Kong: King of Bytopia

Godzilla vs. Kong was pretty darn fun. It's a great King Kong movie, and it feels like a pretty fair facsimile of a Godzilla movie as made by Hollywood. Really, if they just changed that god awful SKREEEEEEEEE roar to Godzilla's roar I'd not really have anything to whine about, and the success of all the other elements just makes that one detail stick out like a sore thumb, because aside from that it gets pretty close to feeling like Godzilla, closer even than the Hanna-Barbera cartoon. Of course it's still bonkers and makes some just plain baffling choices, but having weird non-sensical stuff isn't really a turn off for me. Full disclosure, I saw it high, so when it starts off with Kong's alarm clock waking him up and him going through his morning routine to his favorite jams like some fucking 80's teen comedy I literally couldn't stop laughing and THEN it's the god damned TRUMAN SHOW. And that's how the movie STARTS. So yeah it's insane, but as a Godzilla/King Kong movie? Fun and inoffensive.

    However easily the single most baffling thing in the film was their portrayal of the Hollow Earth as the twin paradises of Bytopia. So, first of all, let's set our baseline: while we just plain have to suspend a certain amount of disbelief, it isn't really as much as you'd think. For starters, while one might be tempted to believe that the rules of physics are all weird in these movies because giant monsters can exist and not just turn into mush cuz square cube law... yeah not really? The thing is, the fact that Godzilla is as big as he is is just one in a suite of fun facts about him that are meant to be impossibilities within the world of the films, this is why people are scared of him. See, nothing should be able to survive an atomic bomb... but Godzilla did, among a bajillion other things he's done that simply shouldn't be possible. This is a huge part of the Heisei era films, coming to a head in Godzilla X Megaguirus where Godzilla tanks a fucking black hole, and taken to outlandish absurdity in the anime trilogy. This is supposed to be as incredible to the audience as it is to the people in the film, that's the point, this stuff isn't meant to be taken for granted, the fact that Godzilla is seemingly impossible yet he exists is part of the story. How DOES he exist? Well it's not exactly clear cut, but bits of his abilities get fleshed out more and more as the series goes on, to varying degrees of success. The square cube law thing can really only be that Godzilla's body is built totally differently from the kinds of animals we see up on the surface. Metallic skin is a given, but exactly how the hell it's so thick isn't quite clear, but it is clear that it's evolved to withstand deep sea pressures, something vertebrates simply don't do to the degree Godzilla does in real life, which means the Godzillasaurs have evolved some sort of novel solution to the problem, one that, after mutating, allows them to carry their extra bulk around. Also... his bones are probably porcelain?

    So the point being that yes you do kind of need to handwave some stuff, but at the same time, the sheer incredibility of what happens in these movies is meant to be taken as something extraordinary and worth study, so we have to operate under the assumption, as a viewer, that the characters in the film are just as baffled as we are, the only difference is the movie doesn't have to justify anything first, it can just show us cool shit and then later have people guess about how it could work. So that's kinda how science in Godzilla movies works.

    Second I want to give a little backstory on the concept of the Hollow Earth. The original, quite literal concept of the Earth literally being a hollow shell with an internal sun at the center, is... complete and absolute impossible fantasyland horse shit. You legit cannot do that in a movie and have it not become a full on, straight fantasy film. At that point it's D&D, and we're in the outer planes watching out for adamantite dragons. Now, caves exist, and are real, and some of them are quite large. If an audience can accept giant monsters, surely it can accept caves big enough to hold an ecosystem of them? Maybe, either way that seems to be the concept as originally presented in the screenplay Bride of Godzilla, that thing there was a whole thread on Toho Kingdom of people not believing it existed after the first time I mentioned it in a blog. You're welcome, btw. That film posits that Godzilla and Anguirus come from a subterranean world, which explains why we haven't seen any herds of them up on the surface. The world itself would have been lit by an orange sky but it isn't really explained. Rodan recycled only a little of this, and we do in fact see a gigantic cavern large enough for a Rodan nest, populated with a whole population of Meganulons, and lit up... somehow. There's no artificial sun or anything, but we know that it must be at least a little bit reflective of what Shigeru actually sees as he IS reacting to the baby Rodan eating the larva, and that's a BIG baby, so clearly something is giving off enough light to make a kaiju baby visible. Another thing to note is that while it isn't said directly in the film, the situation just being kind of handwaved as radioactive contamination got underground "somehow," the film does take place in Kyushu, and you don't need to read between the lines too hard to realize the nuclear contamination they're talking about is probably the bombing of Nagasaki, there's not really another way for it to make sense, Rodan emerges from Mt. Aso in near the middle of the island, you can't just drop secret nuclear tests there, y'know? The implication from that is that the actual area of the hollow cave world underneath Kyushu is quite large and probably covers most of the island.

    The next time we see anymore Hollow Earth shenanigans is in Godzilla vs. Megalon where a panorama shot of a Seatopian city shows it to have an upward curve around a central light like an old time hollow-shell concept, like Pellucidar or some shit. Megalon is a mess narratively and very little is said to set up Seatopia in a way that makes any kind of sense, but that visual definitely tells a story. Basically, we're told (by some fucking guy who really ought to not know what he's talking about) the story of Mu pretty much as we hear it in Atragon, only he's talking about time spans of millions of years, which is... wrong. Then their buttons are made out of sand. It's a weird movie. We can pretty much ignore most of this as it's pretty clearly just some guy badly butchering something he read in a magazine once a decade ago, but the shot of the upwards curve is pretty insane. The second pass at Bride of Godzilla for the Godzilla Revival Project went back to basically the idea of the original '56 script which was basically what we saw in Rodan but bigger and more of it. Additionally, the last King Kong movie and the other Hollywood Godzillas both spoke of their idea of a Hollow Earth in terms that reflected this idea, systems of caves, large hollow caverns, etc., and what we see of it in Godzilla: King of the Monsters would basically have you believe the light is coming from lava falls, which... is perfectly sensible to me, I'll buy that, sure.

    But Godzilla vs. Kong didn't do that, nor did it decide to go full fantasy and take us to the Pellucidar hinted at by Seatopia, it went completely crazy and for absolutely no reason at all, when it never needed to do anything more than give us some caves with lava, it took us into a literal dimensional rift into the twin paradises of fucking Bytopia. And I mean I kinda love that? But at the same time... what?!

So I have two ideas of how this is supposed to work:

1. We see the HEEV enter through some kind of weird... tunnel? Like it seems like it's going through a viscous, stretchy, dimensional portal of some kind. I was pretty high but I remember seeing some weird ass shit when they went down that. This would suggest it's something like Den Valdron's explanation for the hollow planet spaces in ERB and other such pastiche pulp fiction, basically a kind of pocket dimension. This explanation would be, however, too easy, and it also doesn't quite match up to a very important clue the movie lingers on for a good while...

2. King Kong climbs up a mountain to near the mid-point of Bytopia, and finds a bunch of floating, glowing, indigo gems, the same gems that are exposed in many places all across the landscape on both sides of this weird gravitational anomaly. He boops one of the gems which sends it over to the other side, and when he jumps up into the space, he kind of floats there, and seams to swim through it, until he's pulled down to the other surface. This strange glowing mineral is, again, all over the place, with deposits peeking up in nearly every shot in this location in the film. The way we can see bits of it floating naturally in the middle is what we here at Maly's Movie Talk like to call "the language of film" for "these rocks are the source of the gravitational weirdness."

    So what appears to be happening is that there is some sort of crazy unobtainium/cavorite like radioactive gem or mineral or something or another that exists within the crust of the Earth. What it is, how it got there, how it works, etc., all unknown, but this is a totally new fictional substance and the film wants us to take in the fact that it's related. The substance seams to have some sort of magnetic property that in large enough quantities creates a strong anti-gravity field, and we know it's a quantity thing or else all of it would be floating in the air. Anti-gravity, of course, meaning magnetism, so that this stuff, I'm just gonna call it carvorite for the purposes of this article, in large deposites under the surface actually repels rock away from it, creating a little anti-grav bubble inside the crust. And that's pretty damn wild. Since you can generate a magnetic field with an electrical current, it also tracks that this stuff could be used as an energy source, and therefore is probably radioactive, making it simultaneously a reason for the kaiju's existence, a power source, the reason for the Bytopia-type cavern, and... maybe have something to do with the light? The only thing that I still can't quite wrap my head around is why you can stick to the underside of the top crust. Anti-gravity can get you floating against the gravity of the planet, but it doesn't reverse gravity. So maybe this stuff is even more exotic, maybe it's not working with anti-grav but has some sort of self-gravitational ability, which... seams kind of insane, but maybe I guess?

    ...or maybe I'm on the totally wrong path, and the Hollow Earth of the MonsterVerse is just literally a dimensional portal to the twin paradises of Bytopia. ...kinda really fucking stretches the definition of "Earth monster" at that point, eh? At least it makes the weirdness of Seatopia palatable... now if SP can give us an explanation for Jet Jaguar spontaneously becoming sentient and programming himself to make more mass from nothing, and we'll be good.