Gareth Edwards’s 2014 film Godzilla—the second Hollywood reboot of the iconic monster movie series birthed in Japan sixty years earlier—is noteworthy for reasons not especially related to quality. Among fans of the titular character, it’s celebrated for healing old wounds: presenting Godzilla as an impervious force of nature rather than—as in the earlier 1998 American Godzilla—a skittish creature vulnerable to man’s weaponry. It’s also known for kickstarting the MonsterVerse, a mostly lousy collection of blockbusters whose greatest significance is the happenstantial fact that it’s new. Compared to its successors, Edwards’s picture is a towering achievement—vastly more coherent and cinematic than junk like 2019’s Godzilla: King of the Monsters and 2024’s Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire—but is nonetheless hampered by atrocious dialogue (“Something started talking! And I mean talking!”) and the death of its most interesting human character thirty minutes in. Add to that actors failing to transcend their parts, and what one’s left with is a film of resolutely middling quality. Perhaps it’s fitting, then, that the picture’s most discussion-worthy aspect—its attempt to be “about something”¹—is also a shortcoming.

If there is merit to Edwards’s promoted affinity for Godzilla, it’s that he approached his job knowing the franchise’s history of incorporating real-world topics (nuclear warfare, pollution) into entertainment. “[I]n a weird way,” the director has explained, “what you’re trying to do subconsciously is remind the audience that as absurd as everything happening is, this stuff does happen. It’s a fantasy but I think all good fantasy has something truthful or real about it, at least below the surface.”² His film appropriately juggles themes traditional to the series alongside images and implications timely for a 2014 American audience. And while most of these aren’t handled in a particularly engaging way, their inclusion—and what makes them work or not work—merits discussion.

Ishiro Honda’s original 1954 Godzilla was made shortly after World War II and the firebombings and atomic devastation Japan suffered pre-surrender. Honda envisioned the monster as a stand-in for wartime destruction: Godzilla’s rampages leave smoldering rubble and human suffering (e.g., children poisoned by radiation) that would’ve registered with Japanese moviegoers. Edwards’s stated intent to continue Honda’s message³ shows in the 2014 movie: with creatures awakened by nuclear submarines patrolling the ocean depths and mining expeditions drilling for uranium. Godzilla’s adversaries, the Mutos, cause global chaos in their hunt for atomic energy, and the climax involves the military baiting the monsters with a nuclear warhead and then scrambling to disarm it when it’s dragged into downtown San Francisco. Although Edwards pays tribute to calamities of the twenty-first century (to be discussed later), ultimately the film’s about the opening of Pandora’s Box: what happens when man abuses or seeks atomic power.

Alas, Godzilla (2014) falls short on this front as well. The San Francisco climax concludes with the Mutos’ defeat and the warhead being loaded onto a boat and detonating far away enough to spare the city additional damage. This wasn’t entirely novel for the franchise. Koji Hashimoto’s The Return of Godzilla (1984) featured a similar sequence wherein a nuclear warhead, accidentally launched toward Tokyo, is intercepted and exploded above the skyline, causing zero damage to the infrastructure. Both films focus on close calls and races to save a major metropolitan area; and in both cases, the heroes are successful; but there is a crucial difference in what happens next. In Hashimoto’s film, the explosion knocks out the power and revives a comatose Godzilla, who proceeds to burn down the Shinjuku District. Although the bomb ultimately doesn’t hit Tokyo, the city still becomes a fiery holocaust as a result of it. By contrast, the explosion in Edwards’s film yields nothing: the following morning, unprotected rescue workers are seen clambering over debris that should have been showered with radiation (and which would’ve exemplified the dangers of atomic weaponry). In The Return of Godzilla, consequences follow even the accidental use of superweapons. In the 2014 Godzilla, a several-megaton bomb creates, as genre historian Steve Ryfle has written, “harmless fireworks.”⁴

The film likewise dances around one of its more provocative concepts: the Pacific H-bomb tests of the ‘50s constituted not U.S. involvement in the international arms race but an attempt to destroy Godzilla. Ryfle has cogently criticized this distortion of history “to avoid confronting the uncomfortable facts of American culpability in the monster’s origin,”⁵ though the major fault lies in narrative irrelevance. We’re told Godzilla was previously awakened by a nuclear submarine, so what’s the purpose of the attacks? What impact did these repeated bombings have on the Pacific islands, on the ecosystem—on the creature targeted? (Was Godzilla mutated by the radiation?) The script never addresses these questions or builds satisfying plot lines, and so what could’ve been another layer of cautionary storytelling devolves into a prologue and meaningless dialogue. Godzilla is an overly cautious film, handling the antinuclear theme with kid gloves.

In fairness to the staff, they worked from a tampered script. At the time of the film’s release, U.S. News reported that the U.S. Navy had “cooperated with [the] filmmakers [, providing] access to aircraft carriers and real soldiers and sailors who played extras in the film.” Not reported in that piece was the fact that said cooperation had nearly dissolved in pre-production—due to military qualms with the script. In 2023, the Okinawa Times shared Department of Defense memos obtained from the Library of the Marine Corps, Quantico, Virginia State. Documented within was the U.S. military’s threat to renege—to withdraw access to equipment and personnel—unless changes were made. Chief among their reservations was how the screenplay referenced America’s still-controversial bombings of Japan. In an earlier draft, a Japanese scientist played by Ken Watanabe “gave a speech lasting around one minute. It described how his father had been injured in the [bombing of Hiroshima] and had regained consciousness among bodies burning in a schoolyard. Following the DoD complaint, dated February 2013, the monolog was removed and the final movie only contains a brief scene in which Watanabe shows a U.S. Navy commander his father’s watch stopped at 8:15, the time of the explosion.” One of the aforementioned memos printed the DoD’s objection as follows: “If this is an apology or questioning of the decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that will be a showstopper for us.”⁶ No information appears to exist as to whether the Pentagon influenced Godzilla’s ending, though it’s possible any denouement wherein the military fails to save the city from the bomb—and the consequences of the bomb—wouldn’t have been accepted.

Dilution of nuclear dialogue wasn’t the only requested change. In early drafts, Godzilla’s protagonist—a married Navy lieutenant—was deemed not likable enough. By contrast, his final screen version is a poster boy ideal: a muscle-bound soldier who’s all smiles with his family (there’s a reunion scene early on that’d validate criticism of Spielberg’s sentimentality were it directed by him) and who throws himself into one perilous situation after another. Fellow servicemen accommodate the hero, allowing him to join missions of which he isn’t a part, the collective cooperating with mutual respect. U.S. Navy Captain Russ Coons told the press: “Our hope is—the demographics for this audience are roughly 14-to 18-year-old teenagers who are watching movies—they are going to take their family to this film and they’re going to walk out of the theater and say: ‘You know, I never knew the Navy was such a sophisticated, professional organization; […] I never knew that, and maybe it’s something I want to do with my life.’”⁷

Godzilla (2014) is not unique to Hollywood-U.S. military collaborations; historians such as Lawrence H. Suid and Matthew Alford have extensively documented the Pentagon’s history of cooperating with studios in exchange for positive portrayal of the Armed Forces and American military operations both past and present. (Ridley Scott’s 2001 Black Hawk Down underwent numerous script revisions, and the DoD refused to assist Terrence Malick’s 1998 The Thin Red Line due to an unflattering depiction of soldiers.)⁸ Edwards’s film likewise doesn’t stand out in the greater Godzilla franchise simply for having a military focus: three Japanese features directed by Masaaki Tezuka—2000’s Godzilla vs. Megaguirus, 2002’s Godzilla Against MechaGodzilla, and 2003’s Godzilla: Tokyo S.O.S.—followed soldier protagonists. What ultimately distinguishes this blockbuster is another example of its fumbled attempt at poignancy.

Godzilla is the series’s “answer” to the post-9/11 American zeitgeist. Released thirteen years after the fall of the Twin Towers, the film uses destruction scenarios intrinsic to monster movies to create imagery recalling what is often described as America’s most traumatizing day since Pearl Harbor. In one moment, a disabled fighter jet crashes into a skyscraper, gouging out part of the building’s infrastructure in a shower of fire and debris (which Edwards smartly photographs from the perspective of a civilian on the ground). In another, the wreckage of a downed airliner is found in rural America (à la United Airlines Flight 93). And in the denouement, firefighters—like their September 11 counterparts—search the rubble for survivors.

Even more so—and fittingly—Godzilla visually imitates the War on Terror that followed 9/11 and which was ongoing—and thus more relevant to moviegoers and filmmakers alike—in 2014. Contemporary releases such as Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker (2009) and Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper (2014) addressed the U.S.-Middle East conflict via stories about soldiers in combat and/or reintegrating into society. Edwards’s approach is different: using familiar images and the occasional suggestive line to transport the war to the United States. Recalling studying photographs of Iraq and Afghanistan with his crew, Edwards stated: “It’s so scarred in our minds that as we are creating the movie, we are getting all of those reference images and it’s nearly impossible not to be influenced by them.”⁹

Although not explicitly stated, Godzilla’s main character, a specialist in disarming explosives, is implied to have returned from fourteen months in the Middle East. (His father cynically comments that the “bomb business” must be good “these days.”) Our hero encounters troops marching through demolished, dusty areas resembling wartorn cities. And in one of the film’s many striking shots, Army vehicles race across a barren desert—set in Nevada but recalling the Middle East. Edwards shoots these scenes with care, though he shies from confronting the war and any of its correlating issues, never addressing, for instance, foreign policy, the military-industrial complex, American society’s divisive attitude toward the war, or PTSD. (To be fair, any of the above surely would’ve cost the film support from a military that, as established before, squirms at criticism even of its past.) What’s more, the decision to connect the enemy monsters to nuclear energy deprives the film of a stand-in for what U.S. soldiers have recently fought against and what U.S. civilians after 9/11 feared. (By contrast, Steven Spielberg’s 2005 War of the Worlds captured civilian paranoia in a scene where children find themselves in the midst of an alien attack and ask, “It is terrorists?”)

On occasion, Edwards squeezes in something thoughtful. The protagonist’s boy asks his father if he’ll still be home in the morning; when reunited after the finale, the latter appears thoroughly exhausted—perhaps the most resonant moment of someone having endured a harrowing experience. But these are minor moments too few in number. Godzilla replicates wartime images without being about the war itself, surrendering commentary in favor of a presentation that no doubt pleased its military advisers. Eastwood’s American Sniper used a controversial person to address the brutality and dehumanization of war—the PTSD inflicted on soldiers, the guilt associated with killing, the effect changed personalities have on soldiers’ loved ones. Godzilla opts for simple heroics. Troops are shown as fearless, efficient, and perpetually coordinated, operating with precision even when their superiors thrust them into ill-advised strategies. When, in the climax, a group of detonation specialists fails to deactivate the warhead, they promptly transport it to a boat, everyone carrying out their part without hindrance or disagreement. And when they perish, it’s in the effort to fulfill their task. “[W]e’re used to seeing Godzilla movies where the military fails because they’re stupid,” genre historian David Kalat told this author in a 2016 interview, “but seeing them fail but be heroic while failing is new.”¹⁰

There are other timely images. Godzilla’s mid-movie arrival in Hawaii triggers a tidal wave allegedly patterned after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami; following that are shots of FEMA tents and workers; a Muto attacking a Japanese power plant from underground recalls the Fukushima triple disaster of 2011. (Edwards claimed the latter tragedy occurred “[a]s we were writing the film […] and we had to make the decision: Do we stay away from that or do we acknowledge that you’ve opened this Pandora’s box of nuclear power, and when it goes wrong, it really does go wrong?”)¹¹ In line with the mimicry of 9/11 and the War on Terror, Godzilla doesn’t comment on these catastrophes; it doesn’t respond as Honda’s original responded to nuclear proliferation. The visuals, modeled as they are on real-life events, lack the substance needed to dramatically register, and the film at best pays lip service to a few ideas. Still, the attempt to say something is admirable; and the time capsule imagery distinguishes the 2014 Godzilla from other entries in its franchise.

Bibliography:

1. “‘Godzilla’ director Gareth Edwards explains why monsters still matter.” YouTube 13 March 2014
2. Bradshaw, Lauren. “Interview: Gareth Edwards for Godzilla.” Fangirlfreakout 15 May 2014
3. Newitz, Annalee. “Godzilla director Gareth Edwards explains the symbolism of kaiju.” io9 – Gizmodo 25 July 2014
4. Ryfle, Steve. “Whitewashing Godzilla.” In These Times 21 May 2014
5. Ibid
6. Mitchell, Jon. “Following Pentagon complaint, description of Hiroshima bombing cut from Hollywood’s Godzilla reboot.” Okinawa Times 8 February 2023
7. Schogol, Jeff. “Authentic Navy fleet dukes it out with Godzilla.” WTSP 1 May 2014
8. Alford, Matthew. Reel Power: Hollywood Cinema and American Supremacy. London: Pluto Press, 2010, pp. 43-50
9. Suebsaeng, Asawin. “How the Iraq War Influenced the ‘Godzilla’ Reboot.” Mother Jones 16 May 2014
10. Galvan, Patrick. “Interview: David Kalat (2016).” Toho Kingdom 7 August 2016
11. Interview: Gareth Edwards for Godzilla.