Why Did GODZILLA FLOP In America?
0This is why Godzilla flopped so hard in America
“King of the Monsters—Savior of Our City?” This is what a news channel chyron at the end of 2014’s Godzilla asks. The question appears on a television set in a San Francisco stadium that has been converted into a FEMA camp for survivors of Godzilla’s attack on the Bay Area, which climaxed with a battle between the Big G and two Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms (MUTOs). The scale of suffering caused by these creatures, and the shrieks of terror the survivors let out when they see Godzilla rise after defeating the MUTOs and walk to the sea, tell us that the answer is “no.”
To anyone wondering who, then, is the savior of the city, the same scene provides an answer. In a sequence that mirrors countless feel-good videos shared on social media, we follow protagonist Lt. Ford Brody (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) in his tattered fatigues as he carries his son Sam (Carson Bolde) and searches for his wife Elle (Elizabeth Olsen), a nurse. Husband and wife catch sight of each other and rush together, meeting in the center of the frame to embrace as the strings of Alexandre Desplat’s score stir and soar.
The shot of a soldier and nurse coming together definitively answers the chyron’s question. America’s heroes, its first responders and military personnel, saved the city. In other words, the hero of Godzilla is not the awesome-looking monster but rather the dull as dirt humans. This problem has plagued all of the American Godzilla movies, from the 1956 re-edit Godzilla: King of the Monsters! to 1998’s Godzilla, to the MonsterVerse franchise. Time and again, American Godzilla movies put more attention on human characters instead of the monsters, which not only misunderstands what audiences want to see in a kaiju picture but also fundamentally avoids the tragedy that makes Japanese Godzilla movies so compelling.
The Exceptional Heroes of American Godzilla Movies
In the 2014 Godzilla’s standout scene, Ford and other paratroopers descend into the ravages of San Francisco. Director Gareth Edwards cuts from wide shots of the team floating through the clouds, their red smoke trails breaking the black and gray plumes that engulf them, and POV shots through Ford’s perspective. The team’s landing allows Edwards to demonstrate his greatest strength as a director, capturing the massive scale of Godzilla and the MUTOs. As Edwards swings his camera from Brody to Godzilla, a medium shot becomes a worms-eye-view shot, framing the humans as little more than rubble beneath the feet of the combatants above.
At least, that’s what one would think. Whatever Edwards’ visual language might suggest, the plot of Godzilla—screenplay by Max Borenstein, from a story by David Callaham—demands that the humans do matter, very much. While Godzilla and the MUTOs duke it out, the film instead follows Ford’s team as they destroy a MUTO nest and dispose of nuclear weapons that, they’ve come to learn, only make the MUTOs stronger. Despite its ability to capture the size of Godzilla and the MUTOs, Edwards’ film treats the human characters as far more interesting, repeatedly cutting away from the Titans to follow fleshy bores.
This problem is not unique to Godzilla, but plagues all of the MonsterVerse entries. As our own Kirsten Howard says in their review of the Apple TV+ series, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, that show banks on audiences being “enthralled enough by the films’ central scientific organization that you’ll happily sit through an entire series about it as long as you occasionally get to see a titan or two in action.”
Of this franchise though, only Kong: Skull Island managed to reduce humans’ importance as secondary to that of the giant monsters. But director Jordan Vogt-Roberts’ glib approach made the disparity less of a thematic statement and more general mean-spiritedness. Likewise, Godzilla: King of the Monsters lets Ishirō Serizawa (Ken Watanabe) opine that humanity will become the pets of Godzilla, but the film believes that Mark Russell’s (Kyle Chandler) kvetching deserves as much screen time as King Ghidorah and Rodan.
To be fair, even the Japanese Godzilla films can get bogged down in human drama. Who among us thrilled at the familial tension between Goro and Rokuro Ibuki (Katsuhiko Sasaki and Hiroyuki Kawase) in Godzilla vs. Megalon, for example? But as that movie demonstrates, director Jun Fukuda, who wrote the screenplay from a story by Shinichi Sekizawa, had the good sense to realize that they matter only to the degree that they give us Jet Jaguar, who then gets to participate in the brawl.
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Credits:
1. Doktor Skipper
2. https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/americans-can-never-get-godzilla-right/