They Militarized Godzilla (But, Not Like That)
This past weekend I was recovering from being sick (thankfully negative to COVID-19 as I continue to mask) and doing what anyone does when it hurts to move and you don't want to think about canceled summer plans: binge-watch movies.
A few films in and I decided to rewatch the 2019 version of Godzilla: King of the Monsters, because while I love a good kaiju movie, I had admittedly fallen asleep the first time I saw this one and was curious to see how everyone's favorite nuclear-powered reptile defeated the latest incarnation of the alien-hydra Ghidorah.
Fans of the franchise know Legendary's "Monsterverse" has recently picked up traction after the initial 2014 Godzilla's mediocre reviews and relatively long time between chapters until 2017's Kong: Skull Island. It was a full 5 years before the King of Monsters returned in Godzilla vs. Kong, building more hype for a new television series in development around the "Monsterverse" at Apple TV+. I can't speak to what's to come, and have to admit that a new Godzilla series does excite me, but there's a particular scene in 2019's King of the Monsters that I'd like to discuss. [The movie is 3 years old, but warning: spoilers ahead]
In one of the more tense scenes of the film, the ensemble of protagonists finds a mortally wounded Godzilla that they must revive in order to save the planet. At first glance, this feels like an ecological call to action: Because of something a minority of extremist humans did, we must heal this symbol of nature and cooperate to fight for the planet's survival. Nothing wrong with that, and Kong knows we need more ecological action in the real world, too.
It's when we dig deeper into the scene and into writing itself that you’ll find what gave me, and I suspect others, some serious discomfort. One of the lead scientists, and certainly lead Godzilla advocate, Dr. Ishiro Serizawa (played by the easily-recognized Ken Watanabe) sacrifices himself by hand-delivering a nuclear warhead, prepared by the United States military, to the resting Godzilla. The warhead detonates after Serizawa emotionally connects with the wounded king of monsters, saying "Goodbye, old friend" (in Japanese). After the detonation, Serizawa is left, unsurprisingly, dead, and Godzilla reinvigorated as the planet's hero.
There is external context that Ken Watanabe had some input in how this scene played out, flipping Dr. Serizawa's final, impactful line to his native tongue and providing at least some allusion to the Japanese origin of the globally-beloved Godzilla franchise. Also at play, an idea of film artistry and a point on wildlife protection by having Serizawa sacrifice himself to save the creature in opposition to the original, 1954 Godzilla/Gojira's Serizawa character, who sacrificed himself to, not save, but kill the beast. However, these seemingly well-intentioned elements come (in my personal and non-Japanese view) at the expense of the true impetus for the original Godzilla: protest and grief of the American use of nuclear weapons on Japan.
The original Godzilla film "served as a strong political statement, representative of the traumas and anxieties of the Japanese people in an era when censorship was extensive in Japan because of the American occupation of the country after the war ended" writes Kimmy Yan in a 2020 NBC News piece. Godzilla's destruction, and own personal scarring, were reminiscent of the landscape and bodily destruction wrought by the two nuclear detonations by the United States on Japan, which also remain as the only two instances of nuclear weapons used in armed conflict in human history (content warning: the previous link contains graphic imagery of the destruction). In Japan, viewers were recorded as leaving theaters in tears over the grief of the devastating events that took place less than a decade prior. In America, however, Hollywood painted a different story.
When the 1954 film played in American theaters, not long after its Japanese-release, it had been edited to make a white actor central to the story, and removed about 20-minutes of politically charged scenes. These scenes included direct callouts to Godzilla being symbolic of the Hiroshima bombing, as well as a direct call to cease nuclear testing to avoid Godzilla's return.
Now you may begin to see where I felt discomfort with the 2019 film.
The modern King of the Monsters places one of its few Japanese actors/characters into a wholly avoidable situation of: (1) calling on the United States' nuclear cache as the only hope for planetary salvation (2) voluntarily dying at the hands of an American nuclear weapon (3) doing so with kindness in their heart for the very creature originally meant to symbolize mass Japanese nuclear death. Once again, Hollywood has reframed a Japanese symbol of disarmament, named it “King of the Monsters”, and this time turned it into a kaiju romp literally powered by a savior nuclear warhead that's responsible for the death of a Japanese character.
The constant rebooting of franchises is not just a tiring cash grab as genuinely new stories find mass success (like this year’s masterpiece hit Everything, Everywhere, All At Once); rebooting can be dangerous, especially when done by groups that, consciously or not, commit erasure of the genuine commentary in the original(s). If you want a Godzilla movie that doesn't treat nuclear threats so lightly or pass environmental protection ideology off to primarily terroristic characters, Hideaki Anno's 2016 Shin Godzilla shows that a reboot can be done well. The film conveys the gravity of direct and political destruction, offer new social commentary with classic symbols, and is (in my opinion) the best Godzilla movie to date.
My point is this: In an ever-flattening media space where international symbols and characters are increasingly accessible, storytellers need to understand and respect the source material and its cultural context; even better, studios should simply hire more people of different nationalities to write and portray diverse stories. White-washing is harmful enough on its own, but reversing the moral takeaways of a different culture's story and calling it representation is just lying about history.
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Trevor is a Junior Cultural Strategist at sparks & honey, with a background primarily in racial and environmental justice. An award-winning activist that knows way too much about video games, you can usually find him reading up on current events or making surreal memes.