GO JEE RA!

Go-Jee-Ra! Someone cries out. The skrilling roar shatters glass, and the ground beneath your feet moves as if an earthquake has begun. There’s lots of screaming, and running, and screaming, and looking into the sky beyond the tall buildings to point...and scream. Then there’s the stomping and crushing. Skycrapers are just big Lego sets to topple and smash. Who doesn’t groove on a good Godzilla movie?

Legendary seems to be riding a wave of Monsterverse love. Since 2014, there has been four motion pictures featuring Godzilla and Kong. Why now? What is driving the audience’s appetite for these over-the-top kaiju-destructopaloozas?

To unpack that question, we need to understand that kaiju movies service some very specific audience emotional needs, and Godzilla/Kong have their own unique subset of those.

Kaijus act a lot like stories about elementals; Forces of nature (human and otherwise) that cannot be changed and whose behaviors we understand little of. Their actions are shaped by other forces far beyond our control and understanding. The spirit world, the Earth itself, the land of the gods, etc.? When we humans cross paths with them, there is often great hazard. We become collateral damage in large and small ways.

Their narrative role is to bring to light the human spirit’s capacity to survive and overcome in the face of impossible odds. How this moves the human characters in a kaiju story is quite different from a narrative where the antagonist is either human, or has the intelligence equal to, or exceeding humans. Kaiju (generally) do not have villainous intent or a dangerous idea. They don’t have intimate agency that acts upon the heroes and characters of the story in an individually focused way (as found in superhero stories).

It is for this reason that kaiju stories heat up during times of general anxiety, where the audience has feelings of unresolved helplessness because of scary, widespread threats.

The role that creators/storytellers craft for their kaiju varies a lot because kaiju are the physical embodiment of some kind of wild power (natural, metaphysical, or man-made). Pacific Rim imagined kaiju as a kind of all-powerful bio-weapon sent to our universe to wipe us out.? Jeremy Robinson, in his Project Nemesis series, imagines the first American kaiju story where kaiju are brought back to life through experimenting with DNA found in a huge skeleton. Once reborn, they do what kaiju do and cannot be controlled.

Back to Godzilla and Kong; What is unique about their narrative roles is that both explore and represent the runaway consequences of man’s folly. Godzilla was created by our nuclear testing, and Kong was released from his island by Man’s greed. Legendary has leaned into a second beat for both, that describes them as stewards of earth’s balance.

Humans setting off events that cascade out of control, and the need to get things back into balance, could not be more relevant than the times we are in. This is what is driving the popularity of the Godzilla and Kong Monsterverse. Whether the audience knows it, or not, these movies are filling a narrative need of the times we are in.

I believe that that there is big opportunity for new and inventive kaiju stories that bring to life unexpected ideas and roles for these elemental-level forces. Just like the superhero explosion of the past 30 years, kaiju are now increasingly relevant and worth the exploration.

Cheers, Kevin