The Great God, Godzilla!

by Bill Couture

I wanted to collect my thoughts on these three films design work and the choices that led them to make what they did for a while now.  Here we go.    

Nobody liked the ‘98 Roland Emmerich Godzilla.  He was smaller, without fantastical atomic breath, was killed by some missiles, was a horizontal theropod iguana T-Rex.  Here’s the sympathy;  after the crushing success of Jurassic Park and The Lost World, the American monster blockbuster was locked into depicting them in a more grounded, natural way.  What was less grounded in modern thought than an upright dinosaur fire breathing dragon?!  Thus, a tail balancing, horizontal running theropod lizard T-rex Godzilla.  A bold concept design that didn’t work.  Not from bad design, but from betrayal of design.  Bold, but against basic concept.  Godzilla is a God, not a common animal.  He requires a degree of unnatural presence.  

Zoom forward sixteen years.  Gareth Edwards 2014 Godzilla had the job that all these revivals have now, to remind a built in audience why they love whatever it is they’re selling.  This required a measure of restraint in design and reliance on nostalgia.  Therefore, Godzilla 2014 is a loyal addition.  It looks unnatural enough, standing upright and breathing fire, but with a little more natural animalistic performance.  It’s concern is with having a bold silhouette with great sharp angles, and an easy read with basic shape.  This is a case of a fantastic, knowing, and intelligent design that found itself framed through a very artistic eye.  The quality of shots, especially with the night scenes, caused much of the joy and celebration of Godzilla to be lost.  He was hard to make out and enjoy at some key moments even though his depiction was great and it looked beautiful.

Zoom forward a couple years, Shin Godzilla 2016.  Up front I will say that, throughout a year of analysis and critique, I’ve found the design work and choices made in Shin Godzilla to be my favorite film creature design since H.R. Giger’s Alien.  I don’t say this lightly, so here’s the background.  

Never has a Godzilla film had so much to prove since his inception sixty years prior, a time ripe, and in need, for bold exploration.  It had been twelve years since the bombastic ‘Matrix’ riff of a monster mash that was Final Wars.  Japan, and the world, is in a much different, self aware era than it was then in the goofy early 2000′s with ‘bullet time’ and Powerman 5000.  Hollywood had proven two years prior, unlike back in ‘98, that they can produce a worthy depiction of Godzilla.  So what does Japan have to say?  How does this self awareness look?  What does Godzilla mean in his home country now?      

Firstly, Shin Godzilla’s craggily mug was slapped on the first promo poster.  Such a drastic departure, they smartly made it available before anything else, given time for acceptance.  And now a list of the conceptual departures; evolution, multiple forms.  Like Dragonball, Pokemon, or any number of anime.  Godzilla is now evolving in ‘different forms’.  This allows for an evolution of roar, atomic breath, crawler to erect biped.  Different color!  Purple laser beams from the mouth, fins, and tail.  Split jaw unnaturally wide.  Creatures erupting from the tip of a skeletal mess of a tail at the end.  There was a lot of design work at play.  The benefit is in having a constant parade of surprises.  The solo monster performance in a movie can be boring, but these design choices made that a non issue.  Much like H.R. Giger’s evolving Alien, kept fresh by change. 

If Emmerich’s ‘98 Godzilla was a bold failure trying to bring a fantasy character down to reality, and if Edwards 2014 American Godzilla was a knowingly cared for and effective take off of the classic design, then Higuchi and Anno’s 2016 take was an explosion whose main concern was with tearing things apart, rather than trying to justify unnatural design, or gather everyone around a nostalgic campfire to start franchising.  

But not just for creativity’s sake, Shin Godzilla’s crazed look mirrored it’s stories bureaucratic madness.  The nervous humor from the horror of such absurd design was everywhere in every part.  This movie thrived on that nervous humor.  Godzilla was more than ever before, an unnatural creature that captured my imagination.

We take Godzilla and franchise him, with the climax of our 2014 film’s nuclear weapon detonating harmlessly out of the way far off into the ocean.  But in Japan, they’ve left Godzilla frozen in the middle of a city, with difficult nuclear fallout to contend with.  Their government is waiting to prove itself against an unnatural God sprouting demonic humanoids from the tip of his tail.  Our Godzilla woke up and walked back into the ocean carefully through city streets.