The "monster movie," as a genre, is a somewhat vague, malleable construction. Is Freddy Krueger a monster, for example? There's probably a whole conversation to be had about Zodiac's credentials as an entry in the canon. The advertising campaign for 10 Cloverfield Lane, which swapped out a New York–stomping kaiju for John Goodman in a basement, carried the tagline "Monsters come in many forms." Less conceptually, though, giant monster movies are a well-known, well-worn genre with surprisingly few standout properties and little invention. 1933's King Kong was arguably the first of this kind, and has been an appropriately hulking figure in American culture ever since.

Kong has seen himself in many films, in many iterations, over the nearly 85 years of his life. He's a roller coaster, he's a toy, he's one of the best Treehouse of Horror segments.

This year, Jordan Vogt-Roberts's Kong: Skull Island introduces the newest version of Kong. Skull Island is the second entry in the Warner Bros./Legendary Pictures MonsterVerse, in which Kong shares a planet with all sorts of mythical giant beings, including the Japanese behemoth Godzilla. Gareth Edwards's 2014 Godzilla movie—a hyperreal, subdued take on the monster—had its flaws, but its approach to story, to spectacle, was something new, and inspired Legendary to move its planned Kong reboot to Warner Bros. so that Godzilla and Kong could eventually face off. These days, a franchise movie cannot be a success until its universe is set in stone years ahead of time. We're going to be seeing a lot more of Kong, and in a much different way than we've come to know the ape.

He's scarier and more deliberate than Peter Jackson's "big gorilla" version from 2005. He is, naturally, bigger than ever (Skull Island's Kong is 100 feet tall, nearly twice as large as any other version). Speaking with GQ, Vogt-Roberts detailed his reasoning behind the radical redesign: "I was interested in taking our Kong back to the 1933 movie monster, a creature as opposed to an anatomically correct beast. I wanted him to feel like a god. We moved him upright and added this sense of mobility to him. There's a pride and regality. But if you were to just watch him walk by you, there's like a sadness and loneliness to him."

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The logic is sound and speaks to Kong as one of the great American icons for our modern anxieties and fears, much like Japan's Godzilla. Kong evolves; he reshapes to fit the times. 1933 Kong drew unfortunate allusions to America's racism and "anxieties about black male hypersexuality."

So, demonstrably, some more crudely than others, monster movies are our greatest terrors blown up. The insurmountable made flesh. For Japan in 1954's original Godzilla, it was the nuclear holocaust wrought on them by the United States. For South Korea in the flawless The Host, it was our dying planet and the havoc we're wreaking on the environment. For Skull Island, it is, in the simplest way, ourselves.

Alongside the burgeoning MonsterVerse, the kaiju movie is getting the removed, deconstructed indie treatment, a rite of passage for any genre, cementing it as a definite trend. Pacific Rim, too, is getting its long-promised sequel, in which wholly original monsters battle against purpose-built giant robots. I would also not be surprised if one of the Cloverfield movies reintroduces its title character at some point. After a false start (and the requisite trash '90s attempt), the Western-hemisphere Monster Movie is here to stay.

For Japan in 1954's original Godzilla, it was the nuclear holocaust wrought on them by the United States. For Skull Island, it is, in the simplest way, ourselves.

So what is the new monster movie's place? Its thesis? Skull Island isn't so much about one event as it is about the whole horror of mankind. We pick up right after a humiliating lost war, and the broken group of men who try to salvage themselves by breaking something else. To Vogt-Roberts, it is about "what happens when you're truly confronted with a god, something that you're told shouldn't exist and something that doesn't exist as far as you're concerned. It is your duty as a man, as a god, to destroy this thing." The message is loud and clear from Kong: We are not as important as we think. We are at the mercy of the sudden, the inexplicable.

The post-Vietnam setting belies the modern message of Kong: We are not the gods of our domain, no matter what we've been bred to believe. Godzilla (2014) had a similar focus. The human characters were, for the most part, unnecessary. Window dressing. (This was unwittingly enhanced by Aaron Taylor-Johnson's fast-asleep performance.) In an essay for the tragically defunct The Dissolve, David Ehrlich called it the "first post-human blockbuster": "The creative team of this new Godzilla understood that scale is more than another word for height, and that the cinema’s most palpably enormous digital creature wouldn’t be enough in and of itself to fully express the relative smallness of the film’s characters."

Whether you fully buy Godzilla's underwritten humans as a piece of thematic masterwork or not, the clear mandate has been set for the modern American monster movie, and hopefully, going forward, the MonsterVerse itself: We are often wrong and often cruel. It's not a stretch to imagine the upcoming Godzilla sequel, King of the Monsters, isn't just referring to Kong and Mothra.

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