Big and Loud beats Deep and Boring every single time. If there is a creature on screen that could step on a skyscraper, I am already watching. I do not need a trailer. I do not need reviews. I do not need you to tell me the CGI looks a bit rough in some places. I do not care. I am seated. I am locked in. And this is my attempt to explain why that is, and why I have absolutely zero plans to change.
This is not a review of any single film. This is a defense of an entire way of watching. Because spectacle gets treated like a guilty pleasure, something you are supposed to outgrow or apologize for once you have developed more sophisticated taste. I am not apologizing. I am explaining.
The Obsession Has an Origin Story
This has been my whole personality since I was a kid. My brain saw something massive, impossible, and world-ending on a screen and just decided: Yes. More of this, please. It started with the 2005 King Kong. Peter Jackson's remake cost $207 million, ran for over three hours, and became the most expensive film ever made at the time. Universal signed off on every single overrun. Someone sat in a boardroom and kept saying yes to a movie about a giant gorilla, because they knew.
I sat in front of that film completely still, eyes on the screen. Seeing a creature that size - with that much presence, that much weight, that much intention behind every movement - did something permanent to my brain chemistry. Kong was not just big. He was specific. He had moods. He had preferences. He looked at Ann Darrow the way something that enormous should not be capable of looking at anything. The scale and the feeling arrived at the same time, and I have never fully recovered from it. From that point on, the only qualification a film needed from me was: does something enormous exist in it. That was the entire bar. It has never once let me down.
Godzilla and Kong: A Defense of Not Caring About the Script
I will be the first to admit that the MonsterVerse films are not exactly showing up at awards season. The human characters in these films are mostly just placeholders who exist to point upward and say things like "we have to stop it" and "nothing could have prepared us for this" while the entire audience is thinking please stop talking and go back to the monster.
Is the writing occasionally held together by hope and good intentions? Yes. Do I care? Absolutely not.
Here is the thing about the MonsterVerse criticism that never quite lands for me. When people say "the human characters are weak" they are describing a problem as if it is an accident. It is not an accident. The human characters are weak because they are not the point. They are the frame around the painting. You do not look at a painting and complain that the frame is plain. The frame exists so the painting has somewhere to live. When Godzilla rises out of the ocean and the bass drops and something that size just moves, defying movement of something that should not exist at that scale but does, that is the entire product. The plot is the loading screen. The monster is the movie. I have never once felt cheated by a MonsterVerse film because I walked in knowing exactly what I was there for and I got exactly that. Every time.
Pacific Rim: A Film Full of Characters I Cannot Name
Full transparency: I could not tell you the name of a single Pacific Rim character right now if you paid me. There was a main guy. He had some feelings about something. There might have been a mentor figure. There was definitely an emotional backstory involving loss that I was supposed to be moved by.
What I can tell you, with complete clarity, is exactly what it felt like watching a Jaeger step out of the ocean for the first time. Guillermo del Toro directed Pacific Rim in 2013 and made a very specific creative decision: the Jaegers move slowly. Deliberately. With enormous, grinding weight behind every step. A machine the size of a building, moving through water that only reaches its knees, built entirely to walk up to something equally enormous and punch it directly in the face. The character work could have been replaced by title cards that just said "human one" and "human two" and I still would have been fully satisfied based purely on the mech footage. I have watched those fight sequences more times than I can count. I remember none of the dialogue. I remember every single frame of every Jaeger moving. Zero apologies. None coming.
Jurassic Park: The Franchise That Lost the Plot (I'm Still There)
The original Jurassic Park is a genuinely great film. Steven Spielberg made something in 1993 that has never been fully replicated despite everyone trying. The storytelling is tight. The tension is real. The moment the T-Rex steps into the rain and roars for the first time, with the water trembling in the cup and John Williams' score swelling underneath it, is one of cinema's all-time hold-your-breath moments. It earns every second of the awe it asks from you.
The sequels are a different story. The Jurassic World trilogy kept finding new reasons to send people back to an island that has killed everyone who ever visited it. The writing got worse and the excuses got more elaborate. By Dominion in 2022, the franchise had run out of ideas entirely and was recycling original characters and somehow adding a locust subplot nobody asked for. Critics were not kind. Critics were right.
And yet. I am there for every single one. Because a Brachiosaurus walking through frame with that John Williams score underneath it is an automatic, unconditional win regardless of what is happening around it. A T-Rex on screen produces a response in me that bypasses the part of my brain that cares about screenplay quality. You could give me two hours of the weakest writing ever committed to paper and if something with that much scale exists in it, I will walk out satisfied. Genuinely. This is not a rational position. It is a consistent one. And consistency counts for something.
Attack on Titan: Where Scale Becomes Actual Art
This is where I have to stop calling myself a pure spectacle-chaser and admit that something deeper is actually going on. Because Attack on Titan figured out something that most big budget blockbusters spend hundreds of millions of dollars trying to manufacture and almost never achieve: that scale, when used correctly, is not just visually impressive. It is psychologically destabilizing in the best possible way.
You know the scene. Episode one, Season one. The Colossal Titan peers over Wall Maria. The wall is fifty meters tall, an enormous structure that represents the absolute boundary of human safety, the thing humanity built over a hundred years to keep themselves protected. And the Colossal Titan is just taller. Casually. It peers over the top of the wall the way you would look over a garden fence. No explosion yet. No action. Just that image, the complete and instant collapse of everything the characters believed kept them safe, delivered in a single visual. The wall was supposed to be the guarantee. And something was simply bigger than it.
That is not spectacle. That is awe. And it is the exact feeling I have been chasing since I was a kid going very still in front of a screen for reasons I could not yet explain. Attack on Titan understood that scale is not just about size. It is about what the size means. A thing being enormous is interesting. A thing being enormous in a context where its size destroys what people believed to be true is devastating. Most spectacle stops at impressive. Attack on Titan made it mean something.
The Part Where I Justify All of This With Psychology
Here is the thing: this reaction has a name, and it is older than cinema. In 1757, Edmund Burke wrote about why certain experiences produce a feeling that is not quite fear and not quite pleasure but sits somewhere between both. He called it The Sublime. His argument was that it happens when something is so vast or powerful that it overwhelms your ability to fully process it. Your brain hits a limit and goes quiet. Burke was thinking about mountains and thunderstorms. I experience the exact same thing watching a fictional radioactive lizard level a city. The trigger is different. The feeling is the same.
There is a word for what I experience, and it is not megalophobia but it lives right next to it. Megalophobia is the fear of large objects. I have the opposite. The same vertigo, the same wrongness of watching something exist at a size your brain was not built to process, but without the panic. One person looks at the Colossal Titan and feels dread. I look at it and feel something closer to reverence. Same reaction, different sides of it.
We built fictional creatures to trigger this on demand. We built cinemas to deliver it at maximum volume and scale. And I will always show up for it. Every single time.
Are you a spectacle person or a story person - and is there a giant creature film that actually made you feel both at once?
Drop it in the comments. I want to know what broke your brain the same way King Kong broke mine.
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