Your Independence Day Guide To Picking A Noisy Movie

So last week, as everyone in the United States is no doubt aware, we celebrated Independence Day. This involves fireworks. Lots and lots of fireworks. These fireworks may be shot off by your town or municipality, your local businesses, and, of course, your neighbors, and many pets find the noise stressful, including our dog Lulu (the rest of our animals, including former street dog Bean, don’t care that much). We planned ahead for this by getting her a quick-acting prescription medication for her nerves that can be applied half an hour before fireworks are expected to start, and also by lining up a noisy movie for us to watch during festivities. But which one to choose?

Wife: “So what movie are we watching tonight?”
Me: “Well, I was thinking either Dune 2 or Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire.”
Wife: “Isn’t Dune pretty much just people walking across the desert?”
Me: “The first one was mostly that, but I hear the second one has a little more action.”

I then took to the Internet to see if I could find out which movie was, in general, louder*, but this doesn’t appear to be information that anyone really cares about. I did find some theoretical discussions about how loud Godzilla’s roar would be in real life (the answer seems to be 174dB, although I don’t know exactly how that was determined), but mostly if you look for how loud a movie is you get information about how much money it made. Which I guess is some sort of metaphor where “noise” equals “box office success”. So I ended up making an executive decision about it.

Wife (coming in and seeing Godzilla on the screen): “So you decided to go with Godzilla, huh?”
Me: “Yeah, I figured that Dune 2 is almost** certainly a better movie, but Godzilla x Kong is almost certainly a louder movie.”

You can judge for yourself, based on the trailers, whether I made the right decision.

I wanted to watch Dune 2, but, you know, we were looking for noise, so I watched Godzilla x Kong instead.

Wife: “How is it so far?”
Me: “It’s extremely stupid, but it’s also extremely loud. So it’s doing its job.”

So, yeah, this movie was pretty dumb, but I’m not going to say it wasn’t fun to watch all the kaiju mayhem; there is, after all, a reason that the rating system around here is “How long did it take this movie to put my wife to sleep?” and not “Did Jim like this movie?” But, once again, my wife didn’t actually stick around to watch Godzilla x Kong; I mean, if she didn’t watch Godzilla Minus One, which actually had a brain in its head, she certainly wasn’t going to sit through this idiotic spectacle. But she did wander by now and then on her way to someplace else. So she got to see, among other things, the so-called “Mini-Kong”:

Wife: “Is that an orangutan Kong?”
Me: “Ehhh, more or less.”

And Kong donning his power glove:

Wife: “He reminds me of Tony Stark*** with that thing on his arm.”

And she also got to see Godzilla having a nap inside the Colosseum:

Wife: “Look at him curled up in there. It’s just like a dog bed.”

And, of course, she got to see our old friend Paper Boi, still going through it.

Wife: “Poor Paper Boi just can’t catch a break.”
Me: “Well at least some of the stuff he went through in Atlanta would help prepare him for all this.”

And she also had a question about the whole scenario:

Wife: “So is Kong the same as King Kong?”
Me: “Well I mean yes it’s basically the same, but they don’t call him ‘King Kong’.”
Wife: “Why not?”
Me: “I think it’s a copyright thing.”

This led us down a Kong-sized rabbit hole of looking into why he’s Kong and not King Kong, and, yep, it does seem to boil down to a copyright issue. Basically, it sounds like the Kong character itself is in the public domain, but the name “King Kong” is still under copyright. So for instance when Universal tried to sue Nintendo over their famous Donkey Kong video game, claiming to own the “Kong” name, they lost very, very badly. But I’m not a lawyer, and this is the sort of thing that makes one’s eyes glaze over if they gaze upon it too long, so we’ll just say “copyright mess” and leave it at that.****

Anyway, as previously noted, Godzilla x Kong was fairly long and extremely loud, and got us through most of the fireworks on the 4th itself. But lo! Then the 5th rolled around, and there were still fireworks going off in the evening. Lulu got medicated again, and we needed another movie.

Me: “I think I’m going to find out how noisy Dune 2 is. I can’t sit through Godzilla x Kong a second time.”
Wife: “I don’t blame you.”

So we put on Dune 2, and how did it start? Just guess. Go ahead. Guess.

As it turns out, I was right that Dune 2 was a lot noisier than the first one. But, yeah, Godzilla x Kong was still much, much louder.

* Not that I didn’t already have a pretty good idea …
** And by “almost” I mean “definitely”.
*** Tony Stark. Not Iron Man. She doesn’t know who that is.
**** Maybe someday Legal Eagle or somebody like him will do a video explaining it all.