military and a script that favors earnest, hokey speeches peppered with tongue-in-cheek one-liners. KotM isn’t as remotely insipid as those films, but it shares some of their more conspicuous traits: a glossy, faintly laughable futurism a disconcerting hard-on for the U.S. The screenplay from Dougherty and Zach Shields – with an additional story credit to Max Borenstein – is most preoccupied with creating a globe-hopping action epic in the spirit of cheesy 1990s sci-fi blockbusters like Stargate (1994), Independence Day (1996), and Armageddon (1998). The most immediately aggravating thing about the 2014’s film’s direct sequel, Godzilla: King of the Monsters, is its tepid interest in revisiting that novel mood of apocalyptic terror. Much like Shin Godzilla, the 2014 American feature is the uncommon disaster flick in which toppling skyscrapers, normally a source of cheap Hollywood spectacle, evoke a fitting sensation of horror and powerlessness. Edwards’ Godzilla has its glaring flaws – a dishwater-dull “hero,” overly dark visuals, and the elimination of its best performers before the second act – but it also has awe-inspiring and frankly terrifying monster action, superbly conveying the sense that humanity is simply beneath the notice of the planet's battling behemoths. Although there is no narrative connection between those films and Edwards’, the 2014 feature captures the same feeling of Lovecraftian cosmic horror, an uncommon tone for the franchise that nonetheless seems like a natural fit. (The ‘Zilla of TriStar’s notorious 1998 Hollywood film even became a target of outright mockery in the Toho features of the early 2000s.) It’s accordingly surprising that director Gareth Edwards’ remake/reboot Godzilla (2014) has ended up feeling so consistent with the Reiwa-period Japanese features that immediately followed it. The handful of American Godzilla films have always been confined to a sort of parallel, semi-embarrassing sideshow, their relationship to the Toho films primarily one of licensing. That trio of features blends Godzilla tropes with the conventions of futurist anime to create a post-apocalyptic sci-fi saga, one in which the titular leviathan and his kaiju nemeses are reimagined in a darker, more desolate context. (Bizarrely yet compellingly, Anno and co-director Shinji Higuchi also turn the film into a bureaucratic satire-procedural about collective problem-solving.) Toho doubled down on this bleak tone in the Godzilla trilogy it subsequently produced with animation studio Polygon Pictures, films subtitled Planet of the Monsters (2017), City on the Edge of Battle (2018), and The Planet Eater (2018). The tonal change is evident straightaway in 2016’s Shin Godzilla, a “hard reboot” that writer/co-director Hideaki Anno drenches in the paralyzing horror of a massive natural or human-made disaster. This shift was purportedly inspired in part by the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and resulting Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. The series is as blatantly apocalyptic as it’s been since Honda’s original, or at least since the grim anti-nuclear jeremiad The Return of Godzilla (1985). (The “Reiwa period,” per the Japanese imperial parlance used to categorize the Toho features). That said, the Godzilla franchise is currently in the depths of a profoundly pessimistic era, thematically speaking. Megalon, 1973) to exhausting sci-fi lunacy ( Godzilla: Final Wars, 2004). Hedorah, 1971) to kiddie-flick silliness ( Godzilla vs. The 32 official Godzilla films produced by Japanese studio Toho run the gamut, from the overt atomic terror of Ishirō Honda’s groundbreaking original (1954) to psychedelic eco-parable ( Godzilla vs. While the Godzilla novice might be tempted to regard the Japanese kaiju film (and its international cousins) as a monolithic and homogeneous subgenre, the reality is much more complex and, well, pretty damn weird. Godzilla began his cinematic life as a not-so-subtle metaphor for nuclear weapons, but the pop-cultural endurance of this colossal, city-leveling radioactive reptile – arguably the great post-World War II movie monster – is attributable in part to his flexibility.
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