Godzilla, Kong, Gamera & Co.: The Kaiju Mega-Thread

Soundtrack is out



The soundtrack is out, and you definitely get the tone the movie is going for with the titles of the original stuff.

 

Minis are better than nothing. What I want is to see King Kong return to stop motion.

 

The first non spoilers reviews are up and they're pretty positive overall.

It does sound like the movie takes a bit of a page out of Godzilla vs King Ghidorah, in that Godzilla starts off as a small 20 foot dinosaur on an island during WWII that grows into a 200 foot Godzilla.

 

So which origin for Godzilla is more common at this point, that he was something modern that was mutated by the nuclear bombs, or something ancient that was awakened by him? It seems like the different versions have switched back and forth between the two origins a lot over the years.

 

Showa continuity: The three known members of the Godzilla species (the one killed in '54, the one featured from '55 onward, and Minilla) were naturally giant prehistoric dinosaurs that lived in the ocean depths, and were turned radioactive and displaced from their natural feeding grounds by the Marshall Islands nuclear tests. (At least, that's what the original film established, though King Kong vs. Godzilla implied that Godzilla had been "created" by humans without going into specifics.) They weren't "awakened," but were just a surviving, undiscovered fossil species like the coelacanth.

Heisei continuity: Godzilla was a carnosaur of a species that had survived to modern times on a remote island, but was mutated to giant size by exposure to radiation. Through the convoluted logic of Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah's time-loop rigmarole, the same thing happened to create the second Godzilla that emerged in 1984 (which the time travelers mistook for the one killed in '54). Similarly, Baby Godzilla (aka Little Godzilla aka Godzilla Junior) started out as a human-sized infant but was turned giant between movies by radiation exposure.

Millennium continuities: Unspecified, but they're all sequels to the original film that's shared by the Showa and Heisei continuities, and thus Godzilla can be presumed to have one of those two origins.

TriStar: The "Godzillas" of the 1998 film and animated series were a newly emerged, radiation-induced mutant species descended from iguanas.

Legendary continuity: Godzilla is a naturally evolved ancient Titan drawn to the surface by the rise in radiation levels after 1945.

Shin Godzilla: A new mutation arising from mixotrophic sea life mutated by radioactive waste and given the ability to auto-evolve into new forms.

Godzilla Earth anime trilogy: Believed to be the end result of natural selection, newly evolved and gaining useful genetic traits via horizontal gene transfer from other life forms, but possibly predestined to arise in order to punish human civilization for despoiling the Earth.

Singular Point: Kaiju including Godzilla are the result of Earth organisms being mutated by an extrauniversal substance called Red Dust, comprising multidimensional Singular Points (singularities) where normal physical law breaks down. However, the first known Godzilla emerged and was somehow killed c. 1950, with a second one emerging in 2030.


So it hasn't really alternated between the two. The first 2-3 eras portrayed Godzillas as a surviving fossil species that was altered one way or another by radiation, while the Japanese versions of the past decade have consistently gone with the "newly evolved organism" origin, and Legendary has gone with the "reawakened ancient creature" origin that in the Showa era was used for kaiju like Rodan and Gamera (and the Rhedosaur in the movie that started it all, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms) rather than Godzilla.

 

OK, thanks for the info.

 

Really, it's surprising how much LegendaryGoji is basically Heisei Gamera. He's a reawakened ancient kaiju, he's implicitly connected to Atlantis, and he's a "heroic" kaiju responsible for preserving the balance of the Earth.

 

I’ve really been enjoying the Godzilla channel on Pluto TV. I grew up with dubbed children’s matinee versions of the later Showa era, so Godzilla as an outright hero and “friend of man” as he is referred to in Godzilla vs the Smog Monster is what I am most familiar with. I have never seen Gamera—I take it his movies are in a similar vein?

 

The later '60s and early '70s Godzilla movies are influenced by Gamera, so yeah, there are some similarities. However, the Showa-era Gamera films were incredibly cheap, dumb, and formulaic, generally quite terrible (though the second one, the only one focused solely on adult protagonists, is passable). Gamera started out as a generic Godzilla-knockoff kaiju that incidentally happened to save the life of an unhealthily turtle-obsessed kid in the midst of terrorizing Japan, but in the sequels he was retconned into a heroic "friend to children."

The Heisei-era trilogy, by contrast, is among the greatest kaiju movies ever made, and is much darker and more mature. The trilogy established Gamera as a creation of Atlantean geneticists whose role was to be the protector of the Earth's balance. There was also the 2006 Gamera the Brave, set in a different continuity, which returned to a child-oriented focus but in a vastly better way than the Showa films, a soulful and thoughtful metaphor for how children deal with grief and loss, feeling like a live-action Miyazaki film. It turns the tables because it ends up being as much about the children protecting Gamera as the reverse.

Then there's the recent Netflix anime-series reboot, which tries to combined the child-oriented focus and classic kaiju of the Showa films with the darkness and violence of the Heisei trilogy (and then some), and ends up feeling rather hollow, without much of a point to it.

My reviews from my free blog:

• Showa Era Pt. 1
• Showa Era Pt. 2
• Heisei trilogy
• Gamera the Brave / overview
• GAMERA -Rebirth-

 

Thank you so much for the info, Christopher—I’ll check it out!

 

The Middle Age concept of the Hellmouth is something a Halloween program could tackle…gravestones as teeth…Sarlacc style.

 

The first two episodes of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters are out, and it's off to a great start. It's not too heavy on the monster stuff yet, but the parts that do feature them are intense (I'm still not over the San Francisco flashback). I feel that this show is going to end up as the best part of the whole Monsterverse.

 

Watched the first two episodes last night. The introduction of the characters stage of a series is always a little awkward, but the cast seems likable enough. And the CGI was fine. Looking forward to the rest of the series.

 

Godzilla Minus One, while getting rave reviews, has one criticism thrown its way, and that is its lack of acknowledgment of the US occupation of Japan that was happening during the period the movie is set in.

 

Watched the first two episodes and was a little surprised at the lack of monsters, but I'm guessing that will change. The scenes in the Philippines were really done well. My only quibble is Kurt Russell. He's too young to be playing who should at least be in his late 80s by then.

 

Whereas I'm surprised there are as many monsters as I've seen in the trailers. I'd expected that a live-action TV series in that universe would focus more on human-scale things and keep the monsters largely offscreen.

Yeah -- it's ironic to see Russell's 37-year-old son playing his younger self in 1959, when Russell was only born in 1951 and came to fame as a child actor in the '60s. Even with the "present" portions taking place 8 years ago, he'd have to be playing some two decades older than he is, unless his son is playing someone a decade or so younger than himself.

But it's not the first time the MonsterVerse has played fast and loose with character ages. The theoretically canonical comic Godzilla: Awakening posits that the film's Ishiro Serizawa was born in 1945, which would make him 14 years older than Ken Watanabe, and nearly 70 at the time of the 2014 film.

 

The first two episodes were really good. The human stories so far are pretty interesting, the cast is good, and we've gotten some cool monster stuff already.

 

According to a journalist who’s seen the whole season, this will be a plot point. If I had to guess based on what we’ve seen, I’d say it’s an effect of being in close proximity to lots of different monsters and their radiation. In Kong: Skull Island, the Iwi are said to barely age, so I wonder if they’re exploring the long-term effects of being around the unique radiation of the titans.

 

Radiation exposure improving people's health and longevity seems kind of backward, but I guess it's no more nonsensical than skyscraper-sized biological organisms and the Hollow Earth.

 

Watched the first 2 eps and definitely intrigued. I like Cate.