Godzilla, through his boundless adaptability, has remained a staple of cinema and pop culture from his inception, and whether he was a superhero or a walking Nuclear Bomb, there has always been something to love about him. Following the decade's hibernation after Godzilla: Final Wars in 2004, he would return yet again, this time getting the big budget Hollywood treatment he always deserved, and following its massive success, Toho would bring Godzilla back to Japan in a slightly less spectacular fashion. But this wasn't the first time Godzilla had been given a full western treatment. America's first attempt at making a Godzilla film was a miserable failure, one that lives in infamy among Godzilla fans as the film that took the God out of Godzilla.
Godzilla came to America several times before the 1990's. In 1956, Godzilla, King of the Monsters! was released, Gigantis, The Fire Monster released in 1959, King Kong vs Godzilla was Americanised and released in 1963, and in 1985, The Return of Godzilla was released in America under the title, Godzilla 1985, a film famous for the sombre return of Raymond Burr and Dr Pepper. In the late 1970's, American animation company Hanna-Barbera, the company behind Scooby Doo, produced an animated series based on Godzilla. In the show, Godzilla comes to the aid of the crew of a research ship called the Calico, and in typical Hanna-Barbera fashion, Godzilla is given a goofy nephew called Godzooky who hangs around with the Calico crew and gets himself and his friends into trouble that Godzilla then has to get them out of. Outside of film and TV, Godzilla also made several appearances in American comics, most notably his run in Marvel comics in the late 1970's, before then having separate runs in Dark Horse and IDW comics in the 1990's and 2010's respectively. But all throughout the 1990's, an American Godzilla film was on the cards. TriStar had been sold the rights to use the character and concepts were being drawn up for the first full-blooded American Godzilla. The film would go through several iterations, most famously one where Godzilla came from Atlantis, all under Toho's watchful eye, before director Roland Emmerich, who'd proven himself gifted in destroying American cities in his wildly successful 1996 film, Independence Day, joined the project.
In the film, a giant lizard, mutated by Nuclear Testing in the Pacific, would come ashore in New York city and cause unparalleled destruction. When a teaser trailer was released showing Godzilla's foot coming through the roof of a Museum and crushing a Tyrannosaurus display, the hype was huge, and continued to be huge with a very expensive and very successful marketing campaign, one that promised epic spectacle while keeping its best card, Godzilla himself, close to the chest. It seemed that Godzilla was finally coming to America and that Roland Emmerich, the king of epic destruction, was going to do him justice. Then the film came out. The 1998 Godzilla was probably a lot of people's first real introduction to the monster, and what a poor first impression that would have been because to say the film did not live up to expectations would be an understatement. The 1998 film, when stripped of its relation to Godzilla, becomes a much more tolerable film; its a 90's action movie where a giant monster plays cat and mouse with the US Army in downtown Manhattan. It has many very entertaining scenes of the monster outsmarting and outmanoeuvring a clumsy and overly destructive Army, and some scenes, including the opening ship attack and the scene where Godzilla makes landfall are very impressive sequences.
But where the film went so, so wrong was that the monster in it just wasn't Godzilla. The film may have stripped the character of much of his inherent, rubber suited cheese, but it also stripped the character of his inherent characteristics; gone was the indestructible, relentless, vengeful, fire breathing God and in his place was a big lizard that runs and hides from helicopters and just wants to be left alone with its babies. Fittingly, when the monster was featured in 2004's Godzilla: Final Wars, where the real Godzilla humiliated and destroyed it, it had been rebranded to just Zilla, because there was no God in it. The film never became as successful as TriStar or Toho had wanted, and has garnered a reputation as a black mark on the franchise, one that might be overstated, but isn't entirely undeserved. Of course, it never got a sequel, but an animated TV series that aired from 1998 to 2000 where Godzilla fights other giant monsters is more fondly remembered. The 1998 Godzilla may have been a complete misfire, but the damage it did to the brand has waned over time, to the point of being negligible. Throughout the 2000's, attempts were made to get a second American Godzilla film off the ground, this time with a better understanding of the character. Like the TriStar film, it went through several iterations, initially being an IMAX short film being produced by Godzilla vs Hedorah director Yoshimitsu Banno, before American film studio, Legendary Pictures acquired the rights and announced that they would be bringing Godzilla back to America with Warner Bros. co-financing and distributing.
In 2013, Legendary Pictures would also release Pacific Rim, directed by Guillermo del Toro. In Pacific Rim, Earth is being invaded by giant monsters called Kaiju and humanity builds giant mechs called Jaegers to fight them. A film with a deceptively simple premise, it was successful and popular upon release, being praised for its epic scale and imaginative and stunning monster battles, but what Pacific Rim definitively proved was that there was a strong demand for kaiju movies, and so the skids were greased for Legendary's reimagining of the King of the Monsters, which released the following year. Directed by the unknown at the time director, Gareth Edwards, Godzilla was released in 2014 and like Pacific Rim before it, was very successful upon release, raking in half a billion dollars worldwide. In the film, a radioactive insect monster, designated as a MUTO, a Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism, escapes its containment in the ruins of a failed Nuclear power plant in Japan, and while the US Army and a secretive scientific organisation called Monarch hunt it down, its presence awakens Godzilla, who joins the hunt and eventually fights a pair of MUTOs in San Francisco. I've talked about the 2014 Godzilla a lot in the past, but to summarise, I absolutely adore it. I've come to accept that it's not perfect in the decade since it came out, but I feel that the film is very misunderstood and underappreciated, and that might be the fault of Godzilla's own reputation.
A year earlier, Pacific Rim wowed audiences with stunning, indulgent kaiju brawls, and with Godzilla being the King of the Monsters, there was a fair expectation that the film would also be full of indulgent kaiju brawls. Instead, Godzilla 2014 was a restrained, subdued thriller, one that teased the monster action far too much for some people's liking. When the film finally delivers in the finale, the action is not a Pacific Rim style wrestling match, it's a slow, heavy, brutal showdown with three impossibly large creatures. The core complaints about the film are the minimal use of Godzilla and the weak human drama. But when approached with an open mind, the film can be better appreciated as a masterfully directed and paced film with a solid creative vision and contemporary themes that, while distinctly western, are rooted firmly in a complete understanding of the titular Monster. While his Japanese counterpart is a cautionary tale of the cruelty and destructive power of the Atom, this new American Godzilla is a cautionary tale of humanity's arrogance and attempts to control and tame nature, he is an embodiment of nature's uncontrollability, a walking natural disaster, as opposed to a walking Nuclear one. The fact that he looks and sounds like classic Godzilla is just a bonus. Far from being a cheap American version, Legendary's Godzilla is a perfect companion to the original, and a more than worthy adaptation. Following the film's success at the box office, Legendary would carry on the series and expand it into a shared cinematic universe, something that had been popularised by Marvel Studios and their interconnected MCU.
But while other attempts to ape the MCU formula fell flat, the Monsterverse would be sold on a promise that Godzilla and King Kong would be reunited. Legendary Pictures were also working on a reboot of King Kong with Universal Studios, but after the release of Godzilla, the film switched distributers to Warner Bros. It was then announced that the King Kong reboot, titled Kong: Skull Island, would become part of a shared universe with the 2014 Godzilla and that the two titans of cinema would finally do battle again. But while Kong would see similarly huge success to Godzilla in his solo outing, Godzilla would see diminished returns in his sequel, lovingly titled Godzilla: King of the Monsters. Released in 2019, it's notable for featuring three of Godzilla's oldest and most beloved foes; Ghidorah, Rodan and Mothra, unfortunately it's also notable for proving that these icons of the franchise are not box office draws in the west. On top of that, the film was criticised for its poor writing and nonsensical story. Though it was adored upon release by Godzilla fans, the film doesn't get looked back on as often or fondly as it deserves. Like its predecessor, it masterfully and respectfully adapts its Monsters, while infusing them with a layer of fantasy that the first film lacked. By the film's finale, Godzilla, Rodan, Mothra and Ghidorah are elevated to not just giant monsters, but Gods and Demons in a vast pantheon of good and evil in which the human characters must find and accept their role. And what the film lacks in coherent story, it makes up for in monster sequences that are beyond breath taking. King of the Monsters, like the first film, has a complete understanding of Godzilla, and channels the ridiculousness of some of the series' history into an epic film, but one that ultimately failed to recapture the audience its predecessor had alienated.
By this point though, Godzilla vs. Kong was already too far along for the studio to back out, and despite their Godzilla sequel being a financial dud, Godzilla vs. Kong still had clear potential, and was slated to release the following year. Then the Covid Lockdowns happened, and with the entire world on pause, cinemas were forced to close and dozens of releases were delayed and then delayed again as the Lockdowns were endlessly reimposed and extended. The film finally got released in 2021, and despite releasing in a significantly diminished market and simultaneously launching on Streaming, the film managed to out-gross King of the Monsters, though still failing to crack the half a billion the two monsters' solo outings had enjoyed, the film was successful enough for Legendary and Warner Bros. to go ahead with a sequel, Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire, which releases next year. Directed by Adam Wingard, who would return to direct Godzilla X Kong, the film pits cinema's two greatest monsters against one another in a bombastic, action packed adventure. The film also features Mechagodzilla, this time as a secret weapon developed by an evil cybernetics corporation. Godzilla vs. Kong managed to save the Monsterverse like the original King Kong vs. Godzilla managed to re-energise Godzilla in 1962, delivering a massive, non-stop action spectacle, but like its predecessors, it was criticised for its poor writing and weak story.
Regardless of the film's faults though, it delivered on the promise made years prior when the Monsterverse was started that Godzilla and King Kong would meet again, and thanks to GVK, the pair look to have a bright future ahead of them in the west. The Monsterverse has also been expanded into television with Monarch: Legacy of Monsters and Skull Island, neither of which I've watched. During all of this time though, Toho was also releasing new Godzilla films, for the first time in the series' history, separate Godzilla series' were running on either side of the Pacific, and like The Return of Godzilla in 1984, Godzilla's return to Japan would also be a return to his anti-nuclear roots. On the 11th of March, 2011, a magnitude nine earthquake off the coast of Japan and forty foot high tsunami washed away entire towns and killed nearly twenty thousand people, then Prime Minister of Japan, Naoto Kan, called the tsunami "the toughest and most difficult crisis for Japan" since the Second World War. The crisis worsened however when three of the reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, having been damaged by the earthquake and tsunami, exploded. After losing power to the reactors' cooling systems, three of the reactors would eventually melt down and explode, releasing radioactive fission products into the surrounding environment. After the meltdowns, Japan's Nuclear crisis gave way to political scandal, panic was spreading about the release of radiation from the Plant, and the Japanese government were being blamed for the meltdowns and criticised for their response to them, Kan would resign from his office before the end of the year, and the clean up and decommissioning of the Plant still continues today, managed by Plant operator TEPCO, in partnership with the Japanese Government.
The event, understandably, had a massive societal and cultural impact on Japan, for the first time in nearly seventy years, Japan was dealing with a radioactive nightmare, the Fukushima meltdown caused wide scale panic and reignited the country's anti-nuclear movement. After the success of Legendary's Godzilla in 2014, Toho would announce that they were producing a Godzilla film of their own, to be released in 2016. Written and directed by Hideaki Anno, the mastermind behind Neon Genesis Evangelion, with Shinji Higuchi co-directing, the film would depict the political and military response to the emergence of a massive, radioactive creature in Japan, and would heavily satirise the Japanese Government and their response to Fukushima, while also depicting scenes of destruction reminiscent of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. Shin Godzilla was a monstrous success in Japan upon release, and was hailed as one of, if not the best film in the franchise's history and swept the Japanese Academy; winning Best Director, Best Picture, Best Cinematography, Best Sound Design and so on. The film's cultural impact on Japan was massive, Shin Godzilla was appearing in cartoons, TV adverts, being plastered on public transport, it was everywhere, for the first time since 1954, a Godzilla film had a complete stranglehold on the Japanese zeitgeist. However, the film was slow to release in the west, and despite it's massive success in Japan, the film's almost aggressively Japanese focused story and satire was off-putting to some.
It's storytelling, if you can call it that, is overwhelming and underwhelming simultaneously; in place of characters, it has talking heads, in place of a story, it has a criticism of government bureaucracy, in place of a monster, it has the most literal interpretation of a walking nuclear disaster in the series, as in all Godzilla does is move forward and spread radiation. This is just my opinion, of course, but it's like the film was so hyper-focused on satire and commentary that it forgot to be a film, and for all the strengths it does have; its effects, its imagery, the contemporary relevance of said commentary, and its strong nationalistic messaging, the film is just too dense for western audiences, while failing to deliver on the thrills or the terror of the original.
Personally, I don't hate Shin Godzilla, I don't love it either, rather, I am largely apathetic to it, and for the triumphant return of my favourite movie monster and a film considered by many to be a masterpiece, equal to or even superior to the original, not to mention a film that tries to tackle such dark material, that makes me a bit sad. Unfortunately, Toho's next three Godzilla films are films I personally do hate. After the success of Shin Godzilla, Toho announced that Godzilla would be branching out into the genre of animation, and that a trilogy of animated films, co-produced by Polygon Pictures was on the way, with Netflix distributing internationally.
This was largely due to the licensing deal Toho had with Legendary pictures, which prevented the two companies from releasing competing products and barred Toho from releasing live action Godzilla films until after the release of Godzilla vs. Kong. In 2017 and 2018, Godzilla: Planet of the Monsters, City on the Edge of Battle and The Planet Eater would all be released in theatres in Japan, followed by an international release on Netflix. However, the films would prove very divisive and controversial on release, and one of them, City on the Edge of Battle, would go on to become the lowest grossing theatrical release in the series' history. There is no simple way to summarise what's so bad about this trilogy, but I'll try. Set in a distant future where humanity was brought to near extinction by Godzilla, it follows a group of humans who have returned to Earth to try and recolonise the planet, only to find that Godzilla is still alive and has conquered the entire world. So far, so good, but an intriguing set up gives way to slow, boring, pseudo-philosophical nonsense as the humans, led by the thoroughly unlikeable Haruo, wage war on Godzilla Earth, who does little more than stand there and soap up their attacks. The trilogy spends literal hours dwelling on the philosophical nature of Humanity, Godzilla and their relation to each other, which is further complicated by the competing philosophies of the Exif and the Bilusaludo, two alien races that help the humans fight Godzilla.
It's a very nihilistic trilogy where the humans reject technology, religion, and finally themselves in the pursuit of a brighter future that they eventually accept is not possible, and it ends with the main hero, Haruo killing himself. While some of the ideas of the trilogy have potential to be interesting if explored in a good story, the Anime Trilogy is not a good story, and despite being sold as an Anime, it completely lacks the creativity, charm or visual flare of the genre, and to top it all off, they are truly abysmal as kaiju movies. Godzilla is alone and inanimate for most of the trilogy, Mechagodzilla, Mothra and Ghidorah make appearances, but are so wildly altered as to be completely unrecognisable, Mechagodzilla in particular who, rather than being a robot doppelganger of Godzilla, is a living nanometal city. My personal opinion again, but the Godzilla Anime Trilogy are the only three films in the entire Godzilla series that I would honestly call unwatchable, and that includes the 1998 film. After squandering their first shot at a Godzilla Anime, Toho would then squander their second shot with Godzilla: Singular Point, which was also released internationally on Netflix. This time produced by renowned Anime Studio Bones, the series would at least be a visually striking and appealing Anime, though despite a strong start, likable characters and an absolute banger of an intro song, the series slowly devolved into a nonsensical exercise in pseudo-science, bogged down by endless prattle about Archetypes, Orthogonal Diagonalizers and a nebulous, undefined interdimensional Armageddon.
But unlike the Anime Trilogy, Singular Point does try to deliver on the monster action, and while it reimagines and homages many classic monsters, it does so in a faithful and respectful way, sometimes. Like Shin Godzilla, I'm mostly apathetic to Singular Point, but what makes it doubly disappointing is that for the second time in Godzilla's history, Gamera did it better. Earlier this year, Gamera: Rebirth, an animated series that also released on Netflix, did what the Anime Trilogy and Singular Point could not; tell a good story and on top of that, it featured kaiju battles that are leagues above anything in the Godzilla Anime Trilogy or Singular Point, and to add irony to this; Hiroyuki Seshita, who co-directed the Godzilla Anime Trilogy with Kobun Shizuno, wrote and directed Gamera: Rebirth. Gamera: Rebirth managed to blend the fantasy of the Heisei Trilogy with the childish whimsy of the Showa series, and tell a compelling coming of age story with likable characters, while Godzilla's two anime tried and failed to intellectualise a series built on camp and wanton mayhem, while falling far short of their potential. But while Gamera made a modest comeback and Legendary's Godzilla continues to chug along, Toho were preparing their dramatic resurgence. With the conditions of their deal with Legendary out of the way, work began on another live action Godzilla film, this new film would not be a sequel to Shin Godzilla however, but would instead be a stand alone film.
Takashi Yamazaki, who had previously directed the monster sequences for Godzilla: The Ride, signed on to direct, he would also write the film and serve as its visual effects director. But when the film's development was delayed by Covid, Yamazaki would go back to the drawing board and spend the time tweaking and tinkering with his script, the film was filmed under a shroud of secrecy before finally being revealed to the world as Godzilla: Minus One, a film that would take the King of the Monsters back in time and set him loose in one of the darkest periods of Japanese history. The film released in November in Japan, where it naturally soared to the top spot in the box office, but what makes Godzilla: Minus One unique is how it's fairing outside of Japan. This news was coming in as I was writing this, but Godzilla: Minus One recently opened in the United States, being the first Godzilla film to get a theatrical release in the United States since Godzilla 2000. Released by Toho International, the film clawed its way to the top spot in the US box office as well, being the first Japanese Godzilla film to do so, and is receiving extremely positive word of mouth. The film's run has now been extended and rumour is that it's in contention for an Oscar, and it's being hailed by western audiences and critics alike as a modern marvel of filmmaking, and a humiliation of the bloated, preachy, creatively bankrupt and massively expensive failures Hollywood has been pumping out in recent years. It had to compete with a Marvel film, a Disney film, a Historical Epic directed by Ridley Scott, and a prequel to one of the biggest franchises of the 2010's, and it beat them all.
Sacred Beast of the Apocalypse
Godzilla has had a very long and very wild career in film; and be him a terrifying embodiment of Nuclear power, or a manifestation of Death, or a whacky and lovable superhero, there has always been something to love about the King of the Monsters. There are countless different ways to interpret him and what he represents and all of them, no matter how bonkers, can be something special when approached with an open mind. Through the ups and downs of his career, Godzilla has remained as a ruthlessly determined, unstoppable force of nature who's as quick to punish humanity as he will be to save it. He's a monster that has done it all; from terrifying the world and giving a face and a name to the worst of human suffering, to saving the day and defeating the bad guys, and whichever end of that spectrum he lands on, hero or villain, God or Demon, he has struck the hearts and minds of countless people all over the world, and will continue to do so for generations to come. Long Live the King.
No comments:
Post a Comment