In America, Godzilla is a superhero — in Japan, he’s still a monster

The licensing agreement that gave both Toho and Legendary Entertainment the rights to make Godzilla movies — so long as they aren’t in theaters at the same time — has produced wildly different approaches to the world’s most famous kaiju. In particular, America and Japan seem to have radically different ideas about who Godzilla is and what he symbolizes, at least in the modern era.

Godzilla has evolved considerably from his 1954 Japanese debut to the latest franchise installment, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire. And in his most recent incarnations, clear national lines have been drawn between Toho’s version and Legendary’s. America’s modern Godzilla franchise, the MonsterVerse, follows the lore and spectacle-heavy template of the Marvel Cinematic Universe to make Godzilla a heroic protector of humanity. Japan, meanwhile, has reached back to the character’s roots to tell deeply introspective and political stories about the country’s role in the world. Both approaches have produced hits and misses. But is either one the “right” version of Godzilla?

Godzilla smash

In the 1960s, Japanese Godzilla movies often portrayed Godzilla (and associated kaiju, like Mothra) as protectors of humanity, while the villains were anyone who would exploit them. The MonsterVerse takes up those early themes again, but reframes them through the lens of the modern superhero blockbuster. The Hulk hasn’t had a stand-alone movie since 2008, but Hollywood’s latest run of Godzilla operates under many of the same rules as Hulk stories. Godzilla is also a big, green, nearly unstoppable, nuclear-powered monster-slash-misunderstood hero, and the real villains of his films are people who would stand in his way or try to use his powers for their own profit.

Without Bruce Banner to ground these stories with a human voice, the MonsterVerse movies and the live-action Apple TV show Monarch: Legacy of Monsters spend more time on Monarch, the series’ answer to Marvel’s SHIELD. Both Monarch and Godzilla: King of the Monsters replicate the Hulk’s regular conflicts with the U.S. military, as Monarch’s scientific-minded members look for ways to help Godzilla and push back against the inevitably counterproductive attempts to kill him.

The most consistent human hero in the films so far is leading Monarch scientist Dr. Ishirō Serizawa (Ken Watanabe), who established the series’ “Let them fight” ethos. Eventually, he sacrifices himself to save Godzilla from the U.S. military’s Oxygen Destroyer, in a perverse inversion of Dr. Daisuke Serizawa (Akihiko Hirata) giving his life to stop Godzilla with that very same weapon in the original 1954 film.

The MonsterVerse also has strong parallels to the DC Extended Universe films, which it improves on by embracing the relative strengths of the kaiju genre. Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel drew criticism for the cavalier way Superman’s fight against General Zod wreaked havoc on Metropolis, but it’s expected that Godzilla will leave massive destruction in his wake and still walk back into the ocean as a savior.

Similarly, the titular fight in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is silly and pointless for heroes who could have saved a lot of time by just sitting down and talking about their families. It’s much more reasonable for two giant monsters obsessed with establishing their dominance over other giant monsters to slug it out in Godzilla vs. Kong before coming to an accord and setting aside their differences to team up in the upcoming Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire.

Godzilla is on Team America

Image: HBO Max/Everett Collection

Godzilla was first imagined as an avatar of American might. In 1954’s Godzilla, he’s a symbol: a horrific monster awakened by Japan’s military ambition during World War II. He unleashes devastation that humanity has never seen before, and never wants to witness again.

The American movies see him differently. While the U.S. military is regularly portrayed in a negative light in the MonsterVerse films, Godzilla himself continues to fit the model of an American action-movie hero, as poetically explained in the climactic monologue of 2004’s Team America: World Police: “We’re dicks! We’re reckless, arrogant, stupid dicks! […] Pussies don’t like dicks because pussies get fucked by dicks. But dicks also fuck assholes. Assholes who just want to shit on everything. Pussies may think they can deal with assholes their way, but the only thing that can fuck an asshole is a dick, with some balls.”

Godzilla is a giant dick who smashes cities even when he’s heroically defending them from more destructive forces. But King Ghidorah and many of the other Titans of the MonsterVerse are assholes that can’t be defeated in any other way. Just as there is no heroic way to seek power in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the MonsterVerse believes in Godzilla’s inherent right to his might, and its movies condemn anyone who challenges it, including Apex Cybernetics, which hubristically creates Mechagodzilla to try to replace him, and the eco-terrorists who try to manipulate the Titans for their own goals.

The people who understand this truth in the MonsterVerse are most likely to be Japanese, like Serizawa and Monarch co-founder Keiko (Mari Yamamoto), who conspired to keep the Titans secret, hoping to keep the U.S. military from destroying them. The conceit that Japanese scientists are always the wisest curators of Godzilla and his ilk seems to be Hollywood’s way of acknowledging what it owes to the kaiju’s creators. But the respect those characters show for the Godzilla stands in direct conflict with the Godzilla stories Japan has been bringing to theaters since the MonsterVerse launched.

Rewriting Godzilla’s origins

Image: Toho Company/Everett Collection

2016’s Shin Godzilla and 2023’s Godzilla Minus One have much less in common with the playful era of Godzilla filmmaking Hollywood is replicating. These movies more closely resemble the monster’s dark origins. Inspired by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that caused a nuclear accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, Shin Godzilla follows the beats of a disaster movie while brutally satirizing the ineffectiveness of Japanese government bureaucracy. Godzilla largely operates in the background for much of the movie, a threat that starts off slow and awkward. When he first makes landfall, he looks like a lungfish crossed with a turkey. But he still causes immense damage, as Japan is paralyzed by endless meetings and overly cautious scientists and politicians.

Godzilla continues to evolve throughout the film, and Shin Godzilla makes it clear that Japan must evolve with him. The trigger-happy American military wants to nuke Tokyo to stop Godzilla, and the country’s prime minister is so cowed, he agrees to let them do it. The film is deeply nationalistic, explicitly arguing that it’s time for an end to the post-World War II era that established Japan as a military vassal state of the United States.

While Americans celebrate their victory in World War II with Captain America, Godzilla is a symbol of the shame and horror of Japan’s defeat. Characters in Shin Godzilla are desperate to avoid seeing another Japanese city destroyed in a mushroom cloud, or losing more lives to nuclear fallout. Their victory comes not from making an accord with Godzilla or America, but through their own hard work and scientific ingenuity, paired with a willingness to expand their presence on the world stage through an alliance with France.

The nationalist themes are even stronger in Godzilla Minus One, which effectively rewrites the original film and its commitment to pacifism and sacrifice to make an argument for redemption and responsible remilitarization. Like in Shin Godzilla, the monster represents an existential threat that tests Japan. But rather than being defeated by ambitious young people willing to pull all-nighters, this version is stopped by a former kamikaze pilot and other World War II veterans, while America is entirely paralyzed by unrelated geopolitical conflicts.

That framing makes sense, given that America has become increasingly isolationist, even as China ramps up its aggression in the region. Japan has pledged to double its defense spending by 2028 to reduce its reliance on America, and both Shin Godzilla and Godzilla Minus One offer an idea of how that should be done. Shin Godzilla argues that nuclear weapons should remain a deterrent of last resort, while Godzilla Minus One argues that the military should be volunteers who are never asked to throw away their lives meaninglessly.

In both movies, the armed forces are there to protect regular people so they don’t have to experience the traumatic horrors of war. One of the highest callings, these films suggest, is to rebuild Japan and protect the progress it’s made over the intervening decades. That message works equally well in the present-day setting of Shin Godzilla and the immediate postwar setting of Godzilla Minus One.

Let them fight

Image: Everett Collection

The MonsterVerse and the recent Toho Godzilla films have had solid success in their home countries, so both series are likely to continue. As Marvel and DC have dealt with bad-superhero-movie fatigue shrinking their audiences, Hollywood has turned to a new rich trove of colorful characters to duke it out with the fate of the world on the line.

America’s Godzilla movies tend to end in solemn triumph, with Godzilla having fought off the latest challenge, and the promise that he’ll be around in the future to take on the next one. Shin Godzilla and Godzilla Minus One end more ambiguously, with the promise of future threats and a pledge for Japan to remain vigilant and unified against them. Like Godzilla himself, both franchises have mutated and evolved into forms suited for the times and places they occupy. It’s fascinating to sit back and watch them fight, with the films expressing the hopes and anxieties of two different nations in an increasingly chaotic world.