Hello and welcome to the Casual Chat!

Today I wanted to deviate from talking about card games and talk about something else that I really enjoy, and that is giant monsters, often referred to as kaiju.

I have been a fan of giant monsters ever since I was a kid, and there are a multitude of reasons for that but that’s a blog for another day.

What I wanted to do for this was to do a very brief and abridged history of kaiju in film, what they meant for their times, how different cultures use giant monsters, and what they have become in the modern landscape.

In The Beginning…

If you realistically want to look at where giant monsters (which I will use to kaiju as a synonym) came from, then we need to look at some of the earliest mythologies and religions.

Nearly every mythology has some form of giant monster, whether that be the monstrous Typhon in Greek mythology, the Cherufe from the Mapuche people of Chile, the Rainbow Serpent from Aboriginal Australian culture, or dragons from almost every culture on the planet.

When looking at these creatures, we need to also look at the context in which they were made. Many times they were made as an obstacle for a hero to overcome.

Other times they are natural beings that are made to explain why a natural event occurred, and in some other cases they are whole deities of a religious pantheon.

Giant monsters have been ingrained in human culture that it would make sense that when movies started to become more and more common, giant monsters would make their appearance.

On the Silver Screen

Looking through the origins of giant monster movies, the first one that has aspects of the genre is a 1921 animated film called The Pet, which involves a couple getting an animal that eats things and grows to gargantuan size.

A few years later we would get The Lost World in 1925, a stop motion adaptation of a book of the same name in which a brontosaurus was let loose in London. Willis H. O’Brien was the one who did a lot of pioneering of stop motion techniques in The Lost World, which would eventually lead to the gargantuan hit that was King Kong in 1933.

King Kong is probably the film that I would attribute being the first definitive giant monster movie, and would set foundation for the genre in the years to come.

However, the title of this blog uses the term kaiju, which is the Japanese term used for giant monster movies, when did they come into the picture?

From what I can find, the earliest actual Japanese kaiju film is a lost movie from 1934 called The Great Buddha Arrival, which was about a giant Buddha coming to Japan.

Only stills of the film exist, and there was a remake released in 2018, and is often attributed in being the inspiration to the tokusatsu genre.

Tokusatsu is a genre of Japanese media making heavy use of practical effects that can be attributed to franchises like Ultraman, Kamen Rider, Super Sentai (later seasons of which would be adapted to Power Rangers), and of course the biggest name in all of tokusatsu, Godzilla.

Tragedy Into Art

I could (and will another time) go on a massive dialogue about Godzilla because the Godzilla franchise is one of my favorite franchises, but I will keep things short and to the point.

Godzilla, coming out in 1954, was a massive shift in what the genre could be.

Coming out only nine years after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and only seven months after the Castle Bravo incident, Godzilla opens with a ship being destroyed by the titular creature, which is presumed to have woken up from nuclear weapon testing.

As the movie goes on, we see the horrors that come from the nuclear powered beast, from destroyed buildings, lingering radioactive spots, and of course a lot of dead people.

What makes Godzilla stand out from his earlier contemporaries was that the monster could not be killed by conventional weaponry. The military does what they can to kill Godzilla, but it does nothing.

If anything it makes things worse because it enables Godzilla to go on a further rampage.

The only way Godzilla is beaten is by a super weapon called the Oxygen Destroyer, of which the creator of the weapon Dr. Serizawa, does not want to use because he fears of letting the plans into the wrong hands.

He eventually agrees to use it, but he sacrifices himself to do so, after destroying his notes so no one else can reproduce the weapon.

The film as a whole is used as a way to show that humanity can create such powerful weapons, but the consequences of using those weapons could make an even worse threat.

The imagery in the film is powerful and melancholic, which does a lot to make it stand out, even within its own franchise.

Godzilla serves as a pretty solid timeline for what happens to kaiju movies going forward, so I will be referencing it quite often.

A Bit Silly

When looking at subsequent kaiju films, even Godzilla films, the tone of those films began in a somewhat similar vein to Godzilla.

Some of them had a serious message to convey or at the very least had a serious story to tell and were treated as such.

Then there was a sudden shift within the genre in the mid-60s, of which the tone of these films began to become more and more lighthearted.

Godzilla, who was a blatant allegory for the atomic bomb, became a savior and a protector of mankind, and did so with other kaiju.

It didn’t help that when the films came over to the United States, they were dubbed in various qualities. Sometimes the dubs were good and improved some confusing aspects, and sometimes the dubs were terrible and lazily done.

It also doesn’t help that the quality of some of the monster movies of the era was also not always the best.

Gamera, for as much of a kaiju icon it is, had a less than well received first outing and a lot of other kaiju films suffered a similar fate.

When looking at the 70s, things aren’t much better for a while.

While Japanese kaiju films dominated the 60s, the 70s saw the resurgence of other countries trying their hands at monster movies with mixed results. You had The Giant Spider Invasion, Night of the Lepus, and a remake of King Kong in 1976.

The tone of giant monster movies had shifted from a genre of film to be taken seriously to something you can’t take seriously.

Divided Focus

When we arrive to the 80s and 90s, there appears that a dichotomy of giant monster movies emerged.

You had giant monster movies with a much more serious tone return, such as The Return of Godzilla in 1984 which acted a reboot to the franchise, and giant monster movies that played into the goofier aspects of the genre like The Lock Ness Horror.

More and more movies started began to mix the different elements of giant monster movies, having some goofy aspects and some serious aspects.

Tremors is an example of this where looking as a whole there are a ton of serious moments in the film, but there are more comedic elements injected into the film to bring some form of levity. The comedic elements work well by the human cast, and that brings to light an important aspect of giant monster movies: the humans of the movies.

A lot of times when looking at giant monster movies, the human elements of the film can really make or break the film.

While the audience generally goes for the giant monsters, for budgetary and pacing reasons, giant monsters cannot be the main focus.

Instead, the major moments of the films belong to the giant monsters while the rest is filled with humans either reacting to the giant monsters, or finding ways to beat the giant monsters.

This is definitely one of the more difficult aspects of the genre, and we can see it very blatantly in the American version of Godzilla from 1998.

The dialogue is not good, the jokes fall flat, and more over a lot of the movie apes Jurassic Park. It is not a good movies by any stretch of the imagination, however I do have fond memories of this movies.

While it is not well made when compared to its counterpart, it is the film that got a young me interested in the Godzilla franchise.

The Modern Era

As we approach the current era of giant monster movies we have to look at Cloverfield.

This was a giant monster movie that broadened the scope of what a giant monster movie could do because it took two niche genres, the giant monster movie and found footage, and combined them into one.

It brought the human aspect into focus very literally making the movie from the point of view of someone filming a giant monster attack.

It’s visceral and feels somewhat realistic as to how people would react if a giant monster was attacking the city and what a regular citizen would experience.

Of course the modern era of giant monster movies isn’t bereft of pure fun and action, because we also have Pacific Rim, which is the most tokusatsu American film I have ever seen.

While Cloverfield was more grounded, Pacific Rim played into the spectacle of giant monsters and giant robots, and while it did have its more serious moments, it knew what it was going after, a fun action movie.

We also have the divide of the Godzilla franchise. While some Japanese Godzilla movies were made after the mess that was Godzilla (1998), the franchise had laid dormant for a while.

That is until we got Godzilla (2014), another attempt at an American Godzilla movie from Legendary Pictures that the franchise gained new life again.

We then got Shin Godzilla in 2017 and that was another take on a serious Godzilla movie that was met with critical acclaim.

From then on we got more from Legendary Pictures, which focused on the sort of protector of the planet aspect of Godzilla, while many of the subsequent Japanese Godzilla films went towards Godzilla as a monster again.

This has led to what is my favorite Godzilla movie, and what I believe to be the pinnacle of the genre in Godzilla Minus One.

I feel like I could write a whole thesis on why the movie is so great, but it takes the lessons from the history of the genre and adapts the story in a way that makes Godzilla mean something that it didn’t mean before and made some of the most interesting human characters in a Godzilla movie.

A topic for another day.

Where to Next?

Kaiju films have gone through a wild trajectory as it has existed.

From movies that had an inherent message, to goofy schlock, to a mix of both, giant monster movies have dramatically changed.

Where will the genre go next?

I think after the release of Godzilla Minus One that more “serious” giant monster movies will come, but to mixed results.

There will be some people who can make it work and some who are going to try and cash in on the good faith that Godzilla Minus One had.

The genre has been quiet for years, with movies featuring giant monsters, but rarely making them the primary focus of the film.

I would like to see more kaiju movies being made, but they need to be made earnestly. Sure some will be trying to mirror the success of Godzilla Minus One, but they don’t need to.

We could use more high octane, pure fun giant monster movies that don’t feature Godzilla, and this is coming from a fan of the franchise.

Make new monsters, make them mean something or have some fun with them, or do a mixture of both. There is room for goofiness in giant monster movies as there is for seriousness in the genre.

Thank you for reading, see you next time!

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual