Talk:Godzilla 2/@comment-26345648-20150531045543/@comment-1418880-20151020222306

Okay, counterpoints:

1. Godzilla was not a hero or a villain in the 2014 film. He was not there to save the city. He did not care about the people, and intact, pretty much ignored them except for when they attacked him and when that collapsing building knocked him down and he saw Brody. The only reason he came to the city in the first place was to hunt the M.U.T.O.s. The film made that quite clear with the whole backstory and Dr. Serizawa's explanation. Godzilla only cared about killing the M.U.T.O.s, which he either considered prey or a threat to his territory and himself. He was an intelligent predatory creature on the hunt. He was not a "hero" in the traditional sense. He wasn't a protector. He just happened to save humanity from the M.U.T.O.s when he killed them. Need further evidence? Consider the fact that he killed plenty of people on the bridge, and payed absolutely no attention to the people he was potentially harming and killing during the fight. He even shoved the female's head through the ceiling of the shelter were Elle Brody and others were hiding. He isn't a hero. He is, for lack of a better term, the lesser of two evils (though he isn't evil, either, so even that's a bit of a misnomer). 2. Mothra doesn't always protect humanity. In her original film, she went on a rampage through Japan after the fairies were kidnapped from her native island. In Godzilla, Mothra, and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack, she killed multiple partying teenagers when she appeared in the lake, and their bodies were found around her cocoon. Even during her final fight with Godzilla, she shows no concern for the soldiers nearby, hovering right in front of the building where many of the soldiers were positioned, so that when Godzilla tried to hit her with his atomic breath, he ended up destroying the building and killing all of the soldiers within it. So, while Mothra has often been portrayed as a protector of humanity, that isn't always the case. Furthermore, even during the Showa Era, when she made the most appearances as a protaganist, she was primarily concerned with the people of HER ISLAND. In many cases, the people of her island home had to convince her to help the people of Japan. So, even when she appears as a protaganist, her intentions and her role varies. 3. Rodan makes far less appearances in the role of a protaganist than Mothra. In his original film, he is quite destructive and hostile towards humans. He first appears as somewhat of an ally of Godzilla in Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster, when he stops fighting Godzilla and aids Both him and Mothra in their fight against King Ghidorah. In Invasion of Astro-Monster, he is a protaganist throughout the film. His final appearance as a protaganist is in Destroy All Monsters, when he, along with the other monsters of Monster Island, are temporarily controlled by the human protaganist in a battle against the alien's monster, King Ghidorah. After Ghidorah's demise, the controls are destroyed, and the monsters eventually return to Monster Island. So, that's a total of three films in which he appeared as a protaganist, and he only becomes the protaganist at the end of the first one. In all of his latest appearances, however, he was an antagonist or neutral. In Godzilla vs. MechaGodzilla 2, he attacks both Godzilla and Super MechaGodzilla, and only aids Godzilla in his death. In Godzilla: Final Wars, he is one of the monsters the aliens send to defeat Godzilla. So, if you add those two films with the original, that makes three films where he is neutral or an antagonist. Put them all together, minus the other films where he made brief cameos and in stock footage, that makes three films where he is a protector, and three films where he isn't. Traditionally, his role varies between films. 4. King Ghidorah is definitely the antagonist in most of he films he appeared in, but just how "evil" he is debatable. In most of his appearances, he is under the control of one villain or another. In his first appearance, he was basically like an interplanetary locust. He would travel to a planet, devour all it's resources and organisms, and then move on to the next one, like a swarm of locusts moving from field to field, devouring all the grain. That makes him more destructive then evil. In Giant Monsters All-Out Attack, he is a protaganist, but it's explained that he may be a monster defending his territory (I can't remember when this is explained, I've only seen the original once and the dubbed version once). As an additional point, I would like to point out that even in the 2014 film, the "villains", the M.U.T.O.s, weren't evil. They were simply trying to survive and reproduce. What made them worse than Godzilla was the fact that they fed on more man-made sources of radiation, which made them far more destructive than Godzilla. While watching the film, I couldn't help but get the feeling that the M.U.T.O.s were simply out of place in the modern world. In prehistoric times, they had used Godzilla's species as a food source for their young due to his kind's ability to absorb radiation (hence the skeleton in the cave with the spores). Now, after having been dormant in their spores for so long, they newly hatched creatures found themselves in a world full of sources of radiation, all of which were man-made. Since they consumed radiation, they naturally tried to exploit these radiation sources as a food source, which inevitably brought them into conflict with the humans. Even then, they mostly just ignored the humans until they were attacked. Like Godzilla, they cared not for the tiny terrified creatures at their feet. The key difference was that they were hurting and killing people while looking for food. If anything, the man-made structures seemed strange and confusing to them. Look at how the male appeared startled by the tram at the airport before he bit it. Now, granted, the female did start killing people left and right before her death, but that was only after her children were destroyed in the nest. So, basically, she was a crazed animal that went bezerk from grief and went on a rampage. She was also trying to recover her food source, as well. So, even in the 2014 film, the Kaiju are not heroes and villains in the strictest sense. To call them "good" or "bad" is a major oversimplification of their motivations. Gareth Edwards wants to make serious Godzilla films, with a tone like the original. Whatever is going to happen, I don't think it's going to be some cheesy "protectors of humanity vs. forces of evil" flick. That kind of cheesiness may have appealed to theater goers in the sixties and seventies, but modern audiences tend to want more out of films than that.