature, the human-but-invincible assassin) with a small child, Kong’s instinctive distrust of scientists, and of course, the suggestion that even the otherwise heroic Dr Andrews isn’t above a certain kind of greed frequently seen among onscreen scientists (progress, no matter what the price!). “Kong didn’t want me to tell you,” replies Jia. “Why didn’t you tell me,” asks Jia’s adoptive mother Dr Ilene Andrews (Rebecca Hall). My personal favourite is when King Kong is revealed to have learned sign language through his frequent interactions with Jia, a young Maori girl (not more than 11 or 12) who the super-massive primate has formed an emotional bond with. There are several moments in Adam Wingard’s Godzilla vs Kong (released in India on Wednesday, 24 March) where the influence of its two most important ‘source texts’, the Japanese-language Godzilla (1954) and the English-language King Kong (1933), can be felt most clearly.
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