All week long, we’re celebrating the clash of the titans that is Godzilla vs. Kong! It’s Kongzilla Week! Read all of the pieces here!

by Ryan Silberstein, The Red Herring and Garrett Smith, Contributor

Two of our resident Godzilla fans look back on the films of the MonsterVerse so far: Godzilla (2014), Kong: Skull Island (2017), and Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019)!

Ryan: I titled this piece because the Hollow Earth thing unites all of these films so far. The first actual scene of Gareth Edwards’ 2014 Godzilla movie teases the idea of things living under the Earth. The concept was a staple of early fiction writers like Edgar Allen Poe, Jules Verne, and Edgar Rice Burroughs bringing it from ancient mythology into science fiction with stories like Journey to the Center of the Earth and At Earth’s Core. It still pops up now and then, but it’s one of the things I love about this MonsterVerse iteration of Godzilla: that this crazy pulp concept is really what ties the whole thing together. That and Monarch, anyway. 

Revisiting this Godzilla reboot after some years away from it made me appreciate it more for Gareth Edwards’ approach. It seems like half of all existing Godzilla movies are either remakes of the original or sequels to only the original, and this one is firmly in the remake camp. The original 1954 Gojira is clearly an influence, but so are films like Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Lovecraftian horror. I don’t want every film starring the King of the Monsters to function this way, but it makes sense to me that this approach works in a reboot. Some of the fights between Godzilla and the MUTOs being placed in the background emphasizes their size and scale compared to the human characters. It evokes that Lovecraft sensation of something of Godzilla’s size being incomprehensible to witness. 

Thinking about this as a franchise starter is where the film gets really wild. One, a running theme through this movie is the absolutely stacked cast that absolutely do not need to be in this movie. Here, it’s Juliette Binoche, Sally Hawkins, and Elizabeth Olsen that are barely in the film, but also really help their scenes function. Notice they are all women (we need more female leads in these movies). Looking back now, I think we all agree it was the wrong Maximoff twin that got to star in this movie, but you also have Bryan Cranston absolutely killing it here, only to end up being a relatively minor role. The only ones who return from this movie (so far, at least) later in the franchise are Sally Hawkins and Ken Wanatabe’s Dr. Ishirō Serizawa–the latter named after the scientist from the 1954 film and Godzilla co-creator Ishirō Honda.

So Garrett, how do you feel about this movie as a franchise starter?

Garrett: I love this question because this franchise has become unique in the current release market in that it doesn’t seem to have been planned as a franchise in the same way so many other movies are. And I don’t just mean the Marvel Studios output, either. Movies like Mortal Engines feel like they’re trying to kick-start a world within which to build more movies and other related media and oftentimes suffer because of it. Godzilla (2014) seems like it was made in a vacuum, relatively speaking. Not that they didn’t think they wanted to make more Godzilla movies if this was a success, but beyond MY BEST BIG BOY himself, it doesn’t seem like any elements of this movie are calculated to build future products off of. Even the Hollow Earth of it all feels like a minor detail that they retroactively decided to support a cinematic universe on. 

And I LOVE that! Value judgements on which version of a franchise (build-as-you-go vs. pre-planned) I prefer aside, it’s exciting to have what now feels like the “old-school” method of franchising alive and well in the current market. Now that Christopher McQuarrie is the permanent Mission: Impossible guy, THIS is the franchise that gets to be wholly unique to its creative team with each successive chapter. Creatives building on what came before, ignoring what they don’t care for, and making the kinds of exciting decisions that can really only be made when you’re not beholden to an existing plan. I love it for these movies, and I think it only succeeds as well as it has because Edwards’ movie didn’t swing for the sequel fences, it just stuck to its own vision for Godzilla and succeeded on its own merits.

Which I guess brings us to Kong: Skull Island, which I again don’t think was really intended to be a sequel or a franchise starter until kind of late in the game, does that sound right to you?

Ryan: I don’t want to take us too far off topic, but I think the build-as-you-go is almost always the right model. Maybe there’s a goal in mind that is being worked towards, but I think the best build-as-you-go stuff feels like it’s planned out. I’ve recently started thinking about the Marvel stuff this way. No way when they killed off Rene Russo in Thor: The Dark World did they have planned out that she would return in Avengers Endgame’s time heist. But that scene has emotional impact because they went and looked at what had come before and figured out how to leverage stuff that didn’t work and mine it for new meaning. That’s essentially the approach here. I did some digging, and Kong: Skull Island was announced in 2014 as being distributed by Universal, but it flipped to Warner Bros the following year in order to eventually make this movie happen. 

In context of the franchise, I like that Kong is also a standalone film. There’s not really mention of other monsters (which King of the Monsters officially calls Titans), but the characters in the film are brought into a place that seems impossible. There’s a lot of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World in all Kong movies, but this one places so much emphasis on Skull Island in order to avoid the “twas beauty killed the beast” ending. Is it in service of the franchise? Or trying to find new ground? The answer is probably both. 

While Edwards’ Godzilla remains mostly grounded, this one goes full-tilt towards being a genre exercise. It really feels like they put a Call of Duty video game set in the Vietnam War (with heavy references to Apocalypse Now and Platoon) in a blender with anime to make this movie. If that sounds like a backhanded compliment, it kind of is, because the imagery in the film is beautiful, but I don’t think there’s a greater message here than trying to make everything look cool. 

In terms of worldbuilding, this movie feels like it does more to set up/pivot towards the tone and feel of Godzilla: King of the Monsters than the previous Godzilla does. Or am I thinking too much about this?

Garrett: No, that sounds about right to me. This series definitely arcs from grounded to outlandish and Kong sits kind of squarely in the middle of those (which is perhaps why it doesn’t entirely work for me, either). One of the things I like about Godzilla: King of the Monsters is that it feels so much like a love letter to the entirety of the Toho Godzilla canon, which itself stretches from a serious, adult tone to a more childish, cartoony one. Michael Dougerty was able to blend some of the sillier elements of those movies, like psychic twins that communicate with Mothra, into the already established approach of these monsters being a kind of ancient inhabitant of our planet. It’s definitely the movie that feels the most like an actual “sequel” in this series, while realistically being the first one intended to set the stage for the first true crossover among the franchise. Even the connective tissue from Edwards’ movie to this one is pretty much simply that Godzilla exists, which itself is in the Toho tradition of most Godzilla movies really only being a sequel to the original 1954 movie. Though our Hollow Earth gets name dropped a couple of times along the way here, continuing to thread the Monarch needle that holds these together.

And the ending of this movie feels a lot more like it’s setting the table for a future movie. I love the final shot of the other Titans bowing down to their King. It seems like a promise of a Titan showdown a la Destroy All Monsters, if you ask me. And we obviously know from trailers we’re going to have some more returning characters in Godzilla vs. Kong, and perhaps the descendants of some prior characters as well (google this one, kids!). But ultimately what’s so exciting to me about it is it seems like it’s still very much going to play by its own rules, rather than being bogged down by being the first true “unifying” movie of this franchise. 

Do you think the Hollow Earth will play a more significant role here? Or is that still just going to be a nice, loose thread that binds this whole amorphous franchise?

Ryan: The more I think about it, the more I appreciate the ‘canon lite’ approach to these movies. There’s recurring elements and a few characters, but the films aren’t defined by them. I hope that Adam Wingard is able to keep that going with Godzilla vs. Kong, too. Loose threads for nerds like me is a great way to actually make it fun to follow along with timelines on weird wikia sites and theorize. Like I’m discovering that aspect of the franchise rather than it taking up time in the movies themselves. 

Like you said, with King of the Monsters, you don’t actually need to have seen the other two movies to follow the story. Rewatching this again, I really appreciate the rush of the movie. They’re introducing a ton of monsters, the few main ones get amazing introductions, and just throwing in a ton of random science-fiction technology where they need to, which also feels like a huge part of the older films in the franchise. I sort of get why some people don’t like it, but for me, it is exactly the kind of spectacle and loose mythology I want from a Godzilla movie. There’s so much of comic book panels in this movie, bright colors and pulling back on moments to try to give a sense of scale, where the models of the monsters are so far from the ‘camera’ that they become silhouettes. It’s designed to be basked in, mostly concerned with how the image makes you feel, that is to say awesome. 

Do you think that GvK is going to capture that ‘painted on a side of a van’ feel of KOTM, or go somewhere else? 

Garrett: Based solely on the initial trailer and my (slightly obsessive) fandom of Adam Wingard, I assume we’re going to get something fairly different from King of the Monsters, though I expect it to be built on the foundations of the prior films a bit more than they themselves were. It seems like we’re getting a brighter movie here, with poppier colors and a clearer view of our BIG BOYS scrapping and fighting. Where King of the Monsters leans heavily into the grandeur of these creatures and creating frames to awe, it seems like Wingard is going to get a little more up-close and personal with the Titans. I suspect those that complain about these movies focusing on the humans too much are going to be pleased in this regard - I think we’re gonna find out that the main characters of this movie are Godzilla and Kong themselves.

This has me pretty excited, as it means these are continuing to follow the general trajectory of the original Toho films, which is to say they become more and more focused on the monsters themselves as they go. And while I think there are quite a few examples of this actually being a mistake (classic case of audiences not knowing what they want - a good human story really does help these movies) I’m confident that Wingard’s unique sensibilities as a filmmaker will prevent this from becoming the kind of mess that Godzilla: Final Wars turned out to be (a movie which has plenty of fans, by the way). 

There’s also part of me that suspects this is going to be much weirder than general audiences may be expecting. Wingard is a grand weirdo, and the Godzilla franchise gets absolutely bonkers sometimes, and I suspect what attracts him to this stuff are the weirder elements. For instance, in the original Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla, Godzilla had long been established as a “good” kaiju, similar to his appearances in the MonsterVerse so far. However, this movie opens with him once again attacking Japan as a villainous monster. It is later revealed that this evil Godzilla is actually Mechagodzilla, when the *real* Godzilla attacks him and pulls off his skin to reveal Mechagodzilla beneath. It is genuinely possible that Wingard follows this trajectory with his movie and gives us a Buffalo Bill-esque MechaG that is wearing a Godzilla skin suit. CAN YOU EVEN IMAGINE!? 

I, for one, am ready for the American Godzilla to get as weird and wacky as the original. And with Hollow Earth conspiracies tying this whole universe together, I think you can put a little money down that this movie will get even stranger than American audiences may be expecting.

Check back tomorrow for Garrett’s review of Godzilla vs Kong!