[Editorial] The Humans Don’t Matter.
My title is a bit click-bait-y. The human characters ARE essential in Kaiju movies. It should read “...as much as the monsters.” But the fact remains that humans are not the reason we watch these movies. We know why we’re here—it’s literally in the title.
Despite that, there is a common prejudiced notion towards Kaiju movies: the human characters are stupid. Or obvious. Or overacting. This misses the point and ties into a common misconception about monster movies in general. Humans in these movies do not function the way protagonists would in more typical narratives.
And they were never meant to.
The humans are merely there to give these movies scale. If we could tell the stories without them, we probably would. Humans at best are supporting characters. The reactors. The ones that make us believe in the heavies of the story. All we need from these characters is to believe their awe and their fear. Everything should be in service to making our Kaiju foreboding and powerful.
Look at the most important monster movie to American audiences: JURASSIC PARK (1993). Spielberg’s homage to KING KONG emphasized stronger character arcs than the Godzilla movies. Yet for the classic status that JURASSIC PARK acquired over the last 28 years, what do we remember most from this movie? The dinosaurs and Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum).
This is a key to what type of characters work in a Kaiju movie.
Ian Malcolm has no arc in JURASSIC PARK. He has no real purpose in the movie except to communicate one key idea (“Dinosaur cloning is bad!”) and to be colorful. VERY COLORFUL. He’s such a vibrant and funny personality that Spielberg kept him from dying (as he did in the book). Malcolm eventually became the protagonist of Michael Crichton’s 1995 sequel book, The Lost World, successfully rewriting the continuity of the novel’s universe. However, notice that the moment Ian Malcolm became the protagonist of the narrative, he lost all of his juice as an engaging character. Sure, he still had the best jokes but he became IMPORTANT. He had to grow and have an arc and we don’t really care about that. We’re here for monsters.
The new Toho/Warner Brothers/Legendary MonsterVerse franchise has been a fascinating experiment for a Hollywood Studio. Starting with GODZILLA (2014) leading up to this year’s GODZILLA VS. KONG, they have honed in on how to make a proper Kaiju movie with big money budget and talent.
If you want to look at American genres that fit squarely with Kaiju movies, they are a hybrid of slasher and disaster movies. These films present a universe where the world is far bigger than our leads and their petty problems. The coming disaster/monster is unstoppable. The best that our characters can do is survive. And if they can’t succeed at that, they can make heroic sacrifices or die in a truly spectacular fashion.
The best part of 2014’s GODZILLA is Bryan Cranston. He manages a brilliant balance of humanistic and bombastic. He owns the first 10 minutes of the movie with a fantastic tragic farewell to his wife (played equally as well by Juliette Binoette). In less than 10 minutes of screen time, we get a full relationship with true heartbreaking pathos. Afterwards, Cranston gives several portentous speeches that have a similar jazzy, neurotic energy to Richard Dreyfuss in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (1977). These rants deliver the perfect dread and foreboding for the looming Kaiju action: “It's gonna send us back to the Stone Age! You have no idea what's coming!”
Cranston’s the most dynamic character and the movie immediately misses him the moment he leaves the story. This type of showboat acting casts a shadow over the naturalistic acting of Elizabeth Olsen and Aaron Taylor-Johnson through the rest of the film. They’re perfectly solid but they have no strong footing emotionally in this narrative. Thankfully, Toho and Legendary paid attention and they didn't make this mistake again.
Ironically, 2017’s KONG: SKULL ISLAND makes the exact opposite mistake. It gives us too many big characters to follow. It’s an amazing cast (Samuel L. Jackson, Tom Hiddleston, Brie Larson, John Goodman, Corey Hawkins, Toby Kebbell, John Ortiz, and on and on). Seriously, what a cast. Yet while there are some fun nasty kills to be had (I’m amazed they got away with the bamboo spider scene in a PG-13 movie) there’s only one inarguable engaging character in the movie: John C. Reilly.
He plays a WW2 fighter pilot who has been marooned on Skull Island for close to three decades. He serves as the movie’s exposition machine while also operating as its key source of humor (“You're a good group of boys to die with, I'll tell you that much! (laughs) You shouldn't have come here!”). Like Cranston before him, Reilly engages while also building up respect for Kong’s fury and foreboding for this movie’s new Kaiju (the Skullcrawlers). Even while doing all that heavy lifting, Reilly also effectively fleshes out the universe through his asides.
His relationship with an off-camera Japanese pilot carries more weight than any the rest of a very packed cast. I get emotional at the very end when Reilly returns home and meets his son for the first time. He drinks a beer while watching a baseball game and I get a little teary eyed every time I’ve seen it. All this and his entire emotional arc takes up a little more than five minutes of screen time.
The actors that tend to do best in these movies are ones who know how to underplay in relation to larger stars. In this case literally. John Goodman and Shea Whigham know how to serve a small moment well. Whigham in particular gets a brilliant moment of deadpan humor:
Miles (Jason Mitchell): We just got taken down by a monkey the size of a building!
Cole (Shea Whigham): Yeah. That was an unconventional encounter.
Miles: Is that really all your brain telling itself right now?!
Cole: There’s no tactical precedence. We did the best we could in the situation.
One of the smartest moves the MonsterVerse movies did was populate the ensemble casts of all of their movies with experienced character actors. These characters need to be understandable within 30 seconds of introducing them, so the possible approaches are that you either compliment the universe or go big.
And when I say Big, I mean BIG because they are competing with skyscraper size representations of mother nature. Overkill is underrated here. And if you think I’m exaggerating, the hero of the original GODZILLA (1954) is a scientist who has an eyepatch that valiantly sacrifices his life by setting off an oxygen bomb.
With the last two MonsterVerse movies (GODZILLA VS. KONG and 2019’s GODZILLA: KING OF THE MONSTERS), I think they’ve finally perfected that tone.
Everybody important has a soap opera-esque backstory. You can do a drinking game out of the number of characters who have lost someone close to them. Or is a quirky scientist. Often both.
By this point, our Kaiju heroes have been introduced. So the stories get into the action. We still have a murderer’s row of character actors (there isn’t a single bad actor in a major role of this franchise) but it streamlines the emotional narrative down to a very simple debate. In KING OF THE MONSTERS, it’s a family debate about whether Godzilla should be destroyed or if the Titans should be unleashed. In GODZILLA VS. KONG, there are parallel plots; one group is trying to help Kong find the Hollow Earth and another group is trying to discover why Godzilla is attacking humanity. The humans are now clearly organized around specific ideas that reinforce the strength and powers of these Kaiju.
In all of these movies, Godzilla is an unstoppable, unreadable monolith. Only now, these witnesses clearly inform us on why Godzilla is doing what he’s doing or illustrate his needs. Their effectiveness in the story depends on an inverse Kaiju Bechdel test: In every scene, are they talking about the Kaiju of the movie or the thematic metaphor of the Kaiju in this narrative? If they are, the story is working.
These characters’ payoffs are focused on helping Godzilla (or Kong in GODZILLA VS. KONG) in a desperate moment of need. These monsters must be the one to solve the stories’ conflicts but us humans are right there to give them that final push. Give them that extra advantage to stop the evil Kaiju of the present story.
No moment is more powerful at this than the final pay off of Ken Watanabe’s character in GODZILLA: KING OF THE MONSTERS. Not trying to spoil the moment but their final scene together is a brilliant synergy of story points, reclaiming the metaphor of Godzilla as Atomic Bomb and our Gaia-eqsue savior in one amazing moment. It brings the weight of the original 1954 movie back into the mythos. All while giving us a character payoff of incredible strength.
That’s what matters about Humans. We make our Kaiju look good.
Godzilla will always be bigger than any one of us and we owe him awe.
Watanabe’s character puts it quite succinctly earlier in the movie when a Senator asks, “So you’d want to make Godzilla our pet?”
He replies simply, “No. We will be his.”
It’s Godzilla’s world—we’re just living in it.
