They threw in imagery comparing Ghidora to William Blake’s Great Red Dragon paintings, and you know what? They actually earned it. They made him awesome and terrible.

Giving each head a unique personality added a lot. Am I reading into it too much or were they trying to imply that he was the origin of all mythological dragons?

Did you see the MechaGodzilla tease in the credits?

GKotM19 is by far the most fun movie I've watched this year since Alita: Battle Angel. (I mean, Endgame was fun too, I guess, but not as fun for me.) But there were a lot of aspects to its narrative that made the whole thing feel slightly off. I would recognize tropes used in the original 1954/56 film with Dr. Serizawa being reimagined as a new character (san eyepatch and love triangle), and even from 1991's Godzilla vs King Ghidorah, where the Godzilla creature had to be irradiated with a modern Japanese nuclear sub in order to fight King Ghidorah. But in both of those examples, the tropes used sat on the opposite spectrum of the use of nuclear weapons.

In the 2019 film, Dr. Serizawa sacrifices his own life by deploying one of the world's most deadly weapons next to Godzilla. This mirrors the moment inn the 1954 film where Dr. Serizawa did the same thing, but to a different effect. 1954 Serizawa was on a mission to kill the greatest threat known to mankind while also sacrificing himself to assure that no one in the world would ever use his deadly weapon ever again, while 2019 Serizawa was on a mission to sacrifice himself using one of the weapons on Earth to awaken one of the greatest threats known to mankind so that threat could act as a weapon against another monster. (And yes, Godzilla is still seen as a threat in the 2019 film. The movie is nowhere near subtle with its "he's on our side for now" foreshadowing.) This twisting of Dr. Serizawa's goals and beliefs kinda rubs me the wrong way, despite it being so positively emotionally impactful for me when watching it in the theaters. (I'm literally of two different minds about it, but the scene had me sobbing anyway, so overall, I guess it's a win for the film.)

The second part of that is the use of nukes to re-irradiate Godzilla. This was done once before in a Japanese film as well, 1991's Godzilla vs King Ghidorah. (GvKG) But, in the Japanese film, the whole operation is painted with darker undertones. Japan has (in both real life and in this movie's universe) a policy against owning or otherwise using nuclear weapons. (This was established in-universe in Godzilla 1984, AKA "The Return of Godzilla.") In GvKG, it's explain that the Japanese government has been secretly working on a nuclear submarine despite their public policies. While this almost betrays the characters of earlier films claiming to hold to a "No Nukes" policy on their weapons, it also sets up yet another devastating outcome. When Godzilla is successfully re-irradiated in the film, all of his more benevolent qualities are seemingly erased, and, for the first time in the Godzilla franchise, Godzilla becomes a cruel, vengeful god intentionally wreaking havoc on human civilization. (Even in other films where Godzilla was stomping on Tokyo, it was more because he was angry for being woken up, and not because he was being vengeful. In all of the other times, he seems to care little about humans specifically.) This, again, ties back to the main core of the more thematically-minded Godzilla movies of nuclear weapons being always bad all the time. The American 2019 film, again, twists that action in its own narrative towards a different message: Nukes are good when the right people use them.

This was inevitable. Like I said in an earlier post, we saw evidence of this in the Americanized version of Godzilla in 1965, where Dr. Serizawa's motives are changed from no one using cruel bombs to making sure cruel bombs don't fall into the wrong hands. (suggesting that there are good hands in which to place cruel bombs for future use.) But this weird twisting of these Japanese tropes into American usages still rubs me the wrong way (despite cheering like a mad man when Godzilla woke up and started kicking ass again in the film). I'm honestly not sure what to make of it, other than these are indeed American Godzilla films, and the past two have been impactful/fun for me to watch.

But isn't the forbidding of nukes the core aspect of Godzilla, or is the point of Godzilla merely to ease out various culture's fearing about the use of nukes? Does the American series abandoning a darker massage around the nukes also abandon a vital aspect to Godzilla? Or is it merely evidence that it's a Godzilla film made by American filmmakers?

I really don't know myself.

Outright bringing over the themes from Japanese Godzilla movies (the serious ones, anyway) would never work in an American production for one simple reason:

We are the ones who dropped the bombs. We are the only nation in human history that has used nuclear weapons in anger. It would be totally hypocritical for Americans to lecture the world about the evils of irresponsible use of a terrible weapon.

Now, a director could make a Godzilla movie about the chickens coming home to roost, and paint Godzilla as a force of pure, toxic destruction.

No major studio is going to take that risk, though. Even in the 1998 movie, which is all about a atomic bomb radiated lizard coming to destroy shit in America, the French are blamed for the radiation, not us. A popcorn monster movie is not the place where we will confront sins past.

America can be as blind about our transgressions as the Japanese are about theirs, and it reflects in our pop culture.

Now, that’s doesn’t mean that American movies don’t reach for a broadly similar theme. The radiation stuff in the Monsterverse isn’t about the danger or lack thereof with regards to atomic weaponry, it’s a about how even our most powerful weapon is nothing before the wrath of nature. We’re nothing, just getting in the way while nature does its thing.

I think the easiest place to illustrate this is in the choice to name the Monarch headquarters “castle bravo”, which was the code name for the hydrogen bomb test that destroyed Bikini Atol. Serizawa mentions in ‘14 that the nuclear tests in the pacific weren’t tests, they were failed attempts to kill Godzilla.

That’s illustrative of the theme here. Humans just *have* to meddle where they don’t belong, and it often has unintended consequences (apparently a big dose of rads can juice up Godzilla; makes you wonder if all those failed attempts at murdering him just ended up making him bigger and stronger.

We seek to control things we can to understand and hurt ourselves in the process. That’s the theme: Humanity is better understanding these creatures as gods, not just big animals. Some things are beyond our ken and deserve unmitigated respect and unlimited caution, not a half assed attempt to control it.

It rings hollow to me when they claim that Godzilla is on their side "for now" in Kingdom of Monsters. When has he ever *not* been? The backstory they reveal about him being worshiped as a god in ancient times, the sweet nest he has in the sunken city, and his role as monster wrangler in the credits all just serve to further emphasize this. He is one of the most human-tolerant Godzilla incarnations. In fact, I think only Zilla Jr and Hanna-Barbera Godzilla have him beat in that regard. Even Showazilla trashed deliberately trashed a few cities.

Yeah, I know the Japanese themes will never show up in an American Godzilla movie. It just feels weird to me to have these tropes perform in a reverse manner is all. It's not a complaint, per se (not once did it prevent me from enjoying the movie), it's just an observation. I guess the weirdest part was the use of a character named "Dr. Serizawa." It's almost like having a Braveheart movie where Wallace is pretty cool with the English. (You know, if Braveheart wasn't an attempt at a historical drama or whatever.) If it were any other character, it probably wouldn't feel so weird.

Again, I'm not saying "Thing bad, movie sucks," or even "Thing bad, I'm mad." It's more like "Thing exists, and it made me feel. little weird despite my enjoyment of the film."

I always took the "Godzilla's on our side for now" part as more foreshadowing than anything else. These people already saw how these monsters in general can turn on humans very quickly, and how presumably helpless they can be to them. The film as a whole still creates an environment where humans can still probably kill Godzilla without human sacrifice (which would be an unusual first in the series), what with the whole Oxygen Destroyer almost killing Godzilla. The franchise as a whole seems to be keeping that "humans can still kill Godzilla if they really wanted to" in its back pocket as a way to potentially end the series, and only time will tell if that's a fitting way to conclude something like Godzilla.