MONSTERS OF THE UNIVERSE

GODZILLA VS. KONG As rumbles on the horizon, Total Film goes on a massive monster hunt to round up everything you need to know about kaiju, from their birth in Japan to their conquering of Hollywood…

Godzilla is Year Zero of kaiju. No, we don’t mean Gareth Edwards’ 2014 blockbuster, and we certainly don’t mean Roland Emmerich’s “size does tatter” 1998 travesty, though more on both of those movies later. We are referring, naturally, to Ishirô Honda’s 1954 stonker-stomper Gojira, in which a huge beast (art director Akira Watanabe mashed up a Tyrannosaurus, an Iguanodon, a Stegosaurus and an alligator) is roused from the ocean by American nuclear testing, and soon targets Tokyo.

Not that Godzilla came out of nowhere. In the 1925 adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel The Lost World, dinosaurs reared into roaring life courtesy of the genius stop-motion effects of Willis H. O’Brien, with a Brontosaurus busting loose in London to snap Tower Bridge like so many matchsticks. Eight years later, in 1933, O’Brien’s wizardry gave wide-eyed viewers the Eighth Wonder of the World in the form of King Kong, a giant ape who has a good old rumble in the jungle with assorted creatures on Skull Island before scaling the Empire State Building in Manhattan to swat at pesky biplanes. And in 1953, a year before Japan’s Toho Studios unleashed Godzilla, Ray Harryhausen’s stopmotion Rhedosaurus in The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms was awakened by an atomic bomb detonated in the Arctic. Pissed off, it headed to New York.

The word ‘kaiju’, spelled the same in its singular and plural forms, was first used in Classic Of Mountains And Seas, a Chinese text that dates back in its present form to the Han Dynasty (202 BC-220 AD). It is a compilation of mythic geography and beasts that details 277 different animals, including such wonders as mermaids, a nineheaded phoenix, and a celestial dog that causes eclipses by swallowing the sun and the moon. ‘Kaiju’ translates to

‘strange beast’, and the monsters marauding through The Lost World, King Kong and The Beast Of 20,000 Fathoms

– to say nothing on the colossal animal that attacks a city in animated short Dreams Of A Rarebit Fiend: The Pet (1921) – certainly fit that description. What’s more, their penchant for metropolismashing would become a staple of kaiju movies from Godzilla onwards.

But the towering amphibian in Honda’s seminal film was different, rooted in Japan’s traumatic history. Here, the irradiated beast with its atomic breath evoked the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by American nuclear bombs in World War 2, while the 23 crew of fishing boat Lucky Dragon 5 were contaminated by the fallout from US thermonuclear testing at Bikini Atoll on 1 March 1954; Godzilla crashed into cinemas on 27 October that same year. This was no mere monster on the loose for thrills and excitement. While Godzilla might have looked exotic and prehistoric with his erect standing posture, anthropomorphic torso, strong arms and bony plates along his back and thick tail, his skin texture was designed to evoke the keloid scars of survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

“The first Godzilla film was a very dark, deep piece of filmmaking,” said Guillermo del Toro when promoting his own kaiju buster of blocks, Pacific Rim, in 2013. “But the love the country and the kids felt for the creature literally evolved Godzilla into a national hero.”

A STAR IS BORN

Del Toro was right. It might seem odd that a creature built on pain and terror was taken to hearts, but taken to hearts it most certainly was. That allowed for the forging of a franchise that currently runs to 36 movies: 32 produced by Toho, plus Emmerich’s ’98 entry for TriStar Pictures, and the three films – Godzilla, Godzilla: King Of The Monsters and Godzilla Vs. Kong – that thus far contribute to Legendary’s MonsterVerse.

Over the years, the Big G morphed into a popular-culture icon. He’s made endless appearances in Manga, western comics, novels, anime, videogames, board games and TV, and even starred in commercials for Nike, Snickers and the Subway sandwich chain. The last, in which Godzilla sank his teeth into the new $5 footlong, stomped clumsily into the world without authorisation, leading Toho Co. to sue.

Given the size of Godzilla’s cultural footprint, it’s only right that he should receive an MTV Lifetime Achievement Award in 1996 and be awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame in 2004, to celebrate his 50th anniversary. But the love was there from day one. While Honda’s Gojira is a horror movie, its monster managed to somehow come across as a cuddly curmudgeon despite all it represented.

It was probably the decision to go with ‘suitmation’ as the animation technique, with Haruo Nakajima, a black belt in Judo, squeezed into a 100-kilogram rubber suit. His field of vision was so narrow that all he could see was his feet as he stomped through miniature models designed to make Godzilla appear 164ft tall – just high enough to peer over the rooftops of Tokyo’s highest buildings. The effect was simultaneously pulpy and authentic, with Steven Spielberg, who saw Gojira as a kid and fed it into his own CGI classic Jurassic Park, saying it was “the most masterful of all the dinosaur movies, because it made you believe it was really happening”.

As time went on, Godzilla got bigger and bigger to keep up with Tokyo’s shooting skyscrapers: 328ft in Godzilla Vs. King Ghidorah (1991), 389ft in Shin Godzilla (2016) and 984ft (!) in Godzilla: Planet Of The Masters (2017). It wasn’t the only thing to change. Stop-motion, animatronics and CGI have all been employed to bring the Big G and his various friends and foes to life. New metaphors have also been attached to the monsters, be it the obsession with space in the ’60s, or the belief that nuclear energy is the future in the ‘70s, or the anti-pollution environmental message of Godzilla Vs. The Smog Monster (1971).

Godzilla also veered from bad guy to good guy and back again, and is often an antihero who fights on the side of nature, tackling other beasts and humans in order to restore equilibrium. He does not, it should be noted, eat people – he enjoys an omnivore diet along with portions of radiation – and

will happily hibernate once us crappy humans have sorted out our differences and stopped putting the planet at risk.

Given his success, Godzilla has led to many other kaiju stomping and winging their way onto our screens. Plenty of them were created specifically to act as WWE partners for the King of the Monsters. And if you want to see as many of them in as short a time as possible, check out Destroy All Monsters (1968), in which aliens take control of Earth’s beasts to stamp out the human race – it stars Godzilla alongside many of his most famous sparring partners, including Mothra, Rodan, King Ghidorah and the Big G’s adopted son, Minilla.

Meanwhile, Gamera was created by production company Dalei Film to cash in on Godzilla’s success. A giant, fire-breathing turtle that made his debut in 1965’s Gamera, The Giant Monster, he went from aggressor to protector of humanity (especially kids) over 12 movies between 1965 and 2006. Toho Studios declined the offer to have Gamera take a shot at its heavyweight champion, though Godzilla’s stable had happily merged universes previously with some must-see monkey business. Yes, the Godzilla Vs. Kong we’re about to witness in Legendary’s MonsterVerse is not the first time the titans have clashed. That was in 1962, when original Gojira director Honda oversaw King Kong Vs. Godzilla. As the ordering of the title suggests, it was Kong who emerged triumphant, hit by a bolt of lightning and charged up ready for a climactic underwater battle from which only he emerged. Toho then gave Kong his own outing in 1967’s King Kong Escapes. His opponent? A robot version of himself called Mechani-Kong.

GO WEST

Not that Japan has sole dibs on kaiju movies. There is also a long tradition of giant monster movies in the west. They are not, strictly speaking, always in the same vein, as in Japan the monsters are revered as gods and often possess a moral superiority to us scrabbling, squabbling humans. In Hollywood, it’s frequently a case of rampaging oversized animals that need taking out.

King Kong, regarded as a god on Skull Island, had more to him, and our hearts bled as he breathed his last at the foot of the Empire State Building. In the ’50s, smothered as they were by the threat of nuclear war, American cinema unleashed giant atomic ants in Them! (1954), a huge radioactive octopus demolishing the Golden Gate Bridge in It Came From Beneath The Sea (1955), and a lumbering lady (thanks to an alien encounter) in Attack Of The 50 Foot Woman (1958). 20 Million Miles To Earth (1957) scored points for a change of scenery, with Rome trampled by a monster. And a special shout-out must be given to The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms director Eugène Lourié, who became something of a specialist in the genre. He whipped up The Giant Behemoth (1959), with stop-motion effects by Willis H. O’Brien, and Gorgo (1961), featuring suitmation as a giant lizard is captured and sold to a circus in London, only for its truly colossal mum to turn up. Most of the above films differ from Japanese kaiju movies in that the military wins, offering a note – or rather clang – of jingoism.

In the ’70s and ’80s, there was Dino De Laurentiis’ man-in-a-suit remake of King Kong (1976), Larry Cohen’s ace

Q: The Winged Serpent (1982), where the titular beast nests atop New York’s Chrysler Building, and in an affectionate wink, Stay Puft Marshmallow Man in Ghostbusters (1984).

As for the ’90s, Kevin Bacon battled giant worms in Tremors (1990), and Treat Williams fought off spectacular tentacular sea creatures in Deep Rising (1998). Both were a lot of B-movie fun, but Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993) was on a different level. OK, so the threat was contained to Isla Nublar and didn’t draw political attention, but Spielberg further doffed his cap to all things kaiju in sequel The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997), with a T. rex stomping through San Diego. It set things up perfectly for Roland Emmerich’s $125m rendition of Godzilla (1998), only for the muchanticipated monster mash to reveal itself as a lizard-brained dud.

“I think part of the biggest problem was that I pushed Roland into doing the movie because I was a huge Godzilla fan,” producer Dean Devlin told Syfy Wire in 2018. “I grew up with Godzilla and it wasn’t something that Roland

‘Gojira was the most masterful of all the dinosaur movies, because it made you believe it was really happening” STEVEN SPIELBERG

had grown up with. He didn’t have a giant passion about Godzilla… [and] Roland and I made an intellectual idea that was interesting but not compelling filmmaking. We said, in real life, a lizard is neither evil nor good, it’s just a lizard. So what if one got to that size and in its effort to survive, it threatened us, but it wasn’t mad at us? It was just simply doing what it did and it causes this problem for us.”

Yes, Emmerich not only radically changed the beloved beast’s appearance but robbed him of his conscience, personality and soul. It was an offence to Toho Studios and to all of Japan, and was slyly commented upon at the start of Toho’s Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack (2001). Hearing about a monster attacking the East Coast of the US in 1998, a student asks, “That was Godzilla, right?” and is told, “The Americans say it was, but the guys over here have their doubts.”

Still, Hollywood learned, and any defects in Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla (2014) were not to do with the Big G himself, who was lovingly recreated, at 355ft, by state-of-the art CGI. He is, in fact, arguably the finest-looking kaiju we’ve seen in Hollywood cinema, though an oh-so-honourable mention must be afforded to the deep-sea creature in frantic found-footage Cloverfield (2008), who fed off the terror of 9/11 while razing Manhattan. Also notable are Guillermo del Toro’s power-meets-poetry creations in Pacific Rim (2013), and the rampaging monster in Colossal (2016). Both of these films understand the kaiju way, with the former knowing that only when humans work together can beasts be banished, and the latter informed by metaphors on adulthood and addiction. Such subtexts make for something altogether more satisfying than Rampage (2018), which thinks that giant animals and Dwayne Johnson with a grenade launcher are enough.

Kong, of course, has also been terrifically resurrected by modern Hollywood, first by Peter Jackson in King Kong (2005), and then by Jordan Vogt-Roberts in Kong: Skull Island (2017), as part of Legendary’s MonsterVerse. The films might lack in lyricism, but the CG craftsmanship applied to the hairy hero has been worthy of reverence. He deserves his shot at Godzilla. We’re about to find out who really is the King of the Monsters.

GODZILLA VS. KONG OPENS THIS SPRING.