Godzilla has worn more hats over the course of the King Of Monster’s 70+ year career. An allegorical stand in for a nuclear blast, a tsundere defender of the planet, a well meaning dad dad, a pure villain, with dozens of Godzilla movies released over three quarters of an entire many of which putting some variation on the monster experience, the lizard god proves time and again that the creature and the franchise alike can endure. With the newly minted Godzilla Minus Zero soon upon us, sequel to 2023’s Godzilla Minus One thus formally crystalizing a sub-franchise within the greater series, audience eagerly await to see what kind of experience Toho Cinema crafted this time; A simple monster flick, an artistic meditation, a spectacle that begs to be seen on the big screen, or something entirely left field? Godzilla’s done it all before.
The Films: Monster God as cultural reflections through genuine cinema
The very first Godzilla released in 1954 to a budget less than 1 million USD and only barely making its money back in the box-office. At the time Toho’s film divided Japanese critics, some seeing it as making a farce out of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bomb incidents, the fallout Japan still very much actively dealing with. Some in the audience however found the intentional metaphor more than apt, and enjoyed Eiji Tsurubaya's revolutionary visual effects, leading the monster to quickly make appearance after appearance in yearly sequels which played up the monster action and toned down the metaphor. Going back to director Ishiro Honda’s original master piece, you can feel the nuclear apprehension laying the entire work with a pathos pushing it beyond the confines of genre. Over 60 years later, one Hideaki Anno would return a gravitas to Godzilla with his sharp and apt satire of Japanese politics and bureaucracy in Shin Godzilla.
The monster movies: All hail the King Of Monsters
No, Godzilla did not invent the monster movie, but the titular behemoth sure became the genre’s shining star. The vast majority of Godzilla flicks certainly fall under the monster movie moniker, campier in the Showa era and played straighter in their Heisei and millennium incarnations. Despite his origins as a nuclear bomb allegory, audiences liked the dark green city flattener enough to quickly justify production of one film after the next, each bringing in a new monster or two into the fray; Mothra, Ghidorah, Rodan, and Mecha Godzilla the most famous Godzilla co-stars, but hardcore fans love the likes of Gigan just as much. Godzilla vs Biollante, Destroy All Monsters, and Godzilla Against Mecha-Godzilla might make for Toho’s finest efforts in classic monster fighting monster silver screen spectacles.
The blockbusters: When the westernized Godzilla comes home
The oddly Oscar winning and super successful Godzilla Minus One almost decidedly falls into our arbitrary “blockbusters” category, more at home with the last decade of Hollywood produced “Monsterverse” movies by Legendary pictures which includes the 2014 western Godzilla, its 2019 follow up King Of The Monsters, and a handful of continuing crossover efforts with the homegrown American King Kong alongside an original made for streaming televised effort. While Minus One’s post war period piece ambitions gave it both a narrative and flavor thicker than one would find in the majority of Toho’s efforts, Godzilla feels akin to a hurricane or tornado; Not the sentient and angry being portrayed in the original Godzilla or the Anno’s interpretation of the franchise. The odorless Minus One Godzilla coupled with a filmmaking style cribbed from the American summer blockbuster and a smattering of big budget CG not even trying to maintain tokusatsu flair firmly places it into popcorn flick territory.
The experiments: Godzilla gets a little weird with it, but only sometimes
One could consider both Shin Godzilla and Godzilla Minus One to be experiments, but both command a certain seriousness when compared to some of the radiated lizard’s outings. Godzilla vs. Hedorah, first released in English speaking territories as Godzilla vs. The Smog Monster, took Godzilla and spiritually dosed him with magic mushrooms in order to fight a pollution manifestation. A pure product of the 1960s ethos and aesthetic at large, This 1971 film delves into full on psychedelia in the visuals and the message. 2001’s Giant Monsters All Out Attack makes for a technically mainline Zilla entry that turns flips the series on its head; Sometimes Godzilla plays the bad guy, but only Shusuke Kannou and the team that crafted the excellent and kaiju boundary pushing 1990s Gamera could conceive of making King Ghidorah the hero. Polygon Pictures’s sci-fi 3DCG Godzilla trilogy too sees the monster in conceptually interested new cosmic territory, but the execution unfortunately left something to be desired.
As Godzilla Minus Zero hit theatres worldwide and another of the King Kong Monsterverse crossovers following next year, no doubt the future of the now 72 year old franchise still kicks, twisting and evolving along the way. Unlike other legacy franchises that creatively stagnate, Godzilla can proudly call itself one of the few not to rest on its laurels, with a large swathe of its experiments and twists coming in the most recent third of its history. One should never forget the original did not exist to simply shock audiences in the 1950s, but came as a direct response to atomic bomb fallout in Japan. Hideaki Anno proved, however, more could be done with Godzilla not just as entertainment but as artistic statement, addition to heaps of the incredible tokusatsu craft many Toho staff poured their hearts into over the years; We hope to see more of both in the big reptile’s future.
