‘War of the Gargantuas’: The cult monster movie adored by Quentin Tarantino and Nicolas Cage
There’s something about watching giant monsters wreak havoc on the big screen that’s so satisfying, with skyscraper-sized behemoths causing untold collateral damage, one of the purest forms of cinematic escapism there’s ever been; it’s a rich vein Hollywood keeps on mining.
The MonsterVerse is alive and well with Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire continuing the franchise’s stellar box office streak, with episodic streaming series Monarch: Legacy of Monsters having recently been renewed for a second season and multiple spinoffs, and it would be remiss to overlook the Academy Award-winning Godzilla: Minus One to underline the hulking kaiju’s resurgence.
Guillermo del Toro pitted gigantic robots against even bigger monsters in Pacific Rim, Dwayne Johnson scored one of the biggest box office hits of his career when the preposterous Rampage pitted an albino ape, a flying crocodile, and a plane-sized wolf against each other in a destructive battle, while Love & Monsters was a whimsical fantasy gem with a ravenous twist.
It’s clear that monsters are big business, then, but one of the most popular and beloved of all time has yet to be remade, despite boasting such high-profile figures as Quentin Tarantino, Nicolas Cage, John Carpenter, and Tim Burton among its most vocal advocates. Kaiju maestro Ishirō Honda co-wrote and directed 1966’s The War of the Gargantuas, and it boggles the mind that it hasn’t been given the big budget treatment as of yet.
Sure, it sounds a little silly and doesn’t seem ready-made for the 21st century when the story revolves around two hairy humanoids who grow to epic proportions and decide the best way to settle their differences is to kick the shit out of each other in the middle of Toyko, but it’s not as if the genre has ever been treated with the utmost seriousness or importance.
Tarantino admitted that the brawl between Uma Thurman and Daryl Hannah in Kill Bill: Vol. 2 was directly inspired by The War of the Gargantuas, it’s one of Burton’s favourite movies that he made a point of watching with his children, it’s one of del Toro’s dearest kaiju classics, Carpenter named it “the ultimate Japanese monster movie,” Brad Pitt cited it as a title that inspired him to pursue acting, and Cage told Rotten Tomatoes “it was just something that transported me” to another plane of existence as an audience member.
There was talk of the gargantuas being incorporated into the MonsterVerse in the aftermath of Godzilla: King of the Monsters, but Kong clearly took their place as the franchise’s go-to fur-covered fulcrum. It’s right there in the numbers that monster mashes on an epic scale continue to be appointment viewing for paying customers who simply want to sit back, switch their brains off, and watch bustling urban hubs reduced to smouldering rubble, making it increasingly bemusing that no Tinseltown executive has decided it’s time for The War of the Gargantuas to get a fresh coat of paint.