Hiya! Happy New Year. How was your break? I watched all of Reacher and saw some friends. I hope you, too, had a healthy and happy festive season, and that 2024 brings you joy, love and peace. As for the world - well, I’d like the basics please: freedom for Palestine and the democracy we deserve.
You know how it is.
We’re back! I hope that’s nice for you. It’s nice for me. I love writing these stupid things, and I love that it’s run on for a while now, even when I claimed to be quitting. I actually went ahead and made a list of all the films we’ve covered on Letterboxd here, with all links to the posts, and I was genuinely surprised when the number of films covered came out as 44. 44! That’s a lot. This coming series will take us to 47, and then it’s a skip to 50. Thank you for bearing with me through it all. I appreciate you.
Long-time readers may notice the absence of the X-Men newsletters. That’s partly because they are non-canon, but also because I have a really funny plan for the 50th film covered here, and they mess up my numbers.
Anyway. On with it.
Godzilla was created 70 years ago by director Ichiro Honda and the team at Toho, who have shepherded the character’s main Japanese incarnation ever since. There have since been thirty-eight films featuring Godzilla, five of which were made in America, the rest in Japan. The 33 Japanese films are split between four distinct eras - Shōwa (from 1954 to 1975, comprising 15 films), Heisei (1984 to 1995, seven films), Millennium (1999 to 2004, six films) and Reiwa (2016 and still going, five films, though three of them are an anime trilogy nobody much seems to care for). The 5 American films are simpler - one 1998 reboot, and then four from the MonsterVerse.
Okay. There are the facts, as laid helpfully out by Ms. Wikipedia. Context is helpful, I think - both to make clear that this is a gigantic franchise, and that we are covering only a very, very small part of it. The only Western equivalent I can think of that replicates this epic length, similar formula and Eras Tour structure is James Bond - older readers of the newsletter may remember him - but the Bond franchise is a comparative slouch at 27 films.
And, more relevantly for our purposes - for all the knock-offs and spoofs, nobody ever ported over James Bond, officially, to another country.
That’s us, right there. The MonsterVerse version of Godzilla. The American lizard. A foreign translation, as original in concept as The Office. The Office, at least, came from roughly the same cultural context and alphabet. Godzilla comes from an entirely different century, a different generation, and a wholly different culture. While it’s true that a huge nonverbal lizard is a pretty translatable concept, this nonverbal lizard, a product of Japan’s unhappy status as the stage on which nuclear weapons had been introduced for the world, is a hard one to simply port over to America.
It’s true that Godzilla is a product of America, but from the wrong way round. He’s a reaction to America, not from it.
At this point, we can skip past decades and dozens of films. Sorry to the Japanese Toho canon of Godzilla, sorry to the Shōwa and Heisei eras. What we need for our contextual purposes is to skip ahead to 1998, 44 years after Godzilla’s creation.
They - and by they I mean the big lumbering monolith of Hollywood - had tried this - once before. The 2014 Godzilla, the movie we’re actually trying to talk about, was the second American adaptation of the character. The first was sixteen years before, in a film of the same name. It didn’t go so well.
Roland Emmerich was hired as director, which seems like a fairly logical choice for the time. He had directed plenty of hits, but his CV for Godzilla only needed his previous film: 1996’s mega-hit Independence Day, which cemented him as one of the Hollywood kings of the blockbuster disaster film. When considering how to reconfigure Godzilla for American audiences, you have to replicate - or at least recall - the destructive trauma of his original Japanese background in some way. The American disaster film, with its paranoid depictions of gleaming capitalist urban jungles torn apart by either bad luck or ne’er do-well invaders, seems a logical fit for that approximate.
Emmerich’s disaster-film career would notch up plenty of further successes, but 1998 Godzilla was more of a disaster film in the real-world sense. Technically making a profit, it was a failure in every other way, from recouping its huge marketing costs to launching the hoped-for American franchise to, well, the way it fucked up Godzilla. This part needs visual evidence.
With great respect, Roland, that is a dinosaur. That is just a dinosaur.
Nobody liked or appreciated this visual adjustment, and it’s probably the only aspect of the film that’s lingered in our cultural memory. It is otherwise completely memory-holed, unclaimed even by the endlessly forgiving dudes-rock segment of film Twitter, and they will forgive anything.
As the franchise sputtered, Toho took the opportunity to rename this dinosaur as “Zilla” in future merchandise. Funny.
Welcome to Godzilla (2014). Sixteen years is a long time to wait for a second attempt, isn’t it?
Time passed. Roland Emmerich’s career recovered. The Japanese franchise relaunched with the six-film Millennium era, before that incarnation of Godzilla also fell dormant in 2004. The decade between that era’s last film, Godzilla: Final Wars, and this next Godzilla film in 2014, remains the longest gap between a Godzilla film to date.
As one might expect, the ball got rolling on the big guy’s return quite a while before 2014. Development really began in 2010 with the acquisition of the Godzilla rights by Legendary Pictures, who signed up to co-produce a new film with their usual partners Warner Bros. (Legendary have since become a lot more open-minded about partnering with other studios, and last year entered a deal with Sony, but they’re still with Warner Bros. on all things MonsterVerse).
Originally intended for a 2012 release, it was no surprise that this nascent reboot was trumpeted as a return to Real Godzilla, i.e. the Japanese original, and to the big CGI monster fights the franchise was known for rather than the Zilla-vs-humans structure of (God)zilla ‘98.
(It’s an interesting quirk that the two very good live-action Reiwa era films, Shin and Minus One, have totally avoided any big monster adversaries, instead focusing on just regular humans fighting Godzilla. Maybe it’s just a skill issue.)
The next major step on the project, naturally, was finding a director.
Towards an auteur theory of Gareth Edwards.
Edwards hails from the town of Nuneaton in Warwickshire, a town which also gave us George Eliot and Ken Loach. At the time of his hiring in 2011, Edwards was fresher than fresh-faced - his feature directorial debut had been released just a few months prior. Like Emmerich and Independence Day, though, Edwards only needed the one.
The 2010 film Monsters, starring 2010s TV staple and Lyle, Lyle Crocodile star Scoot McNairy in a rare leading role, is as good an audition for a kaiju film as one could hope. It’s true that Hollywood loves to scoop an indie film director from the minnows straight into the franchise factory, but it’s rare that things line up this well. Made on a micro-budget of $500,000, Edwards directed, wrote, served as director of photography and was responsible for all visual effects on the film.
Edwards has little of the storytelling panache or visual invention of John Carpenter, but he learned a little something from the horror master’s command of small budgets and his understanding that the suggestion of a monster is almost always scarier than the actual presence of one on screen. Monsters is, naturally, almost all suggestion and suspense, alien sightings kept to a cost-effective minimum, and it’s all the better for it.
Well, who’d have thought it? Those are helpful skills for a Godzilla job interview. After a precursor ridiculed for its highly visible and very stupid rendition of the big lizard, a little smoke and mirrors seemed like a perfectly apt approach to reinvent Godzilla. ‘Zilla 14 would be made for a budget at least 320 times larger than Monsters, but Edwards would be pulling from the same bag of tricks. In theory.
Edwards’ career post-Godzilla consists of two films and a whole lot of story. His immediate follow-up was Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, set up in the afterglow of Lucasfilm’s post-acquisition afterglow when it seemed like the future was never brighter for Star Wars. As is very well documented, the Rogue One got complicated for Edwards.
The common wisdom is that Disney became anxious about the assembly cut about six months out from the film’s December 2016 release, and brought on Tony Gilroy to supervise an extensive round of reshoots that heavily reworked the third act into the everyone-dies final siege it ended up being.
(Yes, Tony Gilroy of Bourne fame. What is this, a crossover episode?)
How involved Edwards was in that process is up for heavy debate - he came out swinging this year in claiming he was in the editing room up to the end of postproduction - but it’s clear that a lot of the final film is Gilroy’s, not his. All’s well that ends well for Disney, who made a billion on Rogue One, and really us the audience, because Gilroy’s hiring directly led to his work on Andor later, but not so for Edwards.
Afterwards career hit a lull that’s difficult to describe as coincidental. Having pulled out of the Godzilla sequel to work on other projects, Edwards wouldn’t direct another film for seven years.
He returned just a few months back with The Creator - which is, to its credit, an original sci-fi film with outstanding visual effects made on an uncommonly reasonable budget. Not to its credit, The Creator is dull, derivative, emotionally uninvolving and features a John David Washington performance so wooden that it made me doubt Tenet, something which is really hard for me to do.
He might be one of those guys who’s happier on a franchise. Who’s to say?
I think the filmmakers ought to have realised what they were doing casting Bryan Cranston as a decoy protagonist at this particular moment in time.
It’s actually surprising how well the instant criticism of the film back from 2014 - that Cranston’s deceptively small role is a bait-and-switch that unbalances the rest of the movie - holds up. True, it’s partly a matter of audience expectations - Godzilla’s marketing campaign, which basically implied Cranston to be the lead, took place in the immediate aftermath of the Breaking Bad finale, where he was basically one of the most famous actors alive. The hearts that broke when Walter White dies half an hour into the movie? Buddy, I had one of them. Sad little 15-year-old me. Royally pissed off.
There’s that, but the Cranston thing does point to a bigger problem than depriving a mid-2010s audience of Heisenberg crossover memes. This is a controversial statement, so I’ll get it done quickly: Bryan Cranston is a good actor. His post-Breaking Bad career has been thoroughly baffling, and his most successful venture in the last decade might be his mezcal business with Aaron Paul, but it’s undeniable that he has the juice.
Specifically, he’s one of those actors who will work in any arena, as neatly shown by his seamless transition from sitcom comedy to grimdark prestige drama. It’s therefore unsurprising that, in his relatively brief screentime in Godzilla, the man brings it. Cranston is simply in the paint, calibrating his natural emotional precision as an actor for the big, broad-strokes environment of a film about a big stompy lizard. He’s given by far the movie’s most interesting character, a man with a genuine emotional conflict that plugs neatly into the inevitable monster drama.
It’s not just because of Cranston that the first act of Godzilla works a charm - the atmospheric conspiracy-thriller vibes, the clever playing with expectations about Godzilla’s role by setting so much of the action in a dilapidated nuclear plant - but he’s the engine behind it, certainly. For a good forty minutes, you see the best parts of the Edwards who made Monsters, a filmmaker who understands the fertile thematic potential of placing ordinary human struggles amidst indecipherable alien creatures.
Then Bryan Cranston dies. It’s clever that he dies, I guess, on the level of subverting expectations and zagging the story in a different direction, but it’s not clever for very long. In the protagonist relay race, the baton is handed to a slower runner.
I think that Aaron Taylor-Johnson is an interesting actor. He is incredibly good in Tenet from the moment that he strolls in halfway through, muttering about “cowboy shit”. He makes the best of Bullet Train’s Reddit-ass script. Nothing wrong with him as an actor. He’s fine.
I just think that that man above is boring. He has a boring haircut and a boring face and a boring expression. He’s a guy whose face you half-remember. He’s boring.
The conceit of Godzilla is to view the huge monster drama from a human vantage point. When the vantage point is Cranston’s emotionally frazzled grieving conspiracy freak, it all works nicely. When it’s Ford fucking Brody, the human element gets a little lost. He is a first-person-shooter protagonist, an empty vessel from which the viewer can see the world, who travels where he needs to go to see the things he needs to see so that the plot can progress. A character? No. He has a wife. That’s not a character. That’s Borat.
All of this was ripe for discussion in 2014. I’m not covering new ground here, just assessing that the old ground was actually pretty firm. Enough about Ford Brody. I don’t care for him.
What about the big guy?
So, look, all that stuff about The Office US had a later use. It’s impossible not to view this Godzilla - officially branded here, none of that ‘Zilla nonsense - as a foreign transplant, and it’s impossible for the movie not to acknowledge that. Godzilla can’t just be some lizard from Minnesota. That’s not how it works.
How does it work, then?
Japan is quite important to the story of Godzilla ‘14. It’s where the story begins, when a nuclear plant melts down due to some mysterious incident, and that same power plant is the setting of that first Cranston-fuelled act. That first act inches its way towards a revelation of the creature trapped inside the plant, the monster that Cranston is looking for, and your natural assumption would be that it’s Godzilla. A Japanese nuclear plant seems like a likely place for him to be, especially in the light of the recent nuclear tragedy in Fukishima in 2011, a fresh modern trauma that seems apt for metaphor in the same manner as the Hiroshima/Nagasaki nuclear bombings did for the original Godzilla.
What emerges from that cocoon, though, is not Godzilla. It’s a big insect thing, one of the MUTOs Godzilla will fight later. Like Cranston’s death, it’s a fun twist on expectations, and like Cranston’s death, it leaves a lot of questions about what exactly comes next. If Godzilla doesn’t come from the place you expected Godzilla to come from, where does he come from?
Through some ever-so-slightly clumsy exposition dumps, Godzilla does eventually lay out an alternate mythology for Mr. Zilla that clearly represents Edwards and co’s attempts to modernise and Americanise the character while still paying tribute to his origin story. It’s clearly not a coincidence that Godzilla’s modern-day alarm clock in this continuity goes off some time in the early 1950s in the shadow of nuclear war, identical to the release of the original film. In this version, though, Godzilla is discovered by an American ship, and the narrative weaves in the American and Soviet nuclear tests of the 1950s - with an explicit shot of Bikini Atoll in 1954 - and suggests they were all about killing Godzilla. The Japanese, an unlikely country to be dropping nuclear weapons at this time, are not involved in this.
Still, though, the movie does want to maintain the Japanese connection. There’s the business with the power plant, but also the presence of Japanese actor Ken Watanabe, who’s responsible for delivering most of that origin-story exposition, and who - in a moment that is so camp I kind of wished the rest of the movie matched its vibe - turns to camera to solemnly intone that the creature is known as “Gojira”.
The effect of all this is difficult to untangle. In what seems largely intentional, Godzilla’s place of origin is blurred to inscrutability, making the creature as multinational as this movie’s continental-hopping plot. He is, I guess, from the sea? It makes sense as a creative decision, neither exoticizing the character overly by explicitly making him a Japanese creation, nor ignoring his foreign origin to cater to American audiences (can you whitewash a big lizard?). But, like plenty of other risk-averse middle-ground decisions made in blockbusters, the solution is not overly interesting. It’s Centrist Godzilla. Perish the thought.
There’s little metaphorical power behind this Godzilla. He’s a big monster. It’s fun, but weightless. Compare it to the Godzillas of Shin and Minus One, who deliver plenty of big fun crashy action while speaking to larger thematic concerns of political ineptitude and post-war trauma, and this ‘Zilla feels a little flattened-out, as if the movie doesn’t quite trust audiences to perceive meaning within a big CGI object. After all, it’s not like Michael Bay’s Optimus Prime performed merciless battlefield executions on unarmed enemies as they screamed.
Hahaha. Sorry. Had to do it to ‘em. Here’s the clip of Optimus Prime killing in cold blood.
Why is he like this?!
What Godzilla does have in its back pocket is the same thing Monsters did, just with a much bigger budget - an uncanny eye for making things look huge and people look small. That was apparent even from the trailers, which smartly used the film’s most visually arresting sequence, the HALO jump into a smoking San Francisco. The streaming red flares, the crackle of thunder, the glimpses of Godzilla in the fog - come on, now. No wonder people were excited.
Maybe Godzilla only has one neat trick, but it’s a bloody neat trick. Godzilla is huge. Edwards knows just how to frame and composite the real people and locations with the computer-generated chaos. His real knack as a director is making silly and unreal situations - from aliens in the jungle to star destroyers in the atmosphere to that cool Halo spaceship in The Creator - feel as real and tangible as they can be. There is a weight and sense of proportion in his filmmaking that feels like the antithesis of the abstract CGI goop of something like Quantumania, which makes its shrinking and growing heroes’ size meaningless in a nonsense landscape.
In fact, it feels as if the emptiness of Edwards’ characters is a direct consequence of his visual talent. They’re almost required to be vessels with the barest semblance of motivation, because their role is to stand in frame and stare in awe at something huge going on in the sky. It’s the case in Monsters, and it’s certainly the case in The Creator. Rogue One manages to achieve a little more, but it’s still leaning on an overqualified cast to sell the brief Spark Notes motivations of its characters.
Edwards always feels one step away from mounting a GoPro on an extra’s head and letting them be the protagonist instead. For the remaining hour and ten minutes of Godzilla post-Cranston, it’s hard to imagine the GoPro solution making much difference to the film’s quality. What’s good about the second and third acts of the film - and there’s a lot of pleasure in each and every monster fight - has nothing to do with the humans who just happen to be cutting about in the foreground.
The film even seems to understand this well, given that the entire plot revolves around the military and scientists learning to step back and keep their interventions to a minimum. Sure, the heroic soldiers stop a nuke, which is nice (Godzilla’s attitude towards the military, which I can only describe as startlingly sympathetic, is a whole other can of worms). But it’s Godzilla, with his superpowered bad breath, who actually takes out the evil monsters and saves the day. Aaron Taylor-Johnson just lies down on a boat.
It’s no surprise that the incessant fan complaint about these movies - really all of the MonsterVerse movies, whether featuring Godzilla or Kong or both - is that they’d rather see more of the monsters and less of the people. It’s a reactionary complaint, sure, and the movies a lot of these fans want to see would be dramatically inert computer simulations, but can you blame them for getting a little fed up?
So. Question of the day. Many of Godzilla’s problems are self-inflicted, products of Edwards’ weaknesses as a director and the thinness of the script, but not all of them. The issue of how to bring such an iconic Japanese creation to America while respecting the original, to which this movie finds a milquetoast and fairly uninspired solution, is something I think any adaptation of Godzilla would run into.
Is there a solution to this problem - to avoid all the unsavoury implications of whitewashing (yeah, we’re going with it), while still delivering a take that feels pointed and meaningful? Is there way to replicate the effectiveness the OG Godzilla still carries in the Toho movies for an American audience?
Maybe. Maybe not. It’s enough to wonder whether it’s worth all the fuss, really. Why not make a monster at home? Isn’t there an American Godzilla, grounded in homegrown iconography, somewhere?
So, about that…
Next time: We feel a bad moon rising, as the MonsterVerse hops back in time to the 70s for a run through the jungle in a real, authentic Vietnam war movie that just happens to feature a giant gorilla.
In Kong: Skull Island, the titular monkey faces off against a horde of American war pigs. Some folks were made to wear the flag (that red, white and blue), and some folks are born silver spoon in hand, and some folks - well, some folks end up on Skull Island.
See you in a fortnight.
(These are fortnightly now. Sorry.)
Just wanted to add a minor correction - it is Ishiro Honda, not Ichiro Honda.
I'd push back a little against the idea that Godzilla lacks metaphorical power. Godzilla here is meant to metaphorically and literally be a force of nature. He treats humans like ants basically, not caring what happens to em when he stomps somewhere or leaves tidal waves in his wake. Some people like to read climate change into things, and I think that's kinda an element an here, but would become far more prevalent in KOTM.
I also really like how the movie establishes its own lore for the monsters, suggesting that G and by extension the other creatures are basically Gods that has awakened from dormancy at a time when human beings have themselves developed God-like power.