From the time the Greeks invented drama to Piranha 3-D, from Shakespeare to Stephanie Meyer, every story has either conformed to or subverted the conventions of its genre. The movies I’ve covered here over the last few weeks are no different. Giant monsters are slaves to their genre as much as femme fatales, superheros, or psychokillers are to theirs.
In King Kong, we saw a monster brought from its own strange, foreign world to the world we all live in (or at the very least the world audiences of 1933 lived in), going on a rampage caused by fear and confusion, and, in the end, meeting its doom in the face of a force more formidable than itself. King Kong died because he wasn’t the king in New York.
This is, more or less, the same story we’ve seen over and over in the past few weeks. Some monsters have taken more extreme measures to defeat, and with Mighty Joe Young, we saw the conventions subverted to the point where the creature was the hero instead of the monster, but the story has always been the same.
The perfect example is today’s movie: 20 Million Miles to Earth. Off the coast of Sicily, a group of fishermen witness a rocket fall from the sky and crash into the ocean. They’re only able to save one of the astronauts inside, but it turns out something else got out before it sinks to the bottom of Mediterranean. A young boy finds a container marked U.S.A.F. and decides to sell its contents to a traveling veterinarian on the outskirts of town.
What’s in the container is our monster, Ymir, which hatches from it’s egg over night. It’s only a foot tall when it first hatches, but by the next morning it’s grown to 4 times its original size. The morning after that it’s the size of a human. It escapes its cage into the woods.
We’ve seen Ray Harryhausen’s special effects work a few times now, in Mighty Joe Young and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, and it’s clear that his style was perfectly suited to movies about giant monsters rampaging through the city. It was never more clear, however, than in 20 Million Miles to Earth, which may be his most impressive, intricate work.
There’s a moment about halfway through 20 Million Miles to Earth when Ymir fights a farmer. Not only is the monster created using Harryhausen’s stop-motion technique, but so is the farmer. Creating a horrible monster from outer space may not be easy, but compared to making an articulated, detailed human being, something so familiar we see it every time we look in the mirror, it must be a piece of cake.
When Ymir is eventually caught and brought to the zoo in Rome for examination, it’s obvious what’s going to happen. We know it will escape; we know it will go on a rampage through Rome; and we know that somehow, by an act of human will, the monster will eventually be defeated. And of course, all these things happen. The entertainment comes from just how these things happen.
Now over ten feet tall, Ymir breaks out of the lab and into an elephant cage, which leads to a fight with the elephant through the streets of Rome:
Ymir destroys famous landmarks and ruins before finally escaping to the Coliseum. In the end, it climbs to the top of the Coliseum, and, just like King Kong, is shot down before it falls to its death.
There’s nothing particularly unexpected about 20 Million Miles to Earth. The only thing that really separates it from The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms is the fact that it takes place in Rome instead of New York, and the only reason for that is that Harryhausen couldn’t afford to take a vacation there. 20 Million Miles to Earth is a perfectly conventional movie, but with such great special effects, such good cinematography and such great action scenes, there’s nothing wrong with that.
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