“Monsters from the Id….”

A tale of two movies: King Kong v. Godzilla; Forbidden Planet

Sorry ‘bout this, but I am going to refer to not one but TWO sci-fi films in this piece, if it’s all the same to you. One is brilliant, one pathetic. One is FORBIDDEN PLANET, a 1956 gem about a long-extinct civilization that had developed Faster Than Light travel before the human race had left its caves.

The other is King Kong v. Godzilla, about as meaningless and absurd a hunk of junk as ever came out of a studio.

So, you may be wondering: from the sublime to the ridiculous? What gives?

Glad you asked. But first, a little backstory, as we say to the studio and networks execs, to whom we then have to explain what a backstory is….

Forbidden Planet depicts the arrival of a group of military space men from Earth, at a planet that had been colonized 20 years earlier by The Bellerophon Expeditio , but from which nothing has been heard since. When the crew of this space ship, United Planet Cruiser C57D, lands on the planet, they find only two survivors — a brilliant scientist named Dr Morbius, his daughter, Altaira. They also find Robbie the Robot, who, along with character actor Earl Holliman as a space man, provides comic relief. As the story unfolds, we learn from Dr. Morbius that the original inhabitants of the planet, The Krell, perished in a single night almost two thousand centuries earlier, on “the threshold of some scientific breakthrough” that would seemingly allow thought to be converted to physical reality, and that soon after landing the other members of the Bellerophon were torn limb from limb by some creature “that never once showed itself,” according to Dr. Morbius.

King Kong v. Godzilla is about a giant lizard fighting a giant ape.

Forbidden Planet recapitulates the tragic demise of The Krell, who, as Dr. Morbius puts it, were an “all but divine race,” whose intelligence was as far above those modern homo sapiens as we are to an amoeba.

King Kong v. Godzilla is about a giant lizard fighting a giant ape.

Forbidden Planet is a tragedy.

King Kong v. Godzilla is barely a farce, about a giant lizard fighting a giant ape.

And both films reflect this moment in time.

Forbidden Planet reflects the aspirations of the human race, as we today are just in the infancy of space travel, and we aspire to move to the stars — ad astra per aspera — as we strive for the good, the great and the finest of our goals. And even though the Krell were destroyed because, as they approached god-like status, their very nature conflicted with the power they had achieved. The Krell were destroyed by themselves: when they attained the ability to convert thought to reality, their own subconscious urges and hatred, or, as one of the Spacemen put it, “their own primitive beginnings,” destroyed them: they eradicated one another because “monsters from the id” rose out of their thoughts — the “mindless primitive” prevailed. In their quest for divinity, they flew too close to the sun.

We can be like the Krell, and strive for divinity.

King Kong v. Godzilla depicts the battle of two foul creatures fighting because their egos, their ids and their foul demagoguery evoke a disgusting urge to kill.

Trump and Musk are, really, nothing more than our own King Kong and Godzilla.

We can be like Trump and Musk, and fight out of the banality of egomania.

But remember this: when those foul monsters do battle for no reason, Tokyo is destroyed.