| “ | We call him... Gojira. | „ |
Godzilla (ゴジラ Gojira?), also dubbed Titanus Gojira, is a giant reptilian daikaiju created by Legendary Pictures that first appeared in the 2014 film, Godzilla.
Following this, Godzilla appeared briefly in the post-credits scene of the 2017 film, Kong: Skull Island, making a cameo appearance as two cave paintings and roaring as the film ends.
Godzilla reappears in the 2019 sequel, Godzilla: King of the Monsters, where he encounters Rodan, Mothra, Ghidorah, and several other Titans.
Following 2019's monstrous clash, Godzilla will meet and face off against Kong in the 2021 film, Godzilla vs. Kong.
Contents
Name
In Godzilla: Awakening, Godzilla is referred to as a "MUTO" due to him not having a name at the time.
Godzilla originally gained his true name from the Pacific islanders, who refer to him as "Gojira". Ishiro Serizawa also refers to him as "Gojira", before "Godzilla" is formally used. With that said, most of the English-speaking characters eventually start to call him "Godzilla" throughout the film's events.
Michael Dougherty later revealed that the name "Godzilla" is not the primary name of the monster, but a nickname, with the scientific name used within the film's universe being "Gojira". The resulting scientific dubbing of Titanus Gojira comes from the Latin term "Titanus", meaning "Titan", and "Gojira" (ゴジラ Gojira?, To), meaning "Godzilla" in Japanese.
Design
2014 design
Godzilla in Godzilla.
For Godzilla's return, it was decided to give the King of the Monsters a newly revamped look. Thus, he was given a new design that didn't look radically different from the established Godzilla designs like the TriStar Godzilla design from the 1998 film did, but like the TriStar design, it was intended to have a more realistic approach. Just like the 2007 Godzilla design, this design is completely computer-generated. Lead creature and concept designer Matt Allsopp and WETA Workshop creature designers Andrew Baker, Christian Pearce, and Greg Broadmore were tasked with bringing Godzilla into a contemporary reality while honoring his classic silhouette.
The 2014 design's face is blocky, its neck is broad and has shark-like gills, making this the first Godzilla design to feature gills. His eyes are small with a golden-yellow color, and his teeth are small and not nearly as straightly lined up as in previous Godzilla designs. The head and neck seem to lean forward more and the nostrils are more separate, being on opposite sides of the snout, and making him more reptile-like instead of the more mammalian fashion of being close together in the front compared to past designs. According to Andrew Baker, the filmmakers studied the faces of dogs, bears, and eagles to make Godzilla's face look noble and majestic, yet not too cute or threatening.[4]
Godzilla's dorsal plates are smaller than the previous designs, but they still retain the core maple-leaf shape, although straighter and very sharp, somewhat like MireGoji's creating a more jagged look when rising from the water. Godzilla's claws are black, and his feet are wider, resembling an elephant's feet with larger claws than the other Godzilla designs. His skin is more reptilian and crocodile-like, and rougher than the other designs, and is a very dark gray (almost black) color. His body and tail are very wide as well, making him look somewhat bulkier than other Godzilla designs.
Legendary confirmed that their Godzilla's tail is 550 feet and 4 inches long, his height is 355 feet, there are exactly 89 dorsal plates running down his back, the palm of his hands are 34 feet and 4 inches each, and that his roar can be heard from 3 miles away, loud enough to make an opponent go deaf.[1]
2019 design
Godzilla in Godzilla: King of the Monsters
While retaining the same basic design as his 2014 appearance, Godzilla received a slight revamp for King of the Monsters, with his dorsal plates changing in shape. Instead of being jagged and straighter in design, the new design features more protrusions. The three large central dorsal plates running from mid-way down his back are the same shape as the original Godzilla's dorsal plates.[5] The claws of his toes are also longer and curved. His skin is rougher in texture. The tip of his tail is also more rounded. Also, his eye color is now red-orange, but it also changes when he uses his atomic powers, becoming bright blue or yellow-orange, much like his attacks.
Portrayal
Godzilla is portrayed through CGI and keyframe animation, with a partial motion-capture performance from T.J. Storm.[6] Andy Serkis, who performed motion capture for Kong in Peter Jackson's 2005 remake, was consulted to make the Legendary Godzilla and the MUTOs' computer-generated movements more realistic.[7]
VFX supervisor Jim Rygiel said that this Godzilla's fighting style was based on those of bears and komodo dragons as they stand up tall and barge their opponents backward with their arms. In the film, Godzilla is seen doing this with the female MUTO.[8] According to Moving Picture Company VFX supervisor Guillaume Rocheron, Godzilla's movements were also inspired by lions and wolves.[9] This incarnation of Godzilla was designed to be as biologically plausible and "realistic" as possible, with the design process being to try and imagine what Godzilla would look like as a believable, real, natural animal.
Roar
Since the Godzilla roar is considered one of the most famous sound effects in film history, sound designers Erik Aadahl and Ethan Van Der Ryn were both tasked with paying homage to it while revamping it and creating something new.
According to Edwards, they spent six months over the three-year production experimenting with different techniques such as a pine tar-coated leather glove on a double bass trying to match the initial metallic shriek, the following wail, and the finishing bellow of Godzilla's iconic roar. Using microphones that could record sound inaudible to human ears, the team recorded hundreds of sounds at a 192 kHz sample rate before slowing them down to an audible range until they stumbled upon the combination that gave them goosebumps.[10]
The final version that was created was the 50th the team produced. The pair tested the roar on a backlot at Warner Bros., using a 100,000-watt tour speaker array for The Rolling Stones. The roar was powerful enough to rattle pipes and rooftops and was estimated that it could be heard up to three miles away. For this experiment, the crew sent out fliers to surrounding communities warning the neighbors about the potential sound disruption; despite these preemptive measures, however, Burbank P.D. started getting calls and people were tweeting 'Godzilla's at my apartment door!'[11] Additionally, Godzilla can make sounds other than roaring, best demonstrated after killing the male MUTO, and when he collapses to Ford's level, he growls in a soft way that sounds similar to a cat purring.
In an interview with Mike Dougherty, he revealed that even though he thinks the crew did a great job revamping Godzilla's roar, he pushed them further to bring it even closer to the original 1954 Godzilla's roar.[12] The latest version of the roar measures 174 decibels.[2] The final version of Godzilla's roar is overlaid with the roars from both the 1954 film and the roars used from 1962 to 1975.
Personality
| “ | The top of the primordial ecosystem. A god, for all intents and purposes. | „ |
In Godzilla, Godzilla's behavior is that of a territorial animal, Ishiro Serizawa theorized that Godzilla is the driving force to restore balance to nature whenever that balance is disrupted, suggesting that he essentially considers the entire Earth to be his territory.
However, unlike previous incarnations, Godzilla doesn't blatantly attack or plow through ships at sea simply because they're there, in fact, with larger ships like aircraft carriers, he simply dives down under them, even when the military launched a combined forces assault to stop him, he didn't react or fight back, and simply continued to hunt the MUTOs, even when he was being flanked by four naval ships. As opposed to any sort of morality, it appears to be that he simply considers humans to be tiny and insignificant and does not care about their general well-being but at the same time does not consider them worth destroying even though they, without harming him at all, fire at him nonstop.
Godzilla also does not seem to destroy on purpose, even when he destroyed the Golden Gate Bridge, it did not appear to be intentional, but just him reacting from being hit in the gills by explosives. He displays little interest in humans and focuses his attention entirely on the MUTOs. His supposed disinterest in the well-being of humans may be caused by their repeated attempts to kill him. After defeating both MUTOs, he leaves humans alone without any more conflict.
However, Godzilla does occasionally display signs of advanced thinking, as he is seen adapting his strategies to fight the MUTOs and even uses sleight-of-hand to trick the male MUTO into approaching his tail, which he uses to impale him on a fallen skyscraper. He appears to possess some degree of emotion as he briefly looks Ford Brody in the eye when he collapses to his level, which also could suggest that he has at least some degree of interest in humans.
Godzilla was designed to have a personality that would evoke the "last samurai" archetype, an ancient warrior content with solitude and preferring not to be a part of the world but has to resurface when certain types of events force him to appear and set things right.
Godzilla also has some degree of rivalry with Ghidorah and Kong, as he is depicted fighting alternatively with one of them in various cave paintings.
Godzilla has a symbiotic relationship with Mothra, she assists him in their fight against Ghidorah and Rodan, using her webs to glue Ghidorah onto a skyscraper, and incapacitating Rodan after he fought her. Their ancient alliance had been defined in romantic terms, with Dr. Ilene Chen calling Mothra "Queen of the Monsters" and Chief Warrant Officer Jackson Barnes questioning if "they got a thing going on," though subsequently Dr. Sam Coleman explains it as a "symbiotic relationship." As she died, Godzilla roared in grief while he absorbed her life-force, allowing him to go thermonuclear.
When Godzilla becomes the alpha, he does not attack other Titans who followed Ghidorah and instead spares them when they swear their allegiance to him.
Following Ghidorah's death, Godzilla starts to care for the well being of the human race, as evidenced by a clipping in the end credits mentioning that Godzilla is keeping the other Titans from attacking major human settlements.
Origins
| “ | Now grown to almost 400-feet tall, Godzilla stands as king of all he surveys. Initially thought to be a threat, we now understand his potential to become our world’s ultimate guardian, a towering apex predator emerging from the mysterious depths of the ocean to battle aggressors that threaten the balance of nature. The creature designated Titanus Gojira draws its immense power from a bio-nuclear circulatory system that activates when threatened, triggering a neutron flux that travels up its shard-like backspines to nucleosynthetic throat chambers where it explodes into a directed wave of atomic breath. Through this remarkable process, Godzilla’s roar itself becomes nature’s most devastating weapon. The Monarch facility designated ‘Castle Bravo’ was built specifically as a flagship underwater observation base by Monarch to study Godzilla in his natural habitat. Our findings so far have been hard-earned but revelatory. Sub-aquatic audio captures suggest the creature utilizes a range of communication frequencies more complex than anything we had imagined. When not enraged into action, the creature is slow, graceful, inquisitive even. His size and radioactive signature make him easy to monitor, with scans showing him traveling through various oceanic channels on routine patrol routes propelled by his massive tail. There are sporadic gaps where his signature disappears from tracking logs, and analytics is working closely with our mythography team to determine the cause. Dr. Brooks’ ‘Hollow Earth’ theory is gaining more traction because of this finding and is currently leading the on-going investigation. It is possible that the epicenter of these sightings is proximal to a previously undiscovered vile vortex. |
„ |
— Cryptid Profile |
For Godzilla's return, the King of the Monsters was given a radically new origin story that deviates from the previously established origin of him being mutated by the Hydrogen bomb: In Godzilla: Awakening, the prequel to Godzilla, Godzilla is explained to be an ancient lifeform from the Permian period. As the planet cooled and its natural atmospheric radiation began to decrease after the Permian-Triassic extinction event, he adapted to survive various other extinction events by diving deep into the ocean and consuming the planet's natural geothermal radiation in a hibernation-like state from its molten core until 1945, when the atomic bombing of Hiroshima woke him up along with the fearsome Shinomura, an enemy he previously fought in the past.
Godzilla was theorized by Ishiro Serizawa to have been the alpha predator of his ecosystem and prevented the other species from overpopulating and overrunning the world, acting as a force of nature that maintained balance. When Ghidorah arrived on Earth, he quickly established himself as a rival alpha to Godzilla. Godzilla and Ghidorah battled each other several times before they took their fight to Antarctica, which resulted in Ghidorah being buried in ice and Godzilla’s victory. Godzilla's species also share a symbiotic relationship with that of Mothra's.
History
Godzilla: Awakening
Kong: Skull Island
Cave painting of Godzilla fighting Ghidorah in Kong: Skull Island.
| “ | The 1954 Castle Bravo nuclear tests weren't tests, they were trying to kill something. | „ |
— William Randa |
Godzilla was first mentioned by Monarch operative William Randa, who stated that the creature had torn through the U.S.S. Lawton, and Randa was the sole survivor of the ship's destruction. He later stated that the 1954 nuclear tests were not tests, but attempts to kill Godzilla, although he never mentioned the Shinomura as a part of this.
Later, in 1973, Houston Brooks and San Lin would brief James Conrad and Mason Weaver on multiple other monsters who ruled the world alongside Kong. This included Godzilla, along with Mothra, Rodan and Ghidorah, who were all shown to the two via classified Monarch cave paintings.
Godzilla
When the female MUTO emerged in Nevada and began heading to California to meet up with the male, the military formed a plan to lure Godzilla and both MUTOs out to a remote island and kill them all with a nuclear warhead several times more powerful than Castle Bravo. Serizawa believed the detonation would fail to kill any of the creatures and warned William Stenz, the Navy admiral in charge of the operation, to call off the attack. Stenz regretfully told Serizawa they had no choice and allowed the warhead to be armed and carried by boat over San Francisco Bay.
Post-2014
Following the destruction of San Francisco in 2014, Godzilla was tracked by Monarch. Godzilla swam through the Pacific Ocean, passing Skull Island in the process. He eventually disappeared for some time into the Mariana Trench before resurfacing and headed down south where he arrived at the Antarctic, near Outpost 32, where Ghidorah was contained in ice and being monitored by Monarch, presumably to check on him.
Godzilla: Aftershock
Around this time, Monarch had determined that the ultimate MUTO was the same one who had slain a member of Godzilla's species that was known to the ancients as "Dagon", by infecting him with its parasitic eggs using its ovipositors. The deceased Dagon was later entombed in a cavern in the Philippines, the same cavern which was unearthed in 1999 and confirming that the two MUTOs were none other than MUTO Prime's children. As if that wasn't bad enough, MUTO Prime now sought to kill Godzilla in the same manner as his predecessor. Fearing this, Monarch developed a plan to replicate the sonic pulses given off by the MUTO eggs (to pacify MUTO Prime) in hopes of aiding their Titan ally.
Godzilla: King of the Monsters
Godzilla vs. Kong
Godzilla will encounter and battle Kong in this film.
Abilities
Amphibious nature
Though technically a reptile and not an amphibian, Godzilla has an amphibious lifestyle. He spends half of his life in water and the other on land, which makes him an adept combatant in both environments. Capable of swimming by undulating his tail like a crocodile, Godzilla has displayed as being able to breathe underwater. Godzilla possesses gills and amphibious lungs so he can stay underwater indefinitely, but he closes his gills when he's on land so he can use his lungs. These gills appear to be his weak points, as Godzilla reacts aggressively whenever he is hit in the gills by artillery fire or strikes from the MUTOs' claws.
Atomic breath
In Godzilla, Godzilla's atomic breath was more of a focused, fiery shaped energy beam that Godzilla spews out. Godzilla only used it against the MUTOs after he had taken a severe beating and was already growing weaker, showing that Godzilla only uses it as a last resort against opponents he can't physically overpower on his own.
Though it doesn't appear to have the same destructive properties as the incarnations prior, the blasts were strong enough to push back, severely weaken, and eventually kill, the female MUTO, showing that while it may not have the destructive force of its predecessors, this incarnation of Godzilla's atomic breath is still incredibly deadly in its own right.
It is entirely possible, however, that Godzilla never used his atomic breath at its full power, seeing as the glow from his dorsal plates was very faint. This is also seeing as how Godzilla was already extremely weakened in battle and had used up a lot of energy when he began using it, while the film's official novelization and an earlier screenplay suggest that the female MUTO's EMP field severely weakens his atomic breath, so whether or not it's capable of more is unknown at this point. The neon-blue glow on Godzilla's plates begins at the tip of his tail and goes all the way to the top of his neck in this film, and to let the audience know when he was going to fire it, an ominous dynamo-esque humming noise is heard.
In Godzilla: Awakening and Godzilla: King of the Monsters, his breath is far more intense and beam-like in appearance, implying that his breath is not at full power in Godzilla and can be even stronger when he is in better condition. His eyes and numerous orifices around his scales also glow neon-blue, moments before and when he unleashes the beam from his mouth. At the Antarctic, the atomic breath demonstrates explosive properties, having decimated a Monarch facility during a battle against Ghidorah. After being revived by Monarch, a fully-powered Godzilla fires his attack and shows that the atomic breath can knock or push back opponents several times heavier than him.
Bio-atomic nature
Godzilla's power originates from a bio-nuclear circulatory system. Activating when threatened, a neutron flux is triggered that travels up Godzilla's dorsal fins to nucleosynthetic chambers in his throat and explodes into his atomic breath. His radioactive signature also makes it easy for Godzilla to be followed and monitored.
Durability
In Godzilla, Godzilla was stated to have survived exposure to the nuclear tests carried out in the South Pacific in the 1950s, even appearing to have withstood the detonation of Castle Bravo, a 15-megaton hydrogen bomb, at Bikini Atoll while directly next to the bomb. A testament to his durability is his survival of numerous extinction events that occurred millions of years before his encounters with humanity.
Additionally, like his previous incarnations, Godzilla showed no outward signs of damage from any weaponry used by the United States Armed Forces, including heavy gunfire, missiles, tank shells, and various other weapons. Godzilla seemed to not even notice most of these attacks, only flinching slightly at artillery fire striking him at point-blank range and briefly showing visible pain after being struck directly in the gills.
In Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Godzilla can survive a fall from thousands of feet after being airlifted by Ghidorah, though he is still weakened by the sheer amount of pain caused by the impact.
Energy absorption and projection
Godzilla feeds on nuclear radiation and can sustain himself for millions of years at a time by absorbing geothermal radiation from the Earth's core.
Godzilla is capable of healing from his wounds by absorbing large amounts of radiation; however, the rate at which he heals depends on how serious his injuries are. An example of this is when he was fully healed following the Battle of San Francisco after presumably absorbing the radiation from the atomic bomb detonating off the city's coast, while it took him five years to heal from injuries inflicted on him by MUTO Prime, as well as nearly dying from the effects by the Oxygen Destroyer, only to instantly recover after facing a head-on nuclear blast.
After Mothra is obliterated by Ghidorah's gravity beams, Godzilla absorbed her life force to augment his power.
Intelligence
While fighting the MUTOs during the events of Godzilla, Godzilla figures out their strengths and weaknesses through repeated clashes with them. He lets the male MUTO fly in close to attack him, and he then used his tail to slam him into a skyscraper, killing him. With the female MUTO, he fired his atomic breath right into her mouth after forcing it open, making her neck explode, and decapitating her. In Godzilla: Aftershock, Godzilla lifted Muto prime on his back so he can blast her up with his radiation stream, and in Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Godzilla took advantage of his aquatic nature to drag Ghidorah down, causing Ghidorah to panic and allowing Godzilla to remove one of his heads.
Senses
Godzilla has a very strong sense of hearing, as he was able to track down the MUTOs' locations from the ocean by their mating calls.
Speed and agility
Godzilla's top swimming speed can reach up to 40 knots, and he is fast enough to slam the male MUTO onto a skyscraper with his tail. Godzilla is also able to run at great speed when charging Ghidorah, running in a horizontal posture comparatively similar to that of a theropod dinosaur.
Stamina
Godzilla was at one point, also pinned underneath a skyscraper that collapsed on him, while he paused to catch his breath. It did not keep him subdued for long as he quickly got back to his feet to continue pursuing his enemy.
While the MUTOs fought Godzilla to the point of exhaustion, he managed to get back to his feet and return to the ocean in a matter of hours, showing no physical fatigue or injury. This could be a testament to Godzilla's durability, showing that he was either simply exhausted, or because of the healing factor that allowed him to recover from any injury he had by sunrise.
Godzilla is shown to be able to travel for thousands of miles for days to track down his enemies, and he does not show any signs of exhaustion when he reaches his destination to prepare himself for battle.
Strength and combat
Like previous incarnations, Godzilla possesses immense physical strength and can use his huge mass as a weapon. He can toss the MUTOs around with ease by biting into their bodies and he can effortlessly push the female MUTO backward with his arms (like a bear would with its opponent). The strength of his tail swing was great enough to kill the male MUTO outright as well as knock over a large skyscraper by accident.
However, unlike previous incarnations, Godzilla didn't use his arms much to toss them around. This is due to his fighting style being modeled after those of bears and Komodo dragons which, despite having powerful jaws and teeth, use their front legs and claws as their primary weapons.
Overall, this Godzilla's fighting style seems to be somewhat of a reversal of his previous incarnations, preferring to be in close quarters and direct combat with his targets rather than relying on his atomic breath or throwing objects. Godzilla is also able to cause tsunamis just by going ashore.
Similar to other Godzilla incarnations, this Godzilla possesses enormous physical strength and was able to physically incapacitate and raise the MUTO Prime, despite her comparable size and weight to Godzilla.
In Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Godzilla was able to spin and throw the larger Ghidorah with ease and was strong enough to rip one of his heads apart.
Thermonuclear pulses
Radiation stream
In Godzilla: Aftershock, Godzilla demonstrated a variation of the thermonuclear pulse that is projected as a focused wave from his dorsal plates. He demonstrated this after said body part was damaged by MUTO Prime's sonic roar. The attack's firepower was strong enough to severely crippled MUTO Prime.
Weaknesses
Despite being incredibly powerful, Godzilla does have a few weaknesses.
Excess radiation
When Dr. Serizawa detonated a nuclear warhead to revive Godzilla, its radiation combined with that of the Hollow Earth was too much for Godzilla's body to handle, and as such, he had a set amount of time before he exploded "like an atom bomb". Following Mothra's sacrifice and transference of power, however, this seems to no longer be a problem.
Gills
Godzilla bleeds after being struck in the gills by the female MUTO.
The gills on Godzilla's neck appear to be a weak spot, first demonstrated when he smashes through the Golden Gate Bridge after being hit there by missile fire. The two MUTOs were able to draw blood from Godzilla by stabbing his gills with their claws.
MUTOs
While Godzilla is a powerful alpha predator of his prehistoric ecosystem, the MUTOs have evolved over millions of years to specifically hunt and battle his species. As such, they have specific adaptations to counteract Godzilla in battle, such as hooked claws to snag his vulnerable gills, EMPs to disrupt his atomic breath, and the different fighting styles of the male and female to tag-team and overwhelm him. MUTO Prime has shown to be more than able to defeat Godzilla in a 1v1 Fight, having an advantage thanks to her Sonic Roar and possible superior strength.
Numbers
Even though Godzilla is very large and strong, he can be overwhelmed if fighting against numerous foes on his own, as seen when he fought against the MUTOs, he couldn't predict, nor block, their blows in a two-on-one situation. A similar situation happened with Godzilla when fighting against Ghidorah; he could not predict each of the heads' movements, nor block their attacks, whereas the heads could easily grab him, hit him, and dodge his attacks (and even his atomic breath) with little difficulty and mortally wound him with combined attacks.
Oxygen Destroyer
Godzilla was severely wounded by the Oxygen Destroyer and almost killed by it (a weapon that did not affect Ghidorah, due to his extraterrestrial nature) the Oxygen Destroyer forced him to retreat so that he could regenerate, but the process would have taken him years before he would be ready to face off Ghidorah again, prompting Serizawa to manually revive him with a nuclear warhead.
Short arms
While Godzilla's arms are strong, they are proven to be too short to reach the top of his head; a weakness exploited by the male MUTO, who latched onto the back of Godzilla's head just out of reach.
Stamina
Despite Godzilla's overwhelming strength, his stamina posed a problem. After defeating the male MUTO, he hunched over to catch his breath, which led to him being pinned down by a falling skyscraper. After defeating the female MUTO, Godzilla collapsed from exhaustion and remained unconscious until the next day.
Video games
Godzilla (2014 video game)
| “ | A relic species of an extinct organism which stood at the top of the ecosystem that was bombarded with high-density radiation during Earth's Paleozoic Era. It escaped to the deep sea during the mass extinction of all living things in the Permian period. Lurking for eons at the bottom of the ocean, where it managed to perpetuate its species, it appeared on land once again in the 1940s, when it was tracked by both U.S. and Soviet armies. Able to walk upright vertically on two legs, it can survive on land, in water, and below the earth. It possesses tremendous physical strength, and in combat, most foes are overwhelmed just by the enormous destructive power of its long tail. Its ultimate weapon is the heat ray it blasts from its mouth. Although his incarnation of Godzilla was created in Hollywood entirely through CGI animation, the production team put great emphasis on giving it the sense of a costumed character. For the battle in the last scene, human movements were reproduced with CGI animation using motion capture technology, so that the characters' personalities would shine through, allowing audiences to empathize with them. |
„ |
— MonsterVerse Godzilla Kaiju Guide bio |
Moveset
| Square | One tap: Right Scratch Two taps: Left Scratch Three taps: Slap Down |
| X | Tap: Tackle Tap + Roar: Armor Tackle |
| Triangle | Tap: Bite Tap + Up: Grab Press Tap + Down: Tail Sweep |
| Circle | Tap: Atomic Ray Tap + Roar: Rushing Blast |
| R2 | Tap: Double Tail Attack |
Trivia
- Godzilla may have inspired the Cold War, for in the briefing room scene in Godzilla, Vivienne Graham mentions, that when Godzilla emerged in 1954, the Americans and the Russians thought they were being attacked by each other.
- This version of Godzilla is the third oldest monster in the series, dating back to the Permian period 250 million years ago, he is only beaten by Megaguirus from the Carboniferous and Destoroyah from the Precambrian.
- Unlike most previous incarnations and like Showa and Heisei series; this version of Godzilla is portrayed as a protagonist instead of an antagonist.
- While most TV commercials and promotional material depicted Godzilla as a destructive force, in the film he is more of a hero as opposed to an outright antagonist as the trailers would have let the audience believe.
Showa Godzilla's "gill-pores".
- As Godzilla breathes with both lungs and gills, he is more similar to an amphibian as opposed to a true reptile. However, the second Showa Godzilla was mentioned in a mook book to bare gill-pores on its neck, regardless of being it an official status or not. In this book, the first Godzilla was mentioned to be a female, was a member of ancient semi-aquatic, gentle reptiles than a radiated mutant, and some individuals started attacking humanity to revenge for what had caused by nuclear testing.
- Despite being called a "predator", Godzilla never eats the MUTOs once he catches and kills them. They may be simply rival species, who Godzilla actively hunts and destroys as they pose a threat to the existence of his species.
- According to Ken Watanabe, he was originally supposed to name-drop the monster as "Godzilla", however, seeing both him and his character were Japanese, he insisted that the original Japanese name, "Gojira", was more appropriate.
- According to Michael Dougherty:
- Among the four main Titans featured in Godzilla: King of the Monsters; Godzilla was intended to represent the element Water,[13] and the Tarot card the Emperor.[14]
- He suggested Godzilla and his species use bioluminescent communication for both intimidation displays and mating rituals.[15]
- He has personally described the internet FanFiction Song of the Tiny Ones' portrayal of Godzilla's thoughts when he is revived during the film's plot as a highly canon-accurate interpretation.[16]
- Godzilla's 2019 redesign has been dubbed "Godzilla 2.0".[17]
- When redesigning Godzilla, Michael Dougherty simply copied and pasted Godzilla's 1954 dorsal plates onto the 2014 model in places of the original plates and sent it off; before he was given larger claws, a larger head, along with a shorter, club-ended tail.[17]
- The canonical reason for this in the MonsterVerse is that Godzilla's dorsal plates were shattered by the MUTO Prime. This event happened in the graphic novel prequel, Godzilla: Aftershock.
- According to Godzilla: King of the Monsters VFX supervisor Guillaume Rocheron, although they did performance motion capture shoots with T.J. Storm, they used the facial expressions and body language as reference for the animation team rather than directly transplanting them when creating Godzilla.[18]
- After the gills were added to this Godzilla design, they were later added to Godzilla's immature form in the 2016 film, Shin Godzilla.
- In Japan, many have hypothesized that Shusuke Kaneko's Gamera Trilogy could have inspired Godzilla and the MUTOs in this film due to similarities in characters. In an interview on Kinema Junpo, Kaneko himself admitted this and commented as "Gareth of course, he must have watched Gamera. It's alright though".[19]
- At 119.79 meters or 393 feet tall, this the largest live-action incarnation of Godzilla, and second-largest Godzilla overall, after Godzilla Earth.
- As seen on the Monarch Sciences website, Monarch Outpost 54, where Godzilla was located, homages 1954, the year when Godzilla was released.
- The claim that Godzilla's roar can only be heard from 3 miles away is somewhat illogical, as the roar of a lion, an animal only a fraction of the size, can be heard from over 5 miles away. This may have been an error in the source material.
List of appearances
Films
- Godzilla
- Kong: Skull Island (Cave painting)
- Godzilla: King of the Monsters
- Godzilla vs. Kong
Comics
- Godzilla: Awakening (First appearance)
- Godzilla: Aftershock
- GvK: Godzilla Dominion
- GvK: Kingdom Kong
Novels
- Godzilla: The Official Movie Novelization
- Godzilla: King of the Monsters - The Official Movie Novelization
- Godzilla vs. Kong - The Official Movie Novelization
Video games
References
This is a list of references for Godzilla (MonsterVerse). These citations are used to identify the reliable sources on which this article is based. These references appear inside articles in the form of superscript numbers, which look like this: [1]
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