Godzilla is a God, Not a Lizard. That’s Important.
Adding science to the lore rids the monster of its original, fundamental message.
It’s been sixty-five years and over thirty films since Godzilla, King of the Monsters, stepped his giant building-crushing foot into our world. The creature’s debut in 1954 set a revolutionary course for decades of monster and disaster cinema, and as moviegoers take to theaters this month for the latest franchise entry, it’s comforting to see the kaiju lore still catch fire with audiences worldwide.
But despite the persistent success of Godzilla both on and off the big screen (barring a few notable missteps), it’s puzzling to look back at the monster’s origin story and find it anything but consistent. History has not always agreed on Godzilla’s provenance, which allows us to showcase the strengths—and weaknesses—of the monster’s exhaustive and ongoing reinterpretation.
And, contrary to how I normally value the role of science on the big-screen, the case for Godzilla is truly better off when biology takes a backseat to incomprehensible fantasy. Not everything in film needs to be grounded and explicable, and stories like Godzilla make that point decidedly clear.
There were two non-negotiables from director Gareth Edwards when Legendary Pictures took the helm of the 2014 Godzilla adaptation: “The storyline would involve radiation, and Godzilla would attack Japan.” That makes sense given the bread-and-butter of the franchise’s past, but there’s more relevancy here than initially meets the eye. When the film franchise was first launched, Japan was just nine years removed from the 1945 bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — clear sources of inspiration for the film’s radioactive and destructive allegory. Film experts have looked back at these origins intensely since the film debuted, and almost all converge on the same parallel. It’s not very subtle, after all:
Godzilla, both the character and the film, are a reflection on the Japanese experience at the end of World War II: destruction beyond imagining, and a lurking sense that “We brought this on ourselves” somehow, even without meaning to. In the film we see both the guilt, the feeling that the punishment perhaps outweighs the sin, and the striving for redemption, all of which are typical for such stories. — Stephen D. Sullivan, author of Daikaiju Attack
It’s a sentiment that is hardwired into the origin story, crafted by the monster’s original creator Ishiro Honda. The 1954 film begins in just the first few minutes with imagery of nuclear blasts over the South Pacific seemingly stirring Godzilla from the depths of the ocean, and throughout the story our protagonists continue to unravel Godzilla’s mysterious link to atomic energy.
True to form, the bespectacled scientist hypothesizes that the beast is an ancient Cretaceous-era reptile, and given trace elements discovered in its wake, it “must have absorbed an enormous amount of atomic radiation.” Characters even refer to the monster as “a product of the atomic bomb,” but all these jargon-filled theories pale in comparison to another origin posed in the film, and the one that gives the creature its name:
“Godzilla. It’s the name of a monster that lives in the sea. It will come from the ocean to feed on humankind to survive. In the old days, during times when the fishing was poor, we used to sacrifice girls to prevent him from eating us all.”
Grim.
For each part science that is thrown at explaining away the Godzilla phenomenon, it’s balanced equally by a mythical, ancient, folkloric origin story — and gracefully, the genesis of Godzilla rests neatly in between. Whether the science bears any real-world weight is a question for another day, but in the films, theories of physics, energy, genetics, or evolution are represented as incomplete and inadequate.
The true origin of Godzilla is mysterious and, most importantly, unanswered by the film’s most pragmatic characters… and that makes its impact much stronger. The creature is billed as a dormant, inscrutable force from deep within the planet, something that was awakened by humanity’s overuse and blatant exploitation of nuclear force. As told in the original story, we pushed the limits of science too far, past the threshold of our understanding. The retribution was fierce, with two giant scaly legs and breathed atomic fire.
At a cursory glance, this origin doesn’t seem to have deviated much over the decades of Godzilla reinvention — yet there was one major misstep, and for many of us, it was the first incarnation of the beast we ever encountered. Godzilla (1998) brought together teen heartthrob Mathew Broderick with disaster-film genius Roland Emmerich for what, I had once thought, was a delightful film. Although… I was 10 years old at the time, and quite easily impressed.
It wasn’t the franchise’s brightest moment, and has in fact been since declared ‘not a real Godzilla movie’ by Toho, the studio that owns the property. They retroactively renamed the monster “Zilla” and declared it a separate species in the Godzilla movie-verse.
It’s a flawed film in many regards — the cardinal of which is the origin of Zilla and her relationship with (who could have guessed) science. If you’ll allow, I think this out-of-context clip of dialogue really stands for itself:
The Zilla created in 1998 checks many boxes of the creature’s telltale origin, technically speaking, with one critical misstep that mars the iconic meaning of the original Godzilla story. Atomic energy is to blame, yes, but only because humanity created something new. To quote Nick Tatopoulos: “The dawn of a new species. The first of its kind.”
So close, but so far off the mark. Science creating something “new” lacks the intervention of the inexplicable, almighty force that was pivotal to the franchise’s first iterations. Godzilla is not meant to be a Frankenstein’s monster; it is Judgement Day. Placing blame on a freak accident or a genetics breakthrough sends a message that the power of a kaiju is something misunderstood, just a generation away from being harnessed by research. True to the original story, it should represent the opposite — humanity has tampered too much, and delved too far into science, calling on other-worldly and ancient, God-like powers to put us back into check.
“Godzilla is a force of nature, a force beyond human control.”
That quote comes from a 2014 interview with Max Borenstein, the screenwriter behind the latest American reboot of the franchise. Between that film and the newly released sequel, the teams seem to be placing a thematic emphasis back on the original, mystical meaning of the creature — and it shows. To help pitch the reboot and set the franchise on its current track, director Gareth Edwards invoked a quote by J. Robert Oppenheimer, who himself was paraphrasing the world-destroying deity Vishnu: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”
Edwards invokes that line on page one of his screenplay! It’s right there in the text! From the start, these filmmakers were drawing inspiration from deities, mystical forces, and all-powerful destroyers to echo the Godzilla themes. Even once Edwards moved on past the project, incoming director Michael Dougherty echoed the very same ideas for his sequel. I promise this is the last quote, but geez they’re all so juicy:
“We kept saying that we wanted to put the ‘god’ back in Godzilla. …To me, these creatures were intelligent beings fighting out old grudges. They were the equivalent of dragons and giants, and all the creatures you read about in mythology and the Bible. That’s what they were. That’s sort of element that we wanted to add to the film.”
Of course, the new franchise is not without its hackneyed attempts at pseudoscience too, but harkening back to the original 1954 story we can understand why. These films are told from the perspective of humans trying to understand the incomprehensible. The newest Godzilla is framed as a long-dormant, radiation-devouring apex predator, and the whole cohort of Titans are theorized to be ancient defenders of the Earth’s ecosystem.
No doubt the universe will continue to unravel the mystery, but it seems poised to keep its priorities straight: there’s an element of fantasy here, or at least ‘non-science’ that leaves pragmatism behind in favor of utter destruction. The more we can explain Godzilla with genetics and evolution, the more we lose touch with the original allegory. When science goes too far, humanity needs to be put back into place by something ancient, something spectacular, and something we can’t explain.
Let Godzilla be Godzilla. Let them be the God—a destructive power that we cannot understand and cannot control.
If you crave something otherwise, go watch Frankenstein or Terminator or Alien (the newer ones), movies that tell sympathetic tales of hubris and redemption. Godzilla is about more — the fear of power outside of our control. It’s not just about fun cinema, it’s about respecting the essence of the lore and the origins of a story. It’s nice to see that hasn’t been forgotten after all these years.
