Godzilla Movie Thematic Taxonomy

Deathiversary is coming up, a household tradition where over the course of 8 days we watch every Godzilla movie as a way of celebrating the fact that I've survived yet another year. I have ambitious plans this year and I've been putting in a lot of effort to make sure everything will be ready, but while I was taking a break, still with Godzilla firmly entrenched in my brain, I found myself playing around with those little tier maker things. You know, this one here:

    The original Godzilla lost its place as automatic first back in 2013 when a national vote figured out what we already knew but had been keeping a secret for a long time, that the actual greatest work of the human species is Godzilla vs. Biollante. Subsequent votes after the release of Shin Godzilla, which, it should be noted, was very new, and opened up an enormous new audience and "resurgence" of interest in the series, found that one to be #1 with Biollante something like 3rd place was pretty telling in how different the demographics were rather than an actual change in opinion. Nevertheless, Shin Godzilla is absolutely up there and that's pretty dogmatic, but the thing is, Shin Godzilla was so huge it kind of broke the dogma as a thing, y'know? I've felt weird about putting Godzilla behind Hedorah before, even though that's my honest opinion if I'm nudged enough, but ever since the existence of a Godzilla movie about suicide and absolute nihilism written by the dude who did Madoka, that kinda... well... y'know. Fuck the dogma, but Biollante is still mankind's greatest work, and, to be honest, last Deathiversary I kind of fell in love with the original movie all over again (I wrote in my notes that the existence of the movie was like the universe contemplating its own death).

    Anwyas, that's not what this is about. What happened was I saw a button at the top of the page for an "alignment view." Naturally I assumed this was a D&D style alignment chart, inviting me to categorize which Godzilla movies were the most chaotic or even evil, which just... sounded wonderfully dumb. Instead, it gave me two axis, but rather than a 9x9 chart it was more like a four quadrant graph. The axis weren't labeled so it basically gave me four blank extremes to label and chart out with enormous freedom where each Godzilla movie would fit. In short, it gave me a very special kind of rarified Maly crack. So I labeled the vertical axis to range from optimistic to nihilistic and the horizontal one from focused on the environment to focused on social issues and got to work. The results are interesting and I want to talk about this forever.

So before anything let's define these axiseses and their extremes:

Vertical - Outlook (Optimism vs. Nihilism)

    It sounds almost mythical to talk about it now, but sometimes Godzilla movies aren't presupposing suicide is the only way out. Yes, believe it or not, there was a time when Honda was still around when Godzilla movies projected characters, worlds, and ideas that were honest to goodness sincerely hopeful for the future and believed in the humanity of humans. To put some pins in this we'll label the two extremes of this axis: Destroy All Monsters, which takes place less than 30 years in the future (from the perspective of the movie) and shows us a 1990's (possibly a fantasy Showa 79 or Showa 80's?) where all the Earth's monsters are tame, well cared for, studied by scientists who can do whatever weird genetic or behavioral studies they want, with no wars, full, planet-wide integration and cooperation of all governments for peaceful and military purposes, and and and... basically the world of Destroy All Monsters is a surface approximation of Latitude Zero, the possible utopia Honda made the centerpiece of all his vision boards.

    On the other end, we have by far the single most nihilistic Godzilla movie, The Planet Eater. This movie is so devoid of hope it actually tilts the scales. Whereas you'd normally expect to see the extremes be optimism and pessimism, Planet Eater would be off the scales, and as a result it actively skews the entire chart downwards by making simple pessimism more of a middle ground. Godzilla: The Planet Eater presupposes a natural cosmic order to the universe which makes the very notion of anything pictured in Destroy All Monsters a cosmic impossibility, since the very existence of civilization necessitates its eventual decay as part of a circle of life and death in an entropic cycle that only exists for the life cycle of an outer god. Godzilla: The Planet Eater is my second favorite Godzilla movie for a lot of reasons, but the fact that it somehow manages to be more nihilistic than fucking Godzilla vs. Biollante is so outrageous and incredible that you really just have to be in awe of the thing. Planet Eater isn't just cosmic horror, it's a joke where the setup is the thesis of every previous Godzilla movie and the cosmic horror is the punchline. You know, just to rub it in a little.

    A true neutral between these two is closer to pessimism, but for the purposes of getting a better read and, frankly, on spacing the posters out a little so they can read, the implied neutral in dead center is simply that of a conflict to be resolved. As in, we have to look at the outlook of the film, is the film saying that things can be overcome and eventually resolved fully, that there's hope? Is it saying that death is inevitable and humans can't succeed because we're all broken monsters? Or is it not saying anything at all, and the problems, whatever they are, are one-off battles and there's no overarching voice trying to predict the future. The cluster of four films in the center of the chart are this, the only thing that's gone wrong, from the perspective of the film at least, is that alien monsters appear and need to be stopped. That's all.

Horizontal - Theme (Environmental vs. Social)

    Alien invasion plots sit in the middle here, that's the central conflict of both our extremes, DAM and Planet Eater, as well as the cluster of four in the middle, Mechagodzilla '74, Spacegodzilla, G2k, and GFW. Alien invasions and space monsters are a classic Godzilla staple that has been with the series since the 4th film, but the overwhelming majority of the Godzilla series is focused on questions about humans, humanity, and civilization. The original film was about the Lucky Dragon incident, the bomb, the war, political inaction, and the perversion of science for nefarious purposes. That's how the series starts. Since then they covered themes as diverse as pollution, capitalism, feminism, facism, environmentalism, respecting the dead, even mental health. There's a whole movie about the bubble that uses time traveling space dragons as a narrative framing device. I... I fucking love Godzilla movies so much. How seriously and what, if anything, any given film has to say about any of this stuff varies wildly, with tones as diverse as Megalon's simply paying lip service to the Amchitka test and then immediately only using it as a plot excuse to have a 90 minute Ultraman episode, to Hedorah, which is more of a movie about pollution than it is Godzilla at times. So, by two metrics of tone and theme, we can, roughly, describe every single Godzilla movie. That was my thinking anwyas.

    The problem with this is that these are pretty complicated ideas and they don't form quite as much of a smooth gradient as the optimism/nihilism axis. That said, it does makes sense if you squint. To help us squint, let's take a look at the two extremes: on one end, we have the previously mentioned Godzilla vs. Megalon. This movie has nothing to say about the stated subject matter, it takes no stance, and the only subject it gives us is the underground nuclear test in the Aleutian Islands which is not identical to, but certainly meant to be suggestive of the real Amchitka nuclear test which is the obvious inspiration for this aspect of the plot. It isn't insignificant, it's because of this test that Monster Island is devastated, and Seatopia is driven to attack the surface after, we're told, suffering them and maintaining a reluctant peace for an undisclosed amount of time. This is the plot of the movie. It's not... very important, no, but the only thing this movie is about is that nuclear tests are bad, and monsters fighting each other are cool. It's for this reason that Godzilla vs. Megalon is a far-right, dead-center Godzilla movie.

    On the other end we have another cluster, this time of Mechagodzilla movies. These are Godzilla X Mechagodzilla, Terror of Mechagodzilla, and Godzilla: Tokyo S.O.S.. The Kiryu duology skirts a little to either side of the vertical axis, with Terror of Mechagodzilla being more firmly in the center. ToMG is a movie about a woman who's father was driven by hatred and revenge for the loss of respect of his peers and of his career, who goes along with him all the way, becoming, by the end of the film, more machine than woman. As the classic Honda moral center, it's only when she stops being a "cog" in the narratives of the angry men in her life, and makes an emotional decision of her own, out of love, that the conflict is resolved. While the themes have a lot of resonance, the plot is very high fantasy and far removed from any real world systems (what with the space monkeys and cyborgs) that the impact of these characters doesn't really say anything positive or negative about the world at large, so vertically its dead center. But the themes themselves are purely social, it's about revenge, hatred, guilt, love, and as I've gotten tuned into after watching the film high for the first time, it's about a woman who's agency is used as a weapon for the lingering anger of men to the point where Katsura eventually literally becomes nothing more than a tool. Meanwhile, of the Kiryu films, the first insists that life does have value, all life, and it's a little wimpy but to someone like Akane and, er, spoiler alert? Kiryu himself, that simple sentiment goes a long way and it's why GxMG is a higher tier movie than the 90's Mechagodzilla, and a way better realization of a Wataru Mimura movie just in general. Meanwhile Tokyo S.O.S. gives us the wonderful line from Hiroshi Koizumi that, regardless of whether they decide to scrap Kiryu, it's a selfish decision either way. GMMG doesn't outright say that there's no hope in the world, and it even shows us clearly that under certain circumstances, people will do the right thing, but it's not their first decision. This is why it's just below the vertical mid-point, why it's the most realistic Godzilla movie to date, and why it's so high up in my tier list.

Corners - Top Left to Top Right (Flimsy Optimism/Themes)

    So the axiseseses taken care of, let's nail down the corners and see what the epitomes of each quadrant represents. Starting at the top left we have Godzilla vs. Mothra, a movie that seams, according to the chart, as if it's in the wrong series, and certainly it's far more representative of a Mothra movie than a Godzilla one. You can see it's taken a hit on my tier list and that's part of it, but the secret is that Godzilla vs. Mothra, for all it's heavy-handed 90's environmentalism themes, doesn't actually mean it. The thing is, the theme and tone are all superficial, the characters are hopeful and care about the environment, sure, but none of that has anything to do with the actual plot of the movie. In this way it's structurally the polar opposite of Megalon, who's story is totally dependent on the theme of "nuclear tests are bad," but doesn't really care about that statement and has nothing to say about it. Mothra '92 cares very much about what the human characters are saying, but the initial incident is just a meteor impact. The monsters aren't responding to anything other than cosmic happenstance that humans have no hand in. Godzilla was going to wake back up anwyas, Mothra probably would have been fine if they just left her alone, and Battra's appearance didn't even have anything to do with the initial meteor at all. Battra was always going to wake up at this time no matter what, the environment had nothing to do with it.

    On the top right is Ghidorah, the Three Headed Monster, a movie with no real strong thematic content, where the Honda moral pivot lady characters give it its only importance on this chart, that the film presumes that as long as there is a dire enough common enemy, not only can nations work together, but so can monsters, and even monsters and humans can work towards the same goal. This film is often cited as Godzilla's initial turn towards good, but what I think is really important about it is that, within the Godzilla series, Ghidorah is the culmination of Honda's meta-arc, where his G films go from his initial horror at the fallout of the war, to the culmination of the post-war economic boom and his Showa 30's upswing coming here to its optimistic climax. It's not just Godzilla becoming redeemed in this movie, but for Honda, there's a narrative arc here of things genuinely working out, which makes the fact that this movie deals with a space monster and is therefore, by Godzilla movie standards, thematically light, feel like more of a consequence of this change in outlook rather than a bunch of tacked on preachy nonsense that feels like it's not paying attention to the actual movie. The difference between the top two corners, where in one the optimism feels cheap, and in the other it feels real, is interesting to me. It's also interesting to note that despite them being so far to the left and right, neither of them put very much effort into any theming. It's almost like if you have an optimistic Godzilla movie, you kind of can't actually focus on the actual problems. In Ghidorah the push back comes from the monsters themselves, the fantasy element, rather than the people who are the, y'know, important part when it comes to the theme of universal brotherhood. Mothra meanwhile has the human villains fit the mold of the bad guy the theme wants us to hate, billionaire industrialists that want to rape the land and all that, but their said land raping doesn't actually lead to anything... bad... happening, the monsters, again, appear for unrelated reasons. So of these two pinnacles of optimistic Godzilla movies, we have fictional monsters showing humanity, and monstrous humans not contributing to the conflict in any meaning way... c-cool.

Corners - Bottom Left to Bottom Right (Doomed by Everything)

    Unlike the top corners, the bottoms corners are obvious and blatant. Godzilla vs. Hedorah is the firm, bottom left anchor that is so fucking pessimistic that Godzilla doesn't even roar after he defeats Hedorah, he just glares. It isn't the first Godzilla movie to infer that the monsters are a symptom of a bigger problem that will inevitably create more monsters, but it is the first to outright show us another monster before the movie's even over. It technically shouldn't be in the actual corner given that nothing else matches Planet Eater's absolute nihilism and futility, but the movie has a way of just beating you down, and not even Godzilla is immune to the sense of dread and exhaustion. This, combined with the lazor focus on the pollution theme, makes the film one of the most well developed and effective of the series and as I alluded to earlier it kind of jockeys for position with the original Godzilla in my heart.

    In the bottom right is GMK, where nuclear horror is definitely drawn from, but the ultimate message the film is trying to convey is one of ignorance, rewriting history, and, y'know, fascism. The bomb in this context is treated like a consequence for the atrocities of imperial Japan, rising from the dead to punish those who refuse to learn from history, a tragedy repeating itself under its own willpower as a shortcut for the slightly longer course real life history takes. In the same way that Hedorah is the pollution movie, Shin Godzilla is the 3/11 movie, and Return of Godzilla is the Cold War II movie, GMK is the Nippon Kaigi movie, and in a movie about extremists who deny the existence of war crimes, naturally positive change becomes ruled out when you introduce the notion of ignorance and denial. GMK is perhaps the most chilling Godzilla movie, because while the themes of other movies never really go away, not really, their punch becomes progressively more "of their time" the further you're removed from things like the oil crisis, the bubble, the specific system of television advertising lampooned in King Kong vs. Godzilla, GMK has only gotten more and more relevant since its initial release, with the resurgence of fascist ideas and atrocity denial becoming louder and more brazen with each passing year. When I first saw GMK, I didn't even understand that ultra-nationalism was a thing in Japan at the time, but now I'm an adult voter in a world where the country I live in had a fucking literal coup attempt just over three months ago by armed Nazis.

Far Right and Far Left Columns (Respecting the Viewer)

    I found an interesting comparison between the columns of films on each of the edges of the environmental/social axis, namely, that one of them respects the audience more than the other. On the left, starting with Godzilla vs. Mothra which, as mentioned, believes in its message but doesn't work it into the plot but just kind of expects the viewer to care because it sounds important, it isn't really until you get all the way down to Godzilla vs. Hedorah that it feels like the subject matter is being treated with a level of sincerity commensurate with its tone. Son of Godzilla's plot features a secret South Pacific experiment trying to get a weather control device working to solve issues related to food supply, which is an overpopulation problem. This is a setup to get the characters on an island (no city sets) and create the monsters. Functionally, Son of Godzilla treats its thematic content as little more than a plot device for a cool monster movie, but the fact that the experiment ends up being successful in the end gives the group of increasingly frustrated but committed scientists (especially Yoshi Tsuchiya's character, who has a really satisfying arc) celebrate their happy ending, giving the audience a promise that their scientific marvel will... work. This is very optimistic, especially in the film immediately preceding DAM production-wise, but it has no practical link to anything in the real world and doesn't carry any message into the real world, it's just a monster movie.

    The mid-point is Megalon, which as we've discussed, doesn't really have anything to say about its setup, and below that we find Godzilla: Planet of the Monsters. It's fitting that a movie written by Gen Urobuchi is so far down the nihilism scale, but consider for a minute what it's actually saying about its theme. In the film, we're told that the monsters win and claim the planet, forcing humans to flee into space. This is a classic "nature wins" story and and on a certain level its hopeful, because we know that the planet lives on, not only recovers but thrives, and Godzilla's genetics birth a whole new ecosystem with his radioactive "pollen." This isn't the kind of biosphere we're used to seeing as mostly urban Cenozoic animals, but it's a highly developed and stable ecosystem and in the long run that's far better than living in the 2020's. Now this isn't higher on the optimism scale because... well, the film's perspective is from that of the humans, remember this is just Planet of the Monsters we're talking about here, the "part 1" that feels soooo much like a "part 1" it actively hampers the enjoyment of the film as its own entity (hence why in my tier list I have it needing another draft, even more so than the notorious double-climax of Godzilla Raids Again), but when taken as such the movie is saying "nature will kill you, humans are all doomed." This is a strong tone in the film but it loses points because it isn't even like... a bad thing, especially in the year 21,270ce. Moreover, if we take this concept out of the world of the film and apply it to our world, we're left with the assurance that eventually, after some geologically short period of time, humans and their horrible scars will have been mostly erased from the Earth and a healthier biosphere can thrive. That's not really a great outlook for optimism because it essentially paints any effort to reverse environmental decay as kind of pointless for the planet in the long run, and the dire outlook we enter the story from anwyas (that of the weary humans on their generation ship daring to reclaim the planet from Godzilla) is ultimately doomed from the start and it's hard to see their effort as justified or reasonable. Really what we're seeing is an alien invasion movie, but we're the aliens. Point is, again, it isn't really until you get down to Godzilla vs. Hedorah where you start to feel like the film fully respects you as an audience member and that you can engage with the theme and tone on a sincere level. Not that that's a bad thing for Son of Godzilla and Godzilla vs. Megalon, but it's a noticeable trend.

    Meanwhile, taking a look at the opposite end of the chart, we have a series of significantly more awesome movies all the way down. Not only good, but look at how each of the films in sequence treats the viewer. Ghidorah, as I've discussed, takes a misstep in having the monsters be the ones to have a change of heart, instead of people, which doesn't let the message live outside of the film because it's stuck to fictional giant monsters, but that aside Honda's optimism is genuine and real, and the sentiment can live within the audience without the film having to be an overly serious affair. You get a cool Godzilla movie and some cool Honda ethics. Monster Zero really doesn't have a high opinion of the technocracy, which is hard to argue with and easy to get behind, and neither detracts from or gets in the way of the fun alien invasion movie. The trio of Mechagodzilla movies, rather than simply using the theme as a plot excuse to set up the conflict and just have it be resolved without expressing a strong authorial opinion one way or the other, each have interestingly complex but ultimately inconclusive ideas. GxMG ends on a positive note, but as much as it builds up Akane, it also gets Sara to give up the sleeping grass, giving it a kind of coming-of-age angle with her character arc leading her - a child, by the way - to learn to accept death. It doesn't reach any conclusions, but it's not because it's shallow. GMMG, as I mentioned, presents a conflict between respecting the dead and selfish, recursive mistakes. We do see people ultimately do the right thing in the end, but it doesn't really feel like things are just going to be okay. Tokyo S.O.S. is a very ambiguous movie and its unique tone of post-Honda realism strikes a really powerful chord in me that's been resonating for a long time and it was #5 in list riiiight up until I made that tier list just today... and honestly thinking about it now I kind of think I made a mistake there. Terror falls in between having its heavy themes all be part of a self-contained story of robots and aliens and monsters that don't have any clear reflections in the outside world. That said, the tensions and motivations of the human characters are compelling regardless of whether they're cyborgs or w/e else, and the feminist overtones are kind of hard to ignore, especially after seeing the movie high.

    Down in the bottom right corner we have an anti-capitalist salaryman comedy that parodies its own premise, an anti-capitalism non-comedy where Japan's lost decade is revealed to be the inevitable result of pressures inherent in the system where the very forces that revived the scrap-and-build country are the same ones that wrought economic destruction, causing them to scrap, and then build up both Godzilla and King Ghidorah with literal time travel causal loops, and GMK, of which Biollante composer Koichi Sugiyama said "fact: this movie never existed." Godzilla movies aren't the most complicated of films, conceptually or narratively, but taking a look at the two sides of this chart there is a distinct difference, and compared to Megalon even a movie like GMMG can seem obtuse, to say nothing of Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah which for reasons beyond my understanding continues to confuse people. An obvious reason for this is, of course, that issues affecting the environment are very uncomplicated with simple solutions: pollution bad, so don't pollute. Social issues - equality, free will, mental health, ethics, capitalism, ...the technocracy... - are way more nuanced because the bad guys in those situations aren't snorting, glowing chartreuse pig monsters we can just flash some magic rings at, sometimes the bad guys are us, maaannn. This makes these ideas hard to grapple with in a simple way, and harder still to make a kaiju - a rather blunt object, symbolically - into a metaphor for, so you end up having to just use your human characters. Unless you're an absolute fucking chad Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah, then you can turn a time traveling cyborg space dragon into a metaphor for the bubble.

    A mini-pillar emerges on the quarter between the far end of the society axis and its mid-point. This trio of movies is Shin Godzilla, a 3/11 movie that resolves all of its conflicts with bafflingly optimistic faith in bureaucrats in a, I remind you, fucking 3/11 movie, the final member of the Showa 30's anti-capitalist trilogy where a weak type of faith in humanity has to be won back by Honda's lady moral pivot character which is honestly only that far left because it draws so much attention to the state of Infant Island, and the latch-key kid movie which is... only that far left because the incredible attention paid to the pollution and squalor of the urban environments of the film. All three of these lead with the social aspect, Shin because 3/11 wasn't anyone's fault, the only part of that tragedy you can blame on people was the response, Mothra because it's used as a previous example of man's evil, and Revenge for mood and tonal reasons. But there's definitely a clear divide between the optimistic Shin and the two Showa era films in this column. Shin Godzilla - and this is my only complaint about the film - never really earned its goodwill. It shows us how incompetent politicians are, then scrounges up a handful of outcasts who buck against the system and get a chance to enact change in the way things are done to solve a problem in an honest and effective way. This isn't how real life politics work. The optimism comes from the fact that the protagonists - because of the way movies are written - are the audience's window into the film, and they know how bad things are only because we know, not because they are a genuine reflection of some actual Japanese political party. There are sentiments about Japan growing out of their "scrap-and-build" shadow which feel either patriotic or condescending depending on the scene (not sure which is worse), and the whole concept of where it comes from feels very confused to me. Within the context of the film I'm genuinely ecstatic to see these characters make the system work - especially with the return of the international brotherhood theme of the Honda era - but it just doesn't feel earned in a movie where everything else is so grounded and powerful. Meanwhile, the actual Honda movies in the column don't take the easy way out, hell, Revenge ends with the mother weeping because she knows nothing's really changed. I guess that's just an example of Honda being a better director than Anno which is... honestly not a fair comparison to make, especially when we're talking about Godzilla, but it really shows that the second you start moving away from complicated, nuanced social issues where individual people are both the cause and the only real solution, to systemic issues caused by technology, civilization, and wars far larger than any one person, the optimism feels less and less earned.

...that, or maybe I'm just a very pessimistic person. Could explain why all but one of my top 10 Godzilla films in my tier list have an optimism score of greater than 0.

    Alright, that's enough for now. I have more observations about this chart I want to make but right now I'm tired of writing and I'm hungry so I'ma stop for now. Dragon stats will be around after Deathiversary. Oh, also, speaking of Deathiversary: I'm going to do blog posts here, one for each day. It will be the first Deathiversary since 2018 I'll have any kind of online, publicly viewable record for, and I'm actually planning on making online documentations for Deathiversary VI and VII as well. Don't know when all that will be done but, it's coming eventually. I have more dragons planned too, hence why it's a series, such as the tin and zinc dragons, which must exist, and the confirmed but never stated septs of 3.5 rock dragons and 4e scourge dragons, among others.

Skreeonk,

Maly🌹