Godzilla Against Mothra by Leiji Matsumoto

The Horror of Godzilla by ZORNOW MUST BE DESTROYED

Godzilla by Manabu Yashiro

Godzilla Got a Nintendo GameBoy for His 70th Birthday!! by Brett Marcus Cook

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire

If nothing else, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire really highlights the disconnect experienced when viewing extended sequences of animation that are no longer designed to be purely gestural. When it finally gets going, Adam Wingard's latest computer generated monster mash takes a photorealistic, simulation style approach when describing the collapsing, human component in enormously scaled fights that batter into, then over, our fragile dwellings. Action, when it escapes the confines of an otherworldly, subterranean paradise, hops from continent to continent, smearing everything in sight. Cities and ancient monuments alike are pulverised as these mountainous beasts grapple for supremacy. Obviously blocked and styled to prickle a sense of awe in its audience, The New Empire delights in the minutiae of demolition, filling the screen with enough sparks and embers to frustrate the bitrate of any streaming service. 

The (presumably) unintended consequences of all this mathematically plotted carnage is an acute revulsion though. One that, in June 2024, is informed by months and months and months of social media images detailing the systematic extermination of Palestinian children. That New Empire works so hard to avoid a sense of horror taking hold unfortunately tallies with a real-world permissiveness when considering Arab babies buried beneath rubble. Wingard's film then, although keen to depict bridges packed with family sedans as fleeting points of interest in Godzilla's oblivious churn, never engages with any human perspective other than the passive delight of a removed and appreciative crowd: one that cheers on the cataclysm from the safety of a green screen set and, apparently, feels no connection to the trampled citizens of Egypt or Brazil. King Kong taking on a scarlet slave master who, in a 2001: A Space Odyssey-style conceptual leap, has styled a bleached spinal column into a lash may be an exciting flight of fancy but there's precious little entertainment to be extracted from the relentless, reference-level reproduction of imploding apartment buildings.

Godzilla Minus One by Kaitlyn McCulley

Naoki Sato - Resolution // Godzilla Suite II

Godzilla Minus One by Brett Marcus Cook

King Ghidorah by のび (@n_ma17)

Cozzilla by Brett Marcus Cook

Godzilla by Brett Marcus Cook

Godzilla Appears at Godzilla Fest // Godzilla vs Hedorah (2021)

A pair of shorts directed by Kazuhiro Nakagawa, Toho's go-to guy for brief (usually tourist attraction exclusive) glimpses of the King of Monsters. 2020's Godzilla Appears at Godzilla Fest is a sub-two minute piece completed using an iPhone for an online character convention. The slight dimensions of the camera used allow the filmmakers to shoot Godzilla - here represented by one of his more muscular Heisei era suits - from angles that might otherwise prove difficult. The best of these inspections is a point of view shot that seems to originate from the rubble gathering at Godzilla's feet. The angle has a warped, almost fisheye, effect to it - shattered concrete buildings and sagging lamp posts curl in towards the catastrophic weight of Godzilla. Close-ups of the Big G's face aren't quite so forgiving. The auto-focused lens stresses the outfit's rubbery hide to such a degree you begin to wonder if an action figure has been subbed in for a moth-eaten costume. 

Far more entertaining is this year's Godzilla vs Hedorah, a 5 minute film produced to commemorate the 50th anniversary of its Yoshimitsu Banno directed namesake. Given more than twice the runtime of Godzilla Appears, Nakagawa recruits the foam latex suits used in Ryuhei Kitamura's Godzilla: Final Wars, a decision that allows the monster actors a greater degree of freedom in their movements. The Godzilla costume - known as the FinalGoji suit - reigns in the stomping cataclysm of the Heisei era with a design that is leaner in trunk and thigh. The creature's expression is different too, conniving rather than impassive. This is Godzilla as a street brawler, the lightweight apparatus even allowing actor Naoya Matsumoto to lift his leg high enough to hurl a kick at Hedorah's wonderfully sludgy midriff. At least as impressive as the two feature costumes is the conflict's arena, a 70s era power plant filled with rusting buildings and collapsing cranes. Nakagawa and cinematographer Yutaka Adachi's photography may have the same rough-and ready feel as digitally shot Tokusatsu television but the decision to use a more natural style lighting in several shots - appearing to emanate from a setting sun rather than flatly oppressive studio lights - beautifully compliments the peeking, human, perspective on this titanic struggle. 

Godzilla vs Hedorah - THE RUBBER MATCH

The Smog Monster by Kazumasa Yasukuni

Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster by Phantom City Creative

Godzilla vs. Kong

Despite placing Godzilla's name at the top of the card, Adam Wingard's Godzilla vs. Kong is very much structured around Edgar Wallace and Merian C Cooper's Eighth Wonder of the World. Like seemingly every Warner Bros tentpole these days, Godzilla vs. Kong's debut is preceded by rumours of production difficulties and whispers of a director being side-lined or second-guessed. This initial release version (presuming another may eventually follow) is very much like the theatrical cut of Zack Snyder's Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice in that the assembly itself has chosen their preferred combatant. While Snyder's film strained to place Batman in a driving seat that the character hadn't been designed for, this MonsterVerse sequel happily motors along under Kong's impressive steam. 

Josh Schaffer's brisk edit, and perhaps even Eric Pearson and Max Borenstein's screenplay, makes gigantic strides to keep the film under two hours. The minutiae of kaiju wrangling is renounced, circumvented by witty snips and tranquil 70s rock that centres Kong's predicament as the film's driving force. The soundtrack speaks for him. This computer generated Kong, mapped out by umpteen special effects studios, is never simply a featured trick - he's the film's mute male lead. An ape the size of a building that is (somehow) communicated as an underdog; struggling manfully to not only keep himself breathing, but to protect the puny humans that have made themselves his family. Wingard's Kong is one weathered by age, far past his blonde abducting years, happily settled into the role of a colossal Grandfather to the last human survivor of Skull Island, Kaylee Hottle's Jia. 

Lifted out of an enclosure lined with a flat panel sky, Kong is press-ganged into acting as a guide for Alexander Skarsgård and Rebecca Hall's seafaring academics - the hope being that a brush with his ancestral environment will spark something in the ape's latent, genetic, memory. The sense of discovery that Godzilla vs. Kong offers is communicated, not just thematically but emotionally, using the film's enormous gorilla. Godzilla is simply a reactive force, acting as the predatory answer to mankind's latest pilot driven horror. It's a portrayal very much like the King of Monster's role in the Millennium era of his Japanese series but it's also a framing that keeps him offscreen for the majority of the runtime. Kong on the other hand is placed in chains and shipped back to a point of origin that he has no living connection to. Like the 1933 original, Kong's story here is one of displacement. The character, always portrayed as some form of prisoner, suffers for the curiosity, or outright greed, of humans. 

In this film the physical trajectory, if not the dynamic, is reversed. So instead of being tranquilised then shipped off to a New York to be gawped at, the Skull Island native is drugged for passage to the Antarctic, the icy continent apparently the one stable access point to the mythical Pangea at the centre of the Earth. Kong's place in Hollow Earth is hereditary rather than personal but the prehistoric, lighting racked, location does allow the long-suffering primate an opportunity to assume the position of a monarch. A moment to pick up a magical weapon then take a throne that, once, could have been his. The human connection to this realm is technological, an opportunity to synthesise a particularly powerful energy wavelength. For Kong this brief stop, before battle is joined in Hong Kong, is therapeutic; it demonstrates to him that, not only does he physically come from a line of culture and Kings, but his predecessors were able to vanquish the lizards that plagued them. 

Although he passed away in 2017, Godzilla vs Hedorah director (and, let's not forget, Prophecies of Nostradamus' assistant director) Yoshimitsu Banno is still credited as Executive Producer on Godzilla vs. Kong. The credit acknowledges that this big budget monster movie still has its roots in an unproduced IMAX short - Godzilla 3D to the Max - that Banno had attempted to steer towards the largest possible screen. Banno's great big credit registers as ironic in an American production where the King of Monster's portrayal feels peculiarly laundered - specifically, one that has had its atomic hide sheared off. While Toho's creation has multiple, contradictory, creation stories, Wingard's film is the first to suggest that Godzilla and his kind might be naturally occurring behemoths. Presumably, the ancient saurischian bones scattered over the Hollow Earth's seat of power haven't been mutated by mankind's extremely modern nuclear arsenal? This hint of whitewash lingers, a distasteful correction that generates its own background radiation, particularly in a film where Asian characters are portrayed as either shopkeepers or attachés who behave like Vulcans. 

For its finale, Godzilla vs Kong offers up a triple threat in which every neon structure on the Hong Kong skyline sits ready to be used as a turnbuckle. True to form, the film examines these massive interactions from the perspective of the newly crowned Kong. Godzilla is clearly adversarial, a bristling abomination that charges through skyscrapers like a blood-crazed crocodile. Kong doesn't rely on his mass, and cannot count on fire breath, so he fights smarter - snatching up rotating restaurants to use as a shield or hanging from superstructures, crane cudgel in hand. Although we are repeatedly assured that Hong Kong is in the process of being evacuated, ground level shots of kaiju calamity are framed by darting pedestrians, struggling to get to safety. An early news report improbably tallies up only 8 deaths from a particularly violent Godzilla landing in California. The Hong Kong collision inspires no such updates but surely the count is far higher? 

For a film in which Godzilla's portrayal skews far more bestial and aggressive than either Gareth Edwards' Godzilla or Michael Dougherty's Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Wingard's film is reluctant to really embrace the individual, physical, calamity generated by a collapsing, photo-realistic, city. Even Mechagodzilla's synthetic villainy - when it finally puts in an appearance - is expressed purely in the realm of his contemporaries. The mechanical facsimile attacks a flagging Godzilla, exhausted from a night spent battling Kong, using spine rockets and electrified fists to clobber the ailing tyrant lizard. Firmly bracketed away from human terror then, this Mechagodzilla is simply a cheat. An opportunist who sees their chance to batter the current title holder. A backstory for MG that includes exhumed Ghidorah bones and a supercomputer run amuck barely factors into the robo-beasts characterisation - presumably included so the audience can delight, unapologetically, in this undead creature's eventual dismemberment. 

Death's Head vs Godzilla by Geoff Senior

Godzilla by Chun Lo

Destroy All Monsters by Sophie Campbell

Godzilla: King of the Monsters

Whether or not it's a deliberate stylistic choice, Michael Dougherty's Godzilla: King of the Monsters manages to perfectly simulate the disparate energy of the long-running series' 1970s entries. In those films humans and monsters each seemed to live in their own bubble universes, rarely, if ever, intersecting organically. Back when Jun Fukuda was working through slashed budgets, mankind was trapped in flat, knockabout setpieces that, at best, only thematically complimented the wild, smoke-clogged phantasmagoria dreamed up by special effects director Teruyoshi Nakano. In Dougherty's film the human cast is stuck staring at monitors, filling in blanks that the film often makes no attempt to illustrate.

Vera Farmiga plays Dr Emma Russell, a bereaved paleobiologist working with Charles Dance's anti-Nick Fury to reestablish Godzilla and pals as Earth's dominant species. The screed she zaps at her former colleagues and loved ones cites climate change, as well as mankind's increasing, ruinous impact on the ecosystem, but only as surface detailing. Her argument is conveyed as gabble, the good doctor denied the fluency, not to mention mania, to make her points register as truly seductive. The audience isn't invited to consider the validity of this extreme approach to a Green New Deal, they're told to be bored by the unfocused lecture. Russell even seems to be on the verge of pointing the finger directly at corporate America before diverging into an extremely general, not to mention toothless, point about the military's preference for hasty, overwhelming action.

Most of Godzilla: King of the Monster's human scenes sputter along, postulating and explaining the actions of the feature titans. Dougherty and Zach Shields' screenplay isn't quite brave enough to let the sombre, apocalyptic mood stand, employing humourless zings to hurry things along, diverting our attention away from anything suitably melodramatic. King of Monsters feels like a throw-back in this sense, kin to the late-90s / early-2000s noise blockbusters that regurgitated 70s disaster films with computer corralled destruction. The one exception to this leaden take on plotting involves Ken Watanabe's Dr Serizawa walking his American equivalent through his decision to sacrifice himself to kick-start a half-murdered Godzilla.

Serizawa holds an old family heirloom - a pocket watch frozen at 8:15, the moment Little Boy detonated over Hiroshima - and talks about making peace with the demons that make the world the way it is. Of course Kyle Chandler's handsome all-American Dad doesn't catch on. His thinking is fixed shallow - find my daughter, defeat the monsters. In fact the only other character in the film who seems to understand the great weight Serizawa is carrying around is Godzilla himself. King of the Monsters positions them as Children of the Atom, the only two who seem to understand nuclear weapons not as explosive, ejaculatory energy but as devices of towering, unalterable permanence. In a film that goes out of its way to reimagine Toho's distinctly Japanese menagerie as naturally occurring manifestations of Greco-Roman or Judeo-Christian mythology, Serizawa's moment with Godzilla allows a contradictory, even subversive, perspective to creep in. It forces us to consider how cultures and their people are mutated by a proximity to nuclear weaponry. Judging by King of the Monsters, you either delight in their application or suffer beneath them.

That's only one part of King of the Monsters though, the other (much better) half revolves around the monsters themselves, mountainous creatures so amazing that they seem to alter reality itself. King Ghidorah, the malleable space dragon used to represent everything from a nuclear capable China to the last hope of future-shocked American capitalism is here imagined as the Serpent of the Apocalypse. A Satanic ruler who has fallen from Heaven, able to summon beasts and Behemoths from the Earth to do his evil bidding. Ghidorah is an ungodly mass of snaking heads and thrashing, spiked tails, dancing inside soot black clouds reminiscent of the turbulent maritime paintings of JMW Turner (The Slave Ship meets Snow Storm - Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth Making Signals in Shallow Water, and going by the Lead. The Author was in this Storm on the Night the "Ariel" left Harwich). In the 1970s Teruyoshi Nakano dialled into power plant meltdowns and blazing industrial disasters to compliment his cosmic kaiju. Dougherty's film runs with this dazzling idea, gifting us lightning lashed monsters who pulse with brilliant thermonuclear energy.