a review of 金刚大战哥斯拉

1st Annual Criterion Challenge Week 12: Godzilla Showa-Era Box Set In all honesty, after the first several minutes (in which the American version's stilted "news broadcast" framing device is replaced with a different introduction to the Japanese pharma company plot), this wasn't all that different from the American cut except for a few differences in the translation for the subs and the welcome lack of dubbing. I'd forgotten the sheer magnitude of brownface that happens in this movie, with Japanese actors wearing dark makeup to look like fictitious island natives. They're very clearly emulating the same trope from the original King Kong, but all the same there's something kind of weird about filmmakers in a post-imperialist Japan in turn basically imitating the default colonialist racism of 1930s American movies. I will say that they do a pretty good job of distilling the Kong mythos to its essence here, giving him all sorts of moments to re-enact key plot points from the original movie (battling giant island monsters, getting captured and chained up by science, kidnapping the ingenue, scaling the tallest available building, etc.) but ultimately his battle with Godzilla feels like an afterthought here.