Monster movies have proved remarkably durable. Their history can be traced back to Merian C. Cooper’s King Kong in 1933,1 followed by The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms in 1953 and Godzilla in 1954. The monster craze set off by Godzilla brought a whole slew of films, good and bad. Yet after the 1998 American Godzilla (frankly, I’d rather sit through Qing mi Fulangxisi2 or The Lost Village ten times than watch that embarrassment crawl around New York) and Japan’s Godzilla: Final Wars in 2004, great monster movies became few and far between. Before Pacific Rim came out, its trailers turned plenty of heads. Once it opened, though, people discovered that it was just “a Mexican director using Hollywood money to make a Japanese monster movie.” (For my money, its very best feature is its absolutely first-rate effects, which still deserve praise today.)
Take Pacific Rim and the 2014 American Godzilla. Someone buys a ticket and walks into the theater. What do the filmmakers have to deliver to keep that person’s butt in the seat for an hour and a half, or two hours, all the way to the end? Both films served up great special effects. Buildings collapse more convincingly; the Golden Gate Bridge gets demolished again and again and again and again. (Q: What’s the Golden Gate Bridge’s job in movies? A: Getting demolished.) And the audience sits there thinking: that giant monster is so f—ing badass, so ridiculously cool. No wonder so many people’s immediate impression of a monster movie is an effects showcase, no different from a Marvel Studios superhero blockbuster.
But is that really all monster movies are? Granted, without great effects you can’t bring out a monster’s appeal. A hundred-meter-tall creature simply walking along is never going to hit the audience as hard as a hundred-meter-tall creature firing a beam from its mouth and slicing a skyscraper as tall as itself—or taller—clean in two. Yet watch the original Godzilla from 1954 and it’s hard to say that Godzilla is the protagonist. In Hideaki Anno’s 2016 Shin Godzilla, the protagonist isn’t even a person: it’s the entire Japanese government. As head of the government’s Godzilla response task force, the male lead represents the government in its confrontation with Godzilla. I think both are excellent monster movies. The merits of the 1954 Godzilla go without saying; Shin Godzilla was the second-highest-grossing Japanese film at the Japanese box office in 2016. The top spot that year went to Your Name.
These two films make one thing clear: a great monster movie needn’t rely solely on conjuring up an enormous monster with special effects to keep its audience in their seats. A great story can hold them there, too. The trouble is, not many people can write a great monster-movie script. The screenplay for the 1954 Godzilla was written by Takeo Murata, Ishirō Honda, and Eiji Tsuburaya.3 Murata aside, any film enthusiast ought to recognize the other two names. The script for Shin Godzilla was Hideaki Anno’s. (Anno: The ending of the Rebuild of Evangelion films? Working on it, working on it.jpg) We can talk another time about Anno’s love of tokusatsu—the Japanese special-effects film and television tradition. For fans of Japanese animation, though, you could almost say that Anno is now second only to Miyazaki, with everyone else beneath him.
To my mind, great monster movies aren’t films about “monsters.” They’re films about “people.” What does a giant creature like this represent? I think it represents a disaster—not just for humanity, either. For the creature itself, being a monster is a disaster. In the 1954 Godzilla, a nuclear bomb awakens a sleeping prehistoric creature; in Shin Godzilla, an unknown creature on the ocean floor evolves after feeding for years on waste from human nuclear tests. When a disaster has no consciousness of its own, a disaster movie tells the story of people struggling to overcome it. Monster movies pose a different question: what if a natural disaster were conscious? How should humanity deal with a natural disaster that has consciousness?
Now look at it from the monster’s side. Human activity wakes it or causes it to mutate. Isn’t that a disaster for the creature, too? To come suddenly into existence, with no idea where it belongs on this planet, is a sad fate for the creature itself. As director Ishirō Honda put it: “Monsters are born too tall, too strong, too heavy. That is their tragedy.”
Back to the audience, then. What are we really watching when we watch monster movies? I’ve always believed that even the best crew in the world can’t make a great film without a great script. What we remember from Star Wars isn’t one lightsaber duel after another between Jedi and Sith. It’s Darth Vader’s line: “I am your father!” Great effects can bring in enormous box-office returns, but a huge gross doesn’t guarantee that a film will be remembered. Great films that live on and become legends all have ideas of their own to work through. Take the 1954 Godzilla and its reflections on nuclear weapons, and on weapons themselves. Dr. Serizawa invents the Oxygen Destroyer, a weapon more powerful than nuclear arms, then chooses to die along with Godzilla to keep humanity from using the weapon in war.
Maybe audiences come for the great effects. But take away that seasoning: what do we see as viewers, and what does the director want to convey? When we sit in a theater and find ourselves face to face with a monster—a living natural disaster—what do we feel? These are the things we really ought to be looking at when we watch monster movies.
Comment by Fenglin Huoshan
This essay gets at something central to how we watch tokusatsu—and science fiction, anime, and the like: people.
Whether we’re watching monsters or robots, Ultraman or Kamen Rider, it all has to come back to people in the end. I haven’t seen that many monster movies, but I still vividly remember the tragic, stirring scene in King Kong when planes shoot Kong off the Empire State Building. This is a tragedy. Kong’s enormous body falls in a war against human selfishness, greed, the pursuit of fame and fortune, and cowardice. The film gives us so many characters who feel alive: the independent, strong, courageous heroine; Kong, brave enough to sacrifice himself for love. These are classic characters. I believe this tokusatsu film became a classic because it reflects human nature, reflects society, and takes aim at the social ills of its time. Likewise, in Godzilla and its sequels, the reflections on environmental pollution, the use of nuclear weapons, government efficiency, human nature, national interests, and so on are what the films are really there to show us.
This isn’t to say that special effects can be dispensed with. But they can only play a supporting role: a way to express a work’s themes and make its ideas hit home. Only by adopting this perspective, and thinking about human nature and society, can we refute misguided dismissals of tokusatsu such as “Ultraman is childish” or “Kamen Rider is childish.”
Comment by Li Paopao
This essay argues that “great monster movies aren’t films about ‘monsters.’ They’re films about ‘people.’” There is considerable depth to that claim, but the author clearly fails to go any deeper into what monster movies make us think about.
As I see it, on the one hand, monster movies make people less anthropocentric. Monsters’ enormous size and destructive power force them into our awareness, breaking through our indifference to the other living beings around us. We come to recognize that, although humans possess intelligence—and the power intelligence brings—we are not the only powerful creatures on Earth, much less all-powerful. Faced with monsters, humans feel how small they are for the first time. Moreover, in films such as Godzilla, monsters generally originate in the ecological damage caused by human industrial civilization. This introduces an environmentalist dimension, prompting reflection on the harm human activity does to the environment.
On the other hand, monster movies also make people more anthropocentric. Faced with a “living natural disaster,” the image of a united human community confronting disaster together becomes more firmly established. Monsters are portrayed as objects that lack reason and know only destruction, rather than as living beings on Earth with whom humans could coexist in harmony. Beneath the imagery of taming monsters lies a metaphor of “taming nature.” In this respect, critical reflection is largely absent from both King Kong and Godzilla.
Ultraman Gaia, by contrast, introduces an ecocentric perspective through Hiroya Fujimiya: monsters are part of the Earth, while human activity is the root cause of disaster. Admittedly, Fujimiya’s thinking rests on information tampered with by the Radical Destruction Bringer—a sign that his thinking lacks objectivity and is hostile to humanity. Yet there is no doubt that ecocentrism calls into question the image of monsters in earlier Ultraman series as destroyers that lack reason. It also points the way toward the series’ eventual unification of anthropocentrism and ecocentrism. At the very end, Earth’s monsters join humans in resisting the Radical Destruction Bringer’s invasion. This image shows not only that nonhuman creatures may also be subjects capable of making moral judgments, but also that humanity and nature at last achieve a grand reconciliation. I think this is what the films we call “monster movies” ought to achieve.
Editor’s Note
Let me put in a plug for Kamen Rider W.