Photo-Illustration: Vulture
This article originally ran on November 30, 2023, and is being republished now that Godzilla Minus One has arrived on Netflix.
The first 15 Godzilla movies, known as the Showa Era (and collected in a swanky Criterion Collection set a few years back), were a natural, if increasingly goofy, evolution of the King of the Monsters. What began as a haunting metaphor for the horrors of the atomic bomb became, thanks to various creative whims and desires of the moviegoing public, a much more kiddie-oriented series. This first stage of one of the longest-running and most prolific franchises in all of cinema came to an end in 1975, but you can’t keep Godzilla down. The next eras of Godzilla movies — spread out across 40 years and two continents — weren’t just one organic sequel after another. Each successive entry in the Toho Studios–originated series had to establish its relationship to the original 1954 masterpiece, and the resulting movies are as varied in theme, tone, and quality as all the kaiju on Monster Island.
Godzilla would return to Japan in 1984 with seven films in their own rebooted continuity that ignored all the previous movies except for the original. This new Heisei Era began as a more serious return to form, though they would evolve (or devolve) to become increasingly entertaining and somewhat silly by the time the ’90s wrapped up. Hollywood would get in on the game, too, first with the much-maligned 1998 Godzilla and then again with the ongoing MonsterVerse. Japan would reboot Godzilla for a second time with the Millennium era, adopting an anthology approach to mixed results. A third reboot, the Reiwa era, runs parallel with the MonsterVerse and so far has offered two boldly original standalone reimaginings of the iconic monster along with the kaiju’s first animated film foray.
With the most recent Japanese Godzilla movie, Godzilla Minus One, winning the franchise’s first Oscar earlier this month, and the new MonsterVerse entry, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, now in theaters, it’s a fitting time to look back. This second half of Godzilla’s nearly 70-year history is a towering showcase of how versatile Godzilla is; a character who can be a hero, villain, or even eldritch abomination — to mixed results. No Godzilla movie will top the original, a genre-defining piece of blockbuster filmmaking born from the then-recent atomic bombing of Japan, but the films of the late-20th and early-21st century show just how vast the King of the Monsters’ kingdom is.
The three anime Godzilla movies (see also: No. 21 and No. 18), all of which made their U.S. debuts on Netflix, are pretty universally reviled by the Godzilla fandom, and for good reason. Boasting a glossy, CGI-anime style that’s monstrous (in a bad way) to look at, the trilogy is light on any of the traditional hallmarks of the kaiju genre. There are no buildings to be smashed — instead the series is set in the far future, when refugees of a monster-devastated Earth attempt to make a postapocalyptic return to their homelands. It’s as different a premise for a Godzilla movie as there has ever been. That’s not inherently a bad thing, but the anime trilogy doesn’t do its premise justice, instead stuffing the films with ill-fitting anime tropes and gobs of complex, invented sci-fi lore that’s both overly serious and seriously under-explained. The Planet Eater, the capper to the trilogy, is the worst of the bunch. King Ghidorah, one of the most famous kaiju in the series, appears, but in a way that’s so underwhelming it almost seems malicious towards the audience. The film ends with the main character committing suicide to put a status-quo-restoring stop to all this madness. Godzilla is occasionally nihilistic; the anime trilogy goes a depressing step further by being three movies long and ultimately feeling pointless.
There are interesting ideas in the anime trilogy, including this middle installment’s reimagining of Mechagodzilla not as a robot kaiju but a semi-sentient metal city that will do battle with an impossibly large King of the Monsters. However, City on the Edge of Battle is like the rest of the anime films in that it refuses to get out of its own heady way and actually let interesting things happening, instead throwing up roadblocks like a debate about the importance of one’s sense of self between overly logical aliens and one of the least likable human protagonists in anime history. City on the Edge of Battle is too obsessed with the bleakness of its own lore to fully engage in any of the possibilities it creates.
The failure of Hollywood’s first take on Godzilla, which reimagined this towering icon into a skittering lizard that was clearly aping more from Jurassic Park than any of the kaiju films that came before it, positioned the start of Godzilla’s third era as something of a return to form. The Americans didn’t get Godzilla — let Japan show you how it’s done. Unfortunately, Godzilla 2000: Millennium is narrowly worse than the American debacle. It respected Godzilla’s aesthetics but otherwise placed him in a cheesy mess of a movie with bottom-tier human characters and an oddly mundane vibe. Godzilla’s foe here, a giant living UFO that absorbs information and eventually attempts to absorb Godzilla’s own regenerative powers, is interesting in theory but ends up being one of the worst monsters in the series. Bland humans treat Godzilla as a routine annoyance while he fires his atomic breath at what basically amounts to a flying egg. At least the ’98 Godzilla was sporadically engaging for all its many flaws.
The problem with the 1998 Godzilla was that Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin, coming off of the smash hit Independence Day, had no interest in making a Godzilla movie. Instead, they wanted to use Godzilla’s name to make a disaster movie, but while that subgenre is typically their forte, Godzilla fails to be an effective disaster movie, and it’s an even worse kaiju movie. There are some highlights — the rain-soaked late-’90s Manhattan setting is a fun playground for a monster (even if it was hell for the actors) and the soundtrack stomps. But, there were some regrettable creative choices: making the climax a lame ripoff of the Jurassic Park raptor scene rather than supersize action, making the French (?) responsible for Godzilla’s creation, and having an entire subplot fat-shaming Roger Ebert as payback for a previous bad review all prevented Godzilla from even succeeding on its own terms. (Star Matthew Broderick blankly delivering every single line as though it was his first pass at the first table read didn’t help.) As for Godzilla himself — there’s a reason why fans took to calling the misshapen iguana “GINO, or “Godzilla in Name Only,” and why Kenpachiro Satsuma, the suitmation actor who played Godzilla in the Heisei films, walked out of a screening saying, “It’s not Godzilla, it doesn’t have his spirit.”
The first of the Netflix anime-trilogy movies is the best of the bunch because, unlike the next two, it has not yet gone up its own planet-size ass. The (relatively) straightforward story of a revenge-obsessed protagonist returning to the distant future of a world he no longer recognizes to kill the nearly invincible beast response for its destruction is a decent one, and at this point it’s still novel to see Godzilla reimagined in such a drastically different, explicitly sci-fi way. It’s still more interested in being a mediocre anime than it is in being a good Godzilla movie (and the animation style is still visually challenging to parse), but at least it hasn’t yet lost itself in complex narrative detours of the later two films.
The Heisei Era is also sometimes called the “Vs. Era,” because six of the seven movies in it are titled Godzilla vs. [insert monster name here]. That naming convention is telling, and although some of the later movies would, to varying degrees of success, attempt to be about something more than just two kaiju throwing down as miniatures spectacularly explode around them, it’s clear what the primary goal was. Godzilla vs. SpaceGodzilla feints at being about “not polluting outer space,” since the titular kaiju is a crystalline mutation of some Godzilla DNA that made its way to space and into a black hole. It’s pretty vapid stuff, though, and a creative choice to have Heisei monsters attempt to be more animalistic by using beams rather than more human-like wrestling moves reaches its nadir here as Godzilla and SpaceGodzilla mainly just stand still and fire various beams at one another. Creatively, too, it’s clear the Heisei franchise was nearing its end. The previous movie had pitted Godzilla against MechaGodzilla, this one against SpaceGodzilla, and there was even talk that the next movie would feature GhostGodzilla. Thankfully, Toho came up with something different — and much better — for the final Heisei film.
There’s an innate tension with Godzilla, because he’s a monster that began with nuclear death and eventually became a planet-saving hero. All of the Godzilla movies on this list, one way or another, needed to decide where to place the kaiju on this scale, and to decide how seriously they wanted to take the original metaphor. There’s no wrong answer — dumb, popcorn Godzilla movies can be a blast, as a certain simian showdown’s high placement on this list will reveal — but there might not be a Godzilla movie that’s more outright offensively disrespectful than his second MonsterVerse appearance. Whereas the 2014 Godzilla got largely undeserved criticism by carefully doling out its monster action, King of the Monsters slams Godzilla and three of his most iconic foes from the Japanese films (Rodan, Mothra, and King Ghidorah) together in a artless way that sucks the majesty away from the proceedings. That’s just bad, but what’s unforgivable is how flippantly King of the Monsters inverts the atomic metaphor that begat Godzilla. Nuclear devastation of Boston is quipped away as being merely “a bad day to be a Red Sox fan” and Ken Watanabe gallingly looks down at a broken watch that survived Hiroshima as he explodes a nuclear weapon in order to revive Godzilla and save the day. Not every Godzilla needs to be a grim treatise about our species ability to destroy itself — the vast majority of the movies aren’t, and that’s okay — but they shouldn’t actively work against this theme the way King of the Monsters does.
Tokyo S.O.S. is the only film in the Millennium Era to be a direct sequel to another movie in the era. Whereas all the other movies only included the original 1954 Godzilla in their continuity, Tokyo S.O.S. is a follow-up to Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla. Unfortunately, despite being a sequel, it does away with one of the main things that made the first movie, which blended live-action kaiju aesthetics with giant mecha anime tropes, a success. Akane Yashiro, the pilot of the MechaGodzilla known as Kiryu that battled Godzilla to a draw in the previous film and formed a bond with both Godzillas (and, in a rare occurrence for Godzilla’s human characters, the audience as well) is written out of the sequel. Instead she goes to train in America, leaving the handling of Godzilla — and by extension the movie — to a clear B-squad of characters. Mothra and her larvae appear, too, but they almost beat-for-beat repeat by now tired Mothra plots and Tokyo S.O.S. lacks the spark of its predecessor on both a kaiju and human level.
Mothra is arguably Godzilla’s most famous kaiju co-star, having first appeared in her own standalone movie in 1961 before facing off against (or allying with) Godzilla in several movies throughout the Showa era. Unfortunately, that means that some of the Mothra beats begin to get repetitive — two tiny twin princesses show up, make warnings, Mothra shows up, Mothra’s larvae emerge from a big egg, roll credits. Mothra’s sole Heisei Era outing includes most of these basic plot points while attempting to mix things up a bit in a somewhat basic environmental parable. Most notable, there’s the introduction of an “evil” Mothra named Battra, although Battra’s not evil so much as its mission is to protect “the planet” and not to protect “humanity.” Godzilla vs. Mothra does everyone’s favorite big butterfly justice, it’s just held back by weak human characters and the limitations of the kaiju action, as the Mothra and Battra suits have a hard time engaging with the Godzilla suit, leading to a lot of beam exchanges at a distance and clumsy body slams that get old quickly.
The fittingly named final installment in the Millennium Trilogy was a love letter to Godzilla’s past, bringing an unprecedented number of past kaiju together from what was then five decades of movies (even “Zilla,” the American monster from ’98 makes a deliberately embarrassingly brief appearance) and putting them under the control of an extremely ’00s reimagining of the Xiliens, a memorable alien invader race from Invasion of Astro-Monster, a Showa Era highlight. Final Wars is a tour through Godzilla’s history, yes, but in a way that’s divorced from any of the the context or importance of the character other than his own 50th anniversary. It’s a collection of entertaining, largely silly references that add up to a fun movie but not necessarily a good one.
Having already pitted the Heisei Godzilla against King Ghidorah and Mothra, two of his most iconic foes, Toho returned to another iconic enemy, Mechagodzilla (and, also the giant pterodactyl Rodan). This time, rather than an alien creation, Mecahgodzilla was a human effort to defeat Godzilla, giving a direct sense of human stakes to the battle. Mechagodzilla wasn’t the only character from the Showa Era that Toho gave a Hesei spit-shine. Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II also makes the King of the Monsters a dad, again, though Baby Godzilla is far from the garish monstrosity of Godzilla’s Showa Era spawn, Minilla. The whole movie is very much an intentional modernization of past Godzillas, which unfortunately hampers it a little bit 30 years later now that aspects of the moviemaking now themselves feel dated.
Where do you go after Godzilla vs. Kong, a titanic matchup that was such a natural culmination of the MonsterVerse? Godzilla x Kong, which swaps “versus” for monster multiplication, heads deeper into the depths of Hollow Earth, a concept that the ongoing American Godzilla series seems to think is much more interesting than it actually is. Though it doesn’t deliver on the “enemies-to-lovers” potential that some Godzilla and Kong fans no doubt hoped would happen, GxK has plenty of monster fights as the two title Titans fight a giant evil version of Kong and a big icy lizard. By this point in the MonsterVerse, though, the lore and silliness is verging on becoming an outright bug rather than a feature, and even the kaiju action seems oddly devoid of scale or stakes — dumb fun, but the dumb-to-fun ratios are off. It’s not without thrills, but in a franchise increasingly driven by CGI monster fights, it’s a struggle to find more interesting opponents for Godzilla and Kong than each other.
Looking at Godzilla’s filmography, it’s obvious that, despite the high-minded atomic metaphor that spawned the franchise, a lot of these movies are really, really stupid. Godzilla vs. Megaguirus, the second installment in the Millenium Era of films, is so stupid that it loops around to being kinda good, actually. This is a movie where, in order to defeat Godzilla, Japanese scientists invent a satellite with a gun that shoots black holes, as one does. A test firing of this gun unleashes mutant, prehistoric dragonflies that swarm Godzilla before their kaiju-size queen goes claw-to-claw with him. It’s absurd, but in a knowing way, and there are sequences that play with Godzilla’s sense of scale in a way that many movies in the series take for granted. Godzilla vs. Megaguirus also was the debut of what would become the closest thing Godzilla has gotten to theme music since Akira Ifukube’s score from the original.
The villains in Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah are a group of time-travelers who come from a future where Japan is so economically successful, it has surpassed the United States, Russia, China, and generally become a hegemonic superpower. To stop this, the “Futurians” travel back in time and unleash the three-headed King Ghidorah on Japan. (That Japan really was in the midst of an incredible economic boom in the early ’90s, to the chagrin of the West, was not an accident.) They also attempt to prevent Godzilla’s existence, so the King of the Monsters can’t stop Ghidorah, by traveling back to World War II and kidnapping a dinosaur that will, once irradiated by nuclear tests, become Godzilla, from the timeline. (That dinosaur is a hero to a group of Japanese soldiers, because it saved them when it stomped on a bunch of American G.I.’s.) Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah has a lot going on, even if the anti-Americanism never feels like it really amounts to anything of intellectual substance. (There is also a robot character who was clearly just Toho’s attempt to copy The Terminator.) The monsters are good, though, and for all its controversy the film does include one of the meanest, most darkly funny moments in the entire series: A former soldier looks in awe and reverence at Godzilla, the creature that had saved his life in the Pacific in World War II. Then Godzilla absolutely obliterates him with his atomic breath. Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah does a better job than any other movie of making Godzilla an anti-hero, as he’s the lesser of two evils and you’re rooting for him to defeat Ghidorah … but he’s still a big nasty guy himself.
Much like Biollante, a truly unique and impressive-looking kaiju who is a combination of Godzilla’s DNA, a rose, and, uh, the cells and soul of a scientist’s deceased daughter, Godzilla vs. Biollante is a bit of a hodgepodge of a movie. The second Heisei film after the fairly straightforward and grounded The Return of Godzilla, Biollante is almost as much of an international espionage thriller as it is a kaiju flick. A fictional Middle Eastern country wants Godzilla’s cells to genetically modify crops to grow in the desert, and one of their trained agents will stop at nothing to obtain them. Meanwhile, we’re introduced to a psychic named Miki Saegusa who can use her powers to attempt to influence the kaiju. She will be a recurring character in the rest of the Heisei films, which already says something about the direction they’re taking. Biollante is one of the coolest kaiju in the entire series yet she only appears in her final form for a showdown that’s as brief as it is thrilling, which is to say, very. It’s a lot, but unlike some of the other mishmash-y Godzilla films, each individual thread is entertaining despite the looming madness.
If you ever doubt that human characters are important to making a great Godzilla movie, look no further than the first film in Legendary’s MonsterVerse, which goes from “great” to merely “good” once Bryan Cranston’s character, a bereaved widower looking to uncover the truth behind the disaster that claimed his wife’s life, dies about a third of the way through the film. His son, played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson, picks up the reigns as the protagonist in Cranston’s stead, and although his status as a Navy EOD officer lets him be close to the giant-monster action — which Gareth Edwards directs with a breathtaking sense of scale and deliberate restraint — he’s just not as interesting. It’s an unfortunate substitution, as the otherwise excellent sense of awe Godzilla has for its Titans and set pieces is muddled by characters who evoke only a sense of “meh.”
Godzilla had been gone for less than a decade when he returned in 1984 for the first time since the Showa era ended, but Return of Godzilla feels momentous. It’s a return to form, boasting a renewed level of expensive effects and, for the first time since the original, featuring no monsters for Godzilla to fight. Though Return’s human characters are nowhere near the level of that original, and the movie weirdly downplays the impact of Godzilla’s return within its own fiction, the first movie of the Heisei era directly tackles the evolution of the nuclear weapons that first inspired Godzilla, updating the metaphor for the Cold War. Whereas the original echoed the devastation that Japan suffered and warned against future atomic tests, in Returns Godzilla is revived due to the machinations of the United States and the Soviet’s nuclear programs. Few other Godzillas are as of their time, in a positive way, as Returns.
(N.B.: The American edit, Godzilla 1985, is much worse. The Soviets are re-edited to be villains, there’s obvious product placement for Dr. Pepper, and Raymond Burr reprises his role from the American edit of the original movie, although due to the rise in popularity of a certain comedian in the ’80s, his character is exclusively referred to as “Steve” or “Mr. Martin.”)
After only six films over the span of a decade, it was clear that the Heisei era was reaching its creative end (and Hollywood was making a Godzilla movie that, at the time, everyone was pretty excited about). So, Toho decided to end the first reboot series with Godzilla’s death — an effective headline-grabbing premise that Godzilla vs. Destoroyah pulls off with thrilling respect and a real connection to the icon’s history. The other monster, the demonic Destoroyah, was born of the Oxygen Destroyer, the superweapon that killed the original Godzilla in the ’54 movie. Godzilla himself, meanwhile, is melting down, turning him into an-orange glowing tower of rage who will eventually destroy the whole world when he eventually explodes and unites the Earth’s atmosphere. Godzilla vs. Destoroyah manages to be a fun romp despite the heavy stakes (there’s a sequence featuring some smaller forms of Destoroyah that make it clear that someone at Toho saw Alien and wanted to ape that), but it expertly blends the Heisei era’s now complex continuity, reverence to the original movie, and the core metaphor that powers Godzilla into an incredible send-off.
Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla, featuring the third version of Godzilla’s robotic counterpart, works so well because it seamlessly blends the kaiju genre with another, similar-but-distinct genre with all of its own tropes. It’s a mecha anime, in the style of Gundam, Voltron, or Neon Genesis Evangelion, but live action and featuring Godzilla. That makes it an exhilarating watch, and visual cliches like the giant robot swooping to the rescue or pulling off its ultimate attack feel fresh in this new context. Perhaps more importantly, though, the recasting of Mechagodzilla as a true “mecha” means that the robot’s pilot, a young woman named Akane Yashiro who is looking to prove herself after her inaction in an earlier confrontation with Godzilla led to the death of her mentor, is an engaging human character who is also directly connected to the monster action in a way that few other protagonists in the series have been.
There have been lots of movies called Godzilla vs. [insert monster name here]. The Heisei and Showa eras are full of them, and there was already a movie in the ’60s called King Kong vs. Godzilla, with the order flipped. However, no movie in the franchise, “vs.” or otherwise, has delivered on its title as much as the MonsterVerse’s Godzilla vs. Kong, which is exactly what it says on the tin and, well, not much more. But Godzilla vs. Kong wisely knows its titular showdown is exactly what audiences want to see, so it pours everything into delivering that duel. The special effects are great, the fights thrilling, and the human characters know their place, but we still get to hear Rebecca Hall say “Kong bows to no one.” Godzilla can be many things, and the absolute best movies are the ones that use his titanic status to say something more about society, history, or the atomic age we’re all cursed to live in. But, also, some Godzilla movies can be pretty great because a giant lizard and a giant ape fight real good on top of an aircraft carrier.
The latest Japanese Godzilla takes things back to the start — before the start, actually. Rather than attack a mostly recovered Japan in 1954, as in the original, Minus One’s Godzilla strikes in the immediate aftermath of the war that left Japan devastated by firebombs, atomic bombs, and psychological scars. Already at a metaphorical “zero,” Godzilla’s arrival takes the country to “minus one,” hence the somewhat clumsy title. There’s a world in which Minus One is disquieting, where the nuisance of who started that war is totally lost and instead we’re treated to a nationalistic uprising. That’s not what director Takashi Yamazaki does, and while the film isn’t overly interested in interrogating the causes of World War II, it paints the horrors as a folly that average citizens need to find a way to recover from. It’s a movie about optimism, not militarism. Godzilla here is imposing, nigh-unstoppable terror, yet the thrill of the film comes from the fact that he might not be an insurmountable obstacle, no matter how much of an underdog disarmed Japan and our protagonist, a disgraced kamikaze pilot who abandoned his duty, might be.
Godzilla has been heroic, he’s been aloof, and he’s been varying levels of horrifying. Only in GMK, however, does Godzilla truly feel evil as opposed to just bad. Sporting a design with all-white eyes that make him out to be the sort of demon that he’s reimagined to be, GMK makes Godzilla into Japan’s unholy punishment. In the movies where Godzilla is attacking Japan rather than defending it against a worse kaiju, the country is cast as a victim — understandably so, because originally the monster was an allusion to the bombings that ravaged Japan. Here, he’s a creature of malice powered by the souls of the victims of the Pacific War, the crimes of which Japan isn’t ready to admit. Aided by some of the more memorable human characters in the series, three guardian monsters (Mothra, King Ghidorah, and the kind of adorable Baragon), are able to best Godzilla, but not before GMK flips the script on all the other Godzilla movies, creating a kaiju whose innate evilness partially stems from the horrifying, unacknowledged truth that this near-mythical wrath might be earned.
Godzilla is at his strongest when he means something. Nothing will ever top the original Godzilla, a movie released within a decade of the atomic bombings that inspired it. Shin Godzilla, written and directed by Hideaki Anno of Neon Genesis Evangelion fame, comes the closest because it’s inspired by its own all-too-recent tragedy and feels dreadfully specific in its metaphor. Shin Godzilla is a direct reflection of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami and ensuing Fukushima nuclear disaster, events that still loom far larger in the Japanese consciousness than a Western viewer might assume. Godzilla feels like an unnatural natural disaster, first emerging from Tokyo Bay in a grotesquely horrifying, Muppet-like adolescent form and bringing with him a wave of destruction not unlike the wall of debris created by a tsunami. Japan’s old, stodgy government is initially too caught up in bureaucratic red tape and inertia to mount a response. (The scenes where groups of men in suits move from one conference room to another with much formality and little effect are darkly, dryly funny.) This is a Godzilla born of modern fears and concerns.
And what a Godzilla it is. If other versions of the iconic monster were a mutated dinosaur, Shin Godzilla’s kaiju is more akin to an eldritch abomination. As is perhaps fitting for the first Japanese Godzilla to be CGI rather than suitmation, there is nothing human about Shin Godzilla. It’s a monster that defies all sense of order and all your expectations. The moment where Godzilla unleashes his atomic breath is a moment of unparalleled horror and, in a perverse way, beauty. That Godzilla, an icon that’s approaching three-quarters of a century old and who has played basically every role in every media, still has the ability to shock and wow like this is a testament to Shin Godzilla.
