Monster movies are an enduring branch of cinema, with a history that can be traced back as far as Merian C. Cooper’s 1933 King Kong.1 After that came 1953’s The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and 1954’s Godzilla. The monster boom kicked off by Godzilla produced many more monster films of wildly uneven quality. But after the 1998 American Zilla (with all due respect, I would rather you make me watch DARLING in the FRANXX or The Lost Village ten times than watch that embarrassing thing crawl around New York) and Japan’s 2004 Godzilla: Final Wars, excellent monster movies became rare. Before Pacific Rim opened, its trailers drew plenty of attention. Once it did, people discovered that it was simply “a Mexican director taking Hollywood money to make a Japanese monster movie.” (Personally, I think the best thing about it—by far—is its first-rate effects, which deserve praise even today.)
Take Pacific Rim and America’s 2014 Godzilla. A viewer buys a ticket and walks into the theater. From the filmmakers’ perspective, what kind of finished product do they have to put on screen to keep that viewer’s butt planted in a seat for an hour and a half or two hours, all the way to the end? Both films brought excellent visual effects: buildings collapse more realistically, the Golden Gate Bridge gets wrecked yet again and again and again (Q: what is the Golden Gate Bridge for in movies? A: getting wrecked), and viewers sit there thinking, damn, that giant monster is ridiculously badass. So for many people, the most immediate impression of a monster movie is that it is an effects movie, no different from a Marvel Studios superhero blockbuster.
But are monster movies really nothing more than effects blockbusters? Granted, without excellent effects there is no way to create the appeal of a monster. A 100-meter giant creature merely walking around obviously has less impact than a 100-meter creature firing a beam from its mouth and slicing a skyscraper as tall as itself—or taller—cleanly in half. Yet when we watch the original 1954 Godzilla, it is hard to say that Godzilla is the protagonist. In Hideaki Anno’s 2016 Shin Godzilla, the protagonist is not even a person, but the Japanese government as a whole; the male lead functions as head of the government’s Godzilla countermeasures headquarters, representing the government in its confrontation with Godzilla. In my eyes, both are excellent monster works. The 1954 Godzilla needs no defense, while Shin Godzilla was the runner-up among domestic Japanese films at the box office in 2016; the domestic box-office champion that year was Your Name.
These two monster films demonstrate one thing: an excellent monster movie does not have to rely solely on effects that put a gigantic monster on screen to hold an audience. A monster movie can also attract viewers with an excellent story. In practice, though, there are not many people who can write an excellent monster-film script. The 1954 Godzilla script was by Takeo Murata, Ishirō Honda, and Eiji Tsuburaya. Apart from Mr. Murata, any film lover should know the other two names. The screenplay for 2016’s Shin Godzilla, meanwhile, was by Hideaki Anno (Anno: the ending of the Rebuild of Evangelion? I’m working on it, I’m working on it.jpg). We can talk about Mr. Anno’s love of tokusatsu another time, but for Japanese-animation fans, the name Hideaki Anno can now almost be said to stand below Hayao Miyazaki and above everyone else.
Personally, I think an excellent monster movie is not a movie about “monsters,” but a movie about “people.” What does this gigantic creature, the monster, represent? In my view, a kind of disaster—not only a disaster for humanity, but a disaster for the monster itself. The 1954 Godzilla appears because nuclear bombs awaken an ancient creature from its sleep; 2016’s Shin Godzilla evolves from an unknown undersea organism that has spent years feeding on the waste from human nuclear testing. When a disaster has no consciousness, disaster movies tell us how people strive to overcome it. Monster movies present another situation: what if a natural disaster had consciousness? How should humanity respond to a conscious natural disaster? Turn to the monster’s side, and its awakening or mutation under human influence is surely a disaster for the monster itself as well. For a living being suddenly to come into existence with no idea where it belongs on this planet is itself tragic. As director Ishirō Honda said: monsters are born too tall, too strong, too heavy. That is their tragedy.
Back to the audience: when we watch monster movies, what are we really watching? I have always believed that even the finest crew in the world cannot make an excellent film without an excellent script. When we watch STAR WARS, what we remember is not JEDI and SITH clashing lightsabers again and again, but DARTH VADER saying: I am your father! Excellent effects can bring enormous box office returns, but that does not mean every high-grossing movie will be remembered by later generations. Excellent films that are remembered and become legends each have their own thinking behind them. Think of the 1954 Godzilla reflecting on nuclear weapons and weapons themselves: Dr. Serizawa, who creates the Oxygen Destroyer, a weapon stronger than nuclear arms, chooses to die together with Godzilla so that humanity cannot use his invention in war. Perhaps viewers come for excellent effects. But after removing effects, that seasoning, what are viewers actually seeing, and what is the director trying to communicate? When we sit in a theater and confront the monster as a living natural disaster as if we were there ourselves, what do we feel? Those are some of the things we truly ought to be watching when we watch monster movies.
Fenglinhuoshan’s Note
This essay identifies an important core of watching tokusatsu, and even science fiction, anime, and similar works: the human being.
Whether monsters or robots, Ultraman or Kamen Rider, their ultimate purpose must return to human beings. I have not seen very many monster films, but I still vividly remember the tragic scene in King Kong where Kong is shot down from the Empire State Building by airplanes. It is a tragedy. Kong’s enormous body falls in a war against human selfish desire, greed, pursuit of fame and profit, and cowardice. The film creates many vivid, fully realized characters: the heroine’s independence, strength, and courage, for example, and Kong’s willingness to sacrifice himself for love. These characters are classics. I think this special-effects film became a classic precisely because it reflects humanity, reflects society, and criticizes the ills of its time. Likewise, in Godzilla and its related works, people think about environmental pollution, the use of nuclear weapons, government efficiency, human nature, national interests, and many other elements. These are what the works truly seek to show.
It is not that effects can simply be dispensed with. Effects are an auxiliary means: a way to present a work’s theme and drive its ideas more deeply into people’s minds. With this perspective, and with reflection on humanity and society, we can rebut the improper claims that “Ultraman is childish,” “Kamen Rider is childish,” and so on about tokusatsu.
Li Paopao’s Note
This review says, “An excellent monster movie is not a movie about monsters, but a movie about people.” There is considerable depth in that claim, but the author very clearly fails to continue probing the question of “what kinds of thought monster movies bring to people.”
From my perspective, on the one hand, monster movies make people less anthropocentric. The monster’s gigantic body and destructive power force it into human vision, breaking our indifference toward the other forms of life around us. We come to recognize that although humans possess intelligence—and the power intelligence brings—we are neither the only powerful creatures on Earth nor omnipotent. Before monsters, humanity feels its own smallness for the first time. Moreover, as in Godzilla and similar films, monsters are generally caused by industrial civilization’s destruction of the ecology. This introduces an ecological dimension that reflects on the environmental damage caused by human activity.
But on the other hand, monster movies also make people more anthropocentric. Faced with a “living natural disaster,” the image of a unified human community jointly resisting disaster becomes more firmly established. The monster is fashioned as an object without reason, knowing only destruction, rather than as a living creature on Earth with which people might coexist harmoniously. Buried behind the image of taming the monster is the metaphor of “taming nature.” From this perspective, whether King Kong or Godzilla, the dimension of reflection remains seriously lacking.
By contrast, Ultraman Gaia introduces the ecocentric dimension represented by Hiroya Fujimiya: monsters are part of the Earth, while human activity is the true source of disaster. Although Fujimiya’s thinking is based on information falsified by the Radical Destruction Bringer—which foreshadows its lack of objectivity and anti-human orientation—ecocentrism is undoubtedly a reflection on the image of monsters in earlier Ultraman works as irrational destroyers, and, more importantly, a precursor to the eventual unification of the human-centered and ecocentric positions. At the final moment, Earth’s monsters fight alongside humanity against the invasion of the Radical Destruction Bringer. This image not only shows that nonhuman creatures may likewise possess the subjectivity required to make moral judgments, but also expresses the final grand reconciliation between humanity and nature. I think this is what so-called “monster movies” ought to achieve.
Editor’s Note
A quick recommendation for Kamen Rider W.