"A look back at the history of the genre to the modern day." -- Sabeane CONda, 10th Grade
The 1990s were a massive decade for kaiju(japanese for “Giant Monster”), breathing new life into this age-old genre. See, by the late 70s, Kaiju films had almost completely changed their focus. Beginning as somber period pieces anthropomorphizing Japanese society's collective grief, they had, over the course of 20 years become yearly blockbuster cheese-fests built on empty spectacle. Godzilla, once a representation of the nuclear bomb, and all the baggage that comes with that, was now starring as an unambiguous (albeit grumpy) protagonist. Doing battle with Martians, Atlantians, and Saturday Morning cartoon villains. And look, I love these stupid movies, they deserve a lot more credit than I’m giving them here, but I need to illustrate the world of difference they had from their roots and the effect it had on their reputation in wider pop culture.
Giant monsters were for kids. They were stupid, oversaturated cash grabs made in bulk to sell toys. Eventually, relegated into that role, they faded into memory. Box office numbers declined until in 1975, Godzilla starred in what looked to be his final film: Terror of Mechagodzilla. With his cousin Gamera ending his run in the much less glamorous Gamera: Super Monster--a “film” which was quite literally just a clip show of previous movies. The era of the Giant Monster was over.
Cue 1984, with the release of Return of Godzilla. And everything about it, from the plot to the score to the direction to the marketing and even to the design of the big G himself had an aura of gravity. Shown as a direct sequel to the 1954 original, Return of Godzilla proclaimed to wash away the two decades of kiddy antics that the series had fallen into, and to make the monsters monstrous again. And everything about the genre changed to fit this new, shiny mold.
The series that followed this hallmark film into the 90s is, to put it lightly, iconic. The technology that simply did not exist back then, made the set pieces that were previously interesting into what could only be described as mesmerizing. Nearly every original kaiju featured in this era went on to become fan favorites. Until recently, the redesigned kaiju from earlier entries were considered their premier versions. You’d be hard pressed to find a G-fan whose favorite movie didn’t come from this era.
When Godzilla’s series ended in 1995, the unthinkable happened. It was Gamera who burst on to the scene to lead the genre into the future. Gamera, who from his inception, was a dirt cheap version of the Godzilla franchise meant to siphon off money from his much more famous uncle, was now making films that many fans see as the best kaiju movies of all time. To say the 90s were a decade where the stars aligned would be an understatement—the entire Milky Way stood still for this. But all great things come to an end, and when you’re atop the highest mountain in the world, the only direction left to go is down.
By 2012 it had become clear that kaiju films wouldn’t survive the new millennium, with kaiju releases in any medium growing increasingly sparse, until there was nothing left but fan content. Godzilla in particular was in a really rough spot, the King of the Monsters not even surviving halfway through the first decade. And as much as that sucks, it’s not hard to see why. After the bombastic decade that was the 90s came and gone, the Millenium era that began in 1999 was populated almost entirely out of mediocrity. Godzilla 2000 and vs Megaguirus come off as especially uninspired, not helping the fact that the special effects were worse than in previous films.
GMK and Final Wars stand out as charming oddballs, but you probably won’t find anyone who holds them even in their top 3. Gamera the Brave in 2006 is mostly remembered for being not as good as the heisei trilogy. And for the longest time, that was that. The only things we got were kaiju-adjacent films like Cloverfield.
I can’t imagine what it was like in 2012, after 8 years had come and gone without a Godzilla release. Gamera was even less likely to come back. In 2013 it would’ve been the longest Godzilla had ever gone without a release, and with no news, that was seeming increasingly likely.
Then it happened. 2012 San Diego Comic Con. Two teasers were dropped. One was for a big budget Hollywood adaptation of the infamous Mecha v Kaiju genre, helmed by none other than the legendary monster king himself: Guillermo del Toro. The other was a Hollywood adaptation of Godzilla that gave me so many chills that I wanted to call a doctor.
pacific rim (2013)
Pacific Rim was the first kaiju release of the 2010s, a decade that revitalized the genre in ways that look to be a lot more lasting than the 90s. Chock Full of content spanning the breadth of weird, sometimes wonderful, and sometimes terrible. And it helps to analyse what these films represent in the greater kaiju scheme of things if we separate adaptations into three categories.
The first are adaptations made by talented creators who are also fans—it’s these people who understand what made those old movies special, and distills it into its purest form. They also understand what also made them suck, the missteps they took when nobody had the benefit of hindsight. It’s these one-in-a-million adaptations that carve their way into hallowed halls of Best of All Time lists and the status of being considered a true classic.
The second, and less glamorous is the adaptation that simply wishes to bank on nostalgia. Essentially recreating those movies word for word (albeit with the main draw being whatever new technology cropped up in the years past), and as such, they’re limited both by the outdated flaws of the time, and whatever modern flaws incurred from growing pains.
The last (and definitely least) of these is the adaptation made by someone who doesn’t like the original, and tries to malform it into something unrecognizable while still facing pressure from the studio to have it, at least superficially, resemble the original source material. If you’ve ever seen an X-Men movie or an adaptation of your favorite children’s or young adult book, you know what I mean.
So, where does Pacific Rim fall on this scale? Well, nobody is happier than me to say that Pacific Rim is such a massive step above the Kaiju fare of the modern era, that it is the entire reason this hierarchy exists in the first place. But I’m getting ahead of myself. What exactly makes it better than so much of our kaiju media?
Well, it starts conceptually. Now, I understand the absurdity of me trying to convince you of the genius behind the concept of: “Giant Monsters came out of the ocean so we built Giant Robots to punch them until they stopped”, but here me out. Kaiju as a genre is one built on metaphors, messages, and themes. The monsters themselves, a representation of the fears and trauma of a society. Godzilla was infamously an allegory for the nuclear bomb, and atomic power in general. And while these themes were often as subtle as well… a giant monster, their inclusion at all is a core part of what makes this genre special.
But nuclear bombs aren’t very relevant in the public consciousness, not here in America, and especially not 2013, nearly two decades removed from the Cold War. So what does Pacific Rim mean? Let’s look at the premise. Pacific Rim takes place in the mid 2020s, since 2017, we have been attacked by giant monsters emerging from the sea, said giant monsters only appearing now due to human-caused climate change turning the earth into something more suitable for their species(also notable is that said kaiju are denoted into categories like natural disasters, and are directly compared to hurricanes at many points in the film). Humanity is only able to beat them back by banding together and building Giant Robots to fight them.
Monsters as Climate change is one of those great ideas that seems obvious in hindsight, but nobody thought of it. But is that it? Just themes? Your art being deep doesn’t make it good, after all. Luckily, it has more.
The human characters and their narrative in a kaiju film has always been uniquely terrible and boring, to the point where to some fans riddled with Stockholm syndrome, it’s become a part of the experience. But in truth, it’s always been one of the biggest problems with the genre, reducing a vast majority of it to forgettable shlock you only turn on for the action scenes. I can barely describe the effect that the strength of the characters has on this movie. Not only because it gives the audience something to enjoy between setpieces, but also because it elevates those setpieces far beyond what they could have achieved in a vacuum. How much more intense does a fight feel when you care about those characters who participate in it? How much less annoying is it when they cut away from the action scenes to see what the humans are doing when you like watching them? How much more earned does it feel when they win? But even this element would have asterisks attached if the action scenes themselves weren’t worth elevating
Thankfully, they are. Guillermo Del Toro’s mastery of special effects is on full display here, with just the models themselves being beautiful and highly detailed. Their movement, no longer restricted by the limitations that come with suitmation, and guided by a hand that understood the physicality required to convey the weight and power of these beings, hasn’t even aged a day 7 years later, the opposite, in fact. While the weightless, boring kaiju cgi of the last few years has covered itself in a thick mist of filters that reduce the entirety of the action scenes to washy silhouettes, Pacific Rim holds its gorgeous setpieces in full view.
But perhaps more than anything, is the sense of sheer fun this film exudes, not the lifeless, corporate fellow kids “fun” we see all too often in movies, but real genuine fun. It’s that once in a lifetime movie that you can’t be sad that it’s over, but glad that it happened at all.
The first are adaptations made by talented creators who are also fans—it’s these people who understand what made those old movies special, and distills it into its purest form. They also understand what also made them suck, the missteps they took when nobody had the benefit of hindsight. It’s these one-in-a-million adaptations that carve their way into hallowed halls of Best of All Time lists and the status of being considered a true classic.
The second, and less glamorous is the adaptation that simply wishes to bank on nostalgia. Essentially recreating those movies word for word (albeit with the main draw being whatever new technology cropped up in the years past), and as such, they’re limited both by the outdated flaws of the time, and whatever modern flaws incurred from growing pains.
The last (and definitely least) of these is the adaptation made by someone who doesn’t like the original, and tries to malform it into something unrecognizable while still facing pressure from the studio to have it, at least superficially, resemble the original source material. If you’ve ever seen an X-Men movie or an adaptation of your favorite children’s or young adult book, you know what I mean.
So, where does Pacific Rim fall on this scale? Well, nobody is happier than me to say that Pacific Rim is such a massive step above the Kaiju fare of the modern era, that it is the entire reason this hierarchy exists in the first place. But I’m getting ahead of myself. What exactly makes it better than so much of our kaiju media?
Well, it starts conceptually. Now, I understand the absurdity of me trying to convince you of the genius behind the concept of: “Giant Monsters came out of the ocean so we built Giant Robots to punch them until they stopped”, but here me out. Kaiju as a genre is one built on metaphors, messages, and themes. The monsters themselves, a representation of the fears and trauma of a society. Godzilla was infamously an allegory for the nuclear bomb, and atomic power in general. And while these themes were often as subtle as well… a giant monster, their inclusion at all is a core part of what makes this genre special.
But nuclear bombs aren’t very relevant in the public consciousness, not here in America, and especially not 2013, nearly two decades removed from the Cold War. So what does Pacific Rim mean? Let’s look at the premise. Pacific Rim takes place in the mid 2020s, since 2017, we have been attacked by giant monsters emerging from the sea, said giant monsters only appearing now due to human-caused climate change turning the earth into something more suitable for their species(also notable is that said kaiju are denoted into categories like natural disasters, and are directly compared to hurricanes at many points in the film). Humanity is only able to beat them back by banding together and building Giant Robots to fight them.
Monsters as Climate change is one of those great ideas that seems obvious in hindsight, but nobody thought of it. But is that it? Just themes? Your art being deep doesn’t make it good, after all. Luckily, it has more.
The human characters and their narrative in a kaiju film has always been uniquely terrible and boring, to the point where to some fans riddled with Stockholm syndrome, it’s become a part of the experience. But in truth, it’s always been one of the biggest problems with the genre, reducing a vast majority of it to forgettable shlock you only turn on for the action scenes. I can barely describe the effect that the strength of the characters has on this movie. Not only because it gives the audience something to enjoy between setpieces, but also because it elevates those setpieces far beyond what they could have achieved in a vacuum. How much more intense does a fight feel when you care about those characters who participate in it? How much less annoying is it when they cut away from the action scenes to see what the humans are doing when you like watching them? How much more earned does it feel when they win? But even this element would have asterisks attached if the action scenes themselves weren’t worth elevating
Thankfully, they are. Guillermo Del Toro’s mastery of special effects is on full display here, with just the models themselves being beautiful and highly detailed. Their movement, no longer restricted by the limitations that come with suitmation, and guided by a hand that understood the physicality required to convey the weight and power of these beings, hasn’t even aged a day 7 years later, the opposite, in fact. While the weightless, boring kaiju cgi of the last few years has covered itself in a thick mist of filters that reduce the entirety of the action scenes to washy silhouettes, Pacific Rim holds its gorgeous setpieces in full view.
But perhaps more than anything, is the sense of sheer fun this film exudes, not the lifeless, corporate fellow kids “fun” we see all too often in movies, but real genuine fun. It’s that once in a lifetime movie that you can’t be sad that it’s over, but glad that it happened at all.
godzilla (2014) & Godzilla: king of the monsters (2019)
I want to talk about Godzilla(2014) and Godzilla: King of the Monsters(2019) at the same time, because I feel the same way about them.
Despite being beloved fan favorites and incredibly important landmark films, I can’t help but be disappointed in these movies. They’re type twos,(that’s the rehash one) and it really shows in the human casts. They run the full spectrum from boring to annoying, with that occasional outlier that I’d classify more as wasted potential than anything else. And for most fans, that’s fine. It’s always been like that, that what we really need to do is count our blessings. But, in a post MCU world, shouldn’t we be asking more from our blockbusters?
But, as their fans will tell you, it’s the fights. The action. Maybe the human parts weren’t so good, but the action, dude, it’s like, awesome dude. And maybe it would be, if you could fucking see it. It is beyond me why in Godzilla’s name would they spend nearly 200 million on breathing new life into Godzilla with CGI, a technology that the genre benefits so much from that you wonder how they managed to make anything decent before, only to cover it all up in ten filters of dust, debris, smoke, mist, fog, rain, whatever other particle effects they had. But that’s not the worst of it.
The worst of it, what makes these movies so difficult to enjoy, is their chronic, debilitating obsession with sidelining the (admittedly awesome) monster action by cutting to whatever random shit the humans are doing, every 1-2 seconds, perpetually. It’s like trying to watch a show that hits the “skip 10 seconds” button every two seconds.
Despite being beloved fan favorites and incredibly important landmark films, I can’t help but be disappointed in these movies. They’re type twos,(that’s the rehash one) and it really shows in the human casts. They run the full spectrum from boring to annoying, with that occasional outlier that I’d classify more as wasted potential than anything else. And for most fans, that’s fine. It’s always been like that, that what we really need to do is count our blessings. But, in a post MCU world, shouldn’t we be asking more from our blockbusters?
But, as their fans will tell you, it’s the fights. The action. Maybe the human parts weren’t so good, but the action, dude, it’s like, awesome dude. And maybe it would be, if you could fucking see it. It is beyond me why in Godzilla’s name would they spend nearly 200 million on breathing new life into Godzilla with CGI, a technology that the genre benefits so much from that you wonder how they managed to make anything decent before, only to cover it all up in ten filters of dust, debris, smoke, mist, fog, rain, whatever other particle effects they had. But that’s not the worst of it.
The worst of it, what makes these movies so difficult to enjoy, is their chronic, debilitating obsession with sidelining the (admittedly awesome) monster action by cutting to whatever random shit the humans are doing, every 1-2 seconds, perpetually. It’s like trying to watch a show that hits the “skip 10 seconds” button every two seconds.
Furthermore, King of the Monsters has no themes. Can you imagine? A Godzilla movie that has nothing to say. It’s laughable. At least, I hope it has nothing to say, because if you tried to read in between the lines, it starts to sound like a pro nuke movie. But I sincerely doubt they even thought about it that hard, so it’s more likely a series of unfortunate accidents. This film is meh, made manifest. I’d recommend it if you were a kaiju fan, but otherwise, it’s a pretty damn hard sell, only considered due to the fact that a good majority of it isn’t a complete joke. My fellow fans would crucify me for it, but in terms of a final score the critics were right; a 4/10 is a very accurate score for King of the Monsters, and a 5-6/10 is for Godzilla 2014
