A Godzilla for All Seasons

This is a feature excerpt from Unwinnable Monthly #190. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.

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I grew up with Godzilla. When I was a kid, we got a channel that showed Godzilla movies (among others) on Saturday mornings. One of my most prized toys was a bootleg Godzilla figure (the same one that can be seen in Eugene’s bedroom in Monster Squad). The earliest VHS I can remember owning was King Kong vs. Godzilla, back when we were all convinced that there were secretly two endings, a Japanese one where Godzilla won and an American one where King Kong did. (There aren’t.)

The same isn’t true of my spouse. Grace came to Godzilla much later, and while they love that radioactive lizard with a passion that probably puts mine to shame, they hadn’t seen very many of the movies featuring the Big G. So, together, we hatched a plan: Watch every single live action, feature-length Godzilla movie ever made, more-or-less in order.

When you embark upon such a project in the public eye, you’ll quickly learn several things: Pretty much everyone has a favorite Godzilla movie, they’re more than happy to tell you which one it is, and it could be absolutely any one of them.

Sometimes, these are the obvious suspects. Just about everyone loves the original Godzilla from 1954, for example, and almost as many people seem to love Toho’s most recent foray, 2023’s Godzilla Minus One. Others, however, are less predictable…

Given that it was featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000 and is loaded with often-acknowledged problems, one might expect that 1973’s Godzilla vs. Megalon would be no one’s favorite – but one would be very wrong.

Similarly, when I was younger, All Monsters Attack from 1969 was generally reviled. Not only does it heavily feature Godzilla’s unpopular offspring Minilla, but it’s a clip show made up partly of footage from previous installments in the series. And yet, All Monsters Attack enjoys many stalwart defenders, and a certain subset of kaiju fans on Twitter and later Bluesky love Minilla so much they regularly celebrate #MinillaMondays.

Part of this is just people being people. Everyone’s favorite movie is someone else’s least favorite – and vice versa. But I think part of it is also a testament to the versatility of Godzilla itself, a franchise that began life as a metaphor for the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (and a way to chase the success of American creature feature movies) and then transformed into a children’s series and a national hero akin to Mexican masked wrestlers like El Santo, only to transform back again time after time.

Back when Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim first hit theaters in 2013, I remember a review which suggested that the movie didn’t understand kaiju films because the kaiju could never be anything but a metaphor for nuclear holocaust – an assertion that would have been a huge surprise to pretty much everyone who ever made a kaiju flick, including the same folks who made the unforgettable atomic nightmare that is Godzilla (1954).

Indeed, kaiju films more broadly and Godzilla films in particular can be quite a lot of different things, and cater to a wide array of different tastes, which may go some distance to explaining the vast variety of personal favorites from among Godzilla’s large stable of titles.

Some people come to Godzilla for awe-inspiring fight scenes and handmade special effects – and there is no shortage of both to be found, in various places. Some come for that nuclear metaphor, while others come for pure camp, with goofy plots and unlikely science being a feature, not a bug. And for some, all of the above is part of the appeal, and the fact that Godzilla can skip from one to the next so effortlessly is what draws them to the big lizard again and again.

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For those who don’t already know, the Godzilla franchise spans more than seventy years and nearly forty feature films. These are divided by fans into several distinct eras, corresponding to when they were released.

When most of us think of Godzilla, we are thinking of the earliest Showa era movies, the fifteen films released between 1954 and 1975, many of them directed by Ishiro Honda. These were followed by the movies of the Heisei era, spanning a decade from the 1984 release of The Return of Godzilla to Godzilla vs Destoroyah in 1995. A smaller gap separates the Heisei and Millenium eras, with the latter kicking off in 1999 with Godzilla 2000 and continuing until Godzilla took a decade-long break following 2004’s Godzilla: Final Wars.

The current Reiwa era has only two live-action films in it so far; Shin Godzilla from 2016 and 2023’s Godzilla Minus One. However, defining Godzilla’s life on the big screen isn’t quite as simple even as all that.

In 1998, America decided to get in on the action, releasing a largely misbegotten flick directed by Roland Emmerich that has more in common with Jurassic Park than with most Godzilla movies. (And even it has its die-hard fans.) Then, starting in 2014, Legendary Pictures kicked off their blockbuster “Monsterverse” series, which thus far has five installments (with another on the way), four of them starring their own take on Godzilla.

Each of these various eras have their own unique character, and you can usually tell a Showa Godzilla movie from a Heisei, Millenium, Reiwa or Legendary one, even at a glance. There are also differences in how continuity is handled from one group of movies to another. While the modern Legendary films act as direct sequels, the movies in the Millenium era are almost all standalones which ignore all previous Godzilla lore, going back to the 1954 original. Others mix and match these approaches in various ways.

However, even within those categories, Godzilla movies can be divided into two broad types.

There are the “serious” films, in which Godzilla acts as a metaphor, usually for nuclear devastation and the trauma of war. These are often seen as the “better” Godzilla movies, and include Godzilla (1954), Shin Godzilla, and Godzilla Minus One, plus arguably a few others.

You’ll note, however, that those are only a very small portion of the total number of Godzilla movies out there. There are some 35 live-action films starring Godzilla (and three animated features, not to mention various spin-offs), and maybe five or so of those fall primarily in the “serious” metaphor category.

The rest are movies predominantly about wrestling matches between guys in rubber suits; about model buildings getting knocked down and toy tanks firing toy missiles; about alien invaders in spangly spandex outfits. These are the “silly” Godzilla movies but, of course, how silly they actually are varies from one movie to the next – and so does how silly audiences want them to be.

In most of these latter flicks, Godzilla is the “good guy,” often saving Earth from alien invasions or other monsters. That’s not always the case, however. 2001’s Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack is a good example of a villainous Godzilla in a “monster brawl” movie, even turning the tables so that Godzilla’s most routinely evil antagonist, Ghidorah, becomes one of the “good guys” this time around.

Its mouthful of a title is often shortened by kaiju fans to GMK, and it’s also an illustration of the cross-pollination between “serious” and “silly” Godzilla flicks. It may be a rubber suited monster bash, but the Godzilla in it is also a vessel carrying the vengeful souls of those who died during the war in the Pacific, who are punishing modern Japan for its denial of its past crimes.

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Orrin Grey is a writer, editor, game designer, and amateur film scholar who loves to write about monsters, movies, and monster movies. He’s the author of several spooky books, including How to See Ghosts & Other Figments. You can find him online at orringrey.com.