Godzilla: What if Smaug Were on OUR Side?

Wasn’t a clutch of eggs important last time around as well, for Godzilla? It’s cool. I mean, it shows Jurassic Park influence—’nature always finds a way’—but more than that, it suggests that in order for us to keep these science-fiction monsters believable, we’re having to apply biology to them. We’re giving them life cycles outside their brief, usually-tragic rampages. In the case of this Godzilla, though, it actually feels a little bit more like a course correction, of sorts. From Pacific Rim, I mean, whose kaiju had of course already starred in Cloverfield, The Mist, and on and back. But, as far as giant monsters go, we can’t get enough, really. What Pacific Rim did was just elide that fascination with the then- (and soon to be again) fad of giant robots — Transformers, Battleship. What this Godzilla is correcting, though, it’s locating the giant monsters here on Earth, instead of via an interdimensional portal to some place Thor should have cleaned up long ago. This is important because in Pacific Rim, the threat of aliens makes that an invasion story, one Adrien Veidt would have loved, as it catalyzes humanity into a single unit, erases the differences we bicker about, reminds us we’re in this together, gives us a common cause. I’m not saying this Godzilla doesn’t have that Independence Day blockbustery dynamic built in as well, but, whereas ‘aliens,’ at least to this Blackfeet, are always a big fancy metaphor for colonization (I don’t see any other way to watch Cowboys and Aliens), radiation  . . . → → →</a