Ahh, the humans. Interesting little creatures, aren’t they? Depending on who you asked after watching Godzilla: King of the Monsters, they either were okay-but-not great, or they were so unbelievably awful that they ruined the movie and made 2014 look like a masterpiece (not that I think it's bad, I just liked KOTM much better). I mean, why sympathize with a fractured family that’s fallen apart in the wake of a horrific tragedy when you can be watching giant monsters ripping the life out of each other, right?
Well, I’m going to make a pretty big confession here. You ready? Here it goes.
I didn’t think KOTM’s human characters were all that bad.
Now, now, c’mon. Hear me out. I’m not saying they’re great. I’m just saying that they weren’t as apocalyptically bad as everyone likes to make them out to be. At the very least, they didn’t have me tearing my hair out and wishing for the monsters to just eat Millie Bobbie Brown or anything like that.
Besides, I stopped wishing death on child characters after school shootings became more frequent.
I’ve seen a lot of comments around YouTube saying that they wish there was a Godzilla movie that just cut out the humans entirely and focused solely on the kaiju. One particularly idiotic commenter wrote that Serizawa’s sacrifice could have been replaced by Mothra swimming down to Godzilla’s lair and recharging him with her radioactive dust or whatever.
I think that’s a stupid idea. Both of them, actually. Mothra just isn’t a swimmer, unless she pulls some kind of Aqua Mothra stunt like in Rebirth of Mothra II, but then people would say the movie was even more ridiculous.
Here’s the thing about human characters in Godzilla movies. As “annoying” as they may be, they’re actually essential to making them work. Having human characters reminds the audience of what the stakes are, and how dangerous these creatures are. The most effective scenes of the original 1954 film aren’t the ones where Godzilla is pulling high-tension wires down or looking in on subway trains; it’s the ones after the rampage, the ones where little children are being diagnosed with lethal doses of radiation; where the populace finds itself praying from deliverance from what seems to be a wrathful god of destruction; when Japan finds itself once again pulled into the nightmare of a potential atomic holocaust.
One of my favorite scenes from KOTM is the opening flashback to the San Francisco battle. Mark Russell staggering through the wreckage, calling out for Andrew, his voice betraying the realization that he’s already gone; Emma staring at the carnage, numbly stroking a young Madison’s hair. And then he steps through a building before them. This titanic, nigh-unkillable force of nature. And I suddenly began imagining just how terrifying it would be to be in their shoes; to fell utterly small and insignificant before this massive beast. To realize that we’re no longer in control…and maybe we never were.
Whether Godzilla is an allegory for the Hiroshima bomb or the folly of Man in general, the humans are an essential part of driving those messages home; they’re the ones who are affected by the creatures’ actions. Without them, the movies would collapse in on themselves. They’d basically devolve into speculative evolution documentaries or something; fun to watch, but ultimately with no meaning behind them whatsoever. They really would become the mindless monster romps that people write the Godzilla franchise off as.
But you probably want me to get on with it and talk about what I thought of the characters themselves, so let’s get on with it.
I was actually surprised by how much I liked Mark Russell. In fact, I’d say he was my favorite character out of the whole thing. I like how they took the classic “Godzilla-hurt-me-and-now-I-hate-him” trope, but then handled in a way that makes him look a lot smarter and more likable. He makes it no secret that he wants Godzilla dead; but when he actually shows up, he’s not stupid enough to just tell Monarch to fire everything. In fact, he authorizes them to stand down unless they know it’s a fight that they can win. It shows that he’s not letting his hatred get the best of him, and that he’s not so blinded by it that he’s willing to risk innocent lives to achieve his fantasies. And in the end, when he realizes that Godzilla is actually essential to the continued survival of both humanity and the world at large, he’s able to let go of his hate. He’s also got quite a few moments of selflessness as well, going back to rescue the G-Team troops from the collapsing Antarctic base, and offering to help fix the Argo’s hangar doors to get the Isla Del Mara survivors safely on board.
One thing I’d like to point out about Mark; I’ve seen a lot of people complaining that he’s a know-it-all that everybody listens to. But there’s a reason for that. According to his bio on the Monarch Sciences website, he held the title of Senior Anthrozoologist, with expertise in wildlife behavioural science, zoomusicology (whatever on Earth that is), biocommunication, and apex predation. The reason why people at Monarch listen to him is because they would have listened to him anyway; he was one of their top members before he left. I suppose it’s a fault of the movie for not making his status clearer, but it’s still something to keep in mind.
I thought that Madison Russell was a pretty-decent child character. She’s definitely a far-cry from Ichiro from Godzilla’s Revenge and the many child characters of the Showa-era Gamera films. She never felt annoying or irritating to me, and I thought she played her part in the story pretty well. And let’s be honest; it takes some serious guts to stare into the eyes of a three-headed space demon and roar back at him in defiance.
As for Dr. Serizawa…well, what can I say that hasn’t already been said about him? He’s not a particularly complex character, but he serves his purpose well, and his sacrifice to save Godzilla’s life is up there with the Big-G’s death in Godzilla vs. Destoroyah as one of the most gut-wrenching scenes of the franchise. He also gives Mark some pretty good advice: “Sometimes the only way to heal our wounds is to make peace with the demons who made them.” And in this world where we’re constantly clapping back at the people who do us wrong, I think that’s a pretty interesting message to think about.
I don’t remember if it was in the movie, but the novelization mentions that Vivienne Graham was friends with Mark following his divorce with Emma, and she also served as a sort of surrogate aunt to Madison while she and her mother were at Monarch, as seen in Godzilla: Aftershock. With this in mind, it makes her death at Ghidorah’s jaws a lot more meaningful in-universe.
I thought Dr. Chen was okay. I think she’d make a good successor to Dr. Serizawa in future films. Ironically, I seem to be the only person around who wasn’t too keen on her being one of the MonsterVerse incarnations of Mothra’s Shobijin. I get it was meant to be a nice little reference, but it actually fell kind of flat for me. It didn’t really need to be there, and they didn’t go anywhere with it. Compare it with the Oxygen Destroyer, which, in spite of it’s sudden appearance and absence of a build-up, has lasting consequnces on the story.
Colonel Foster as okay as well. I was pleasantly surprised that they didn’t try to make a big deal about her being an African-American woman in a position of power. She’s the leader of an elite military group and that’s all that’s said about her. As it should be. On a side note, the movie’s avoidance of falling into the pitfalls of social justice promotion is one of the things I liked about it. I didn’t come to this movie to see yet another commentary on our current political climate; I came here see a monster movie.
I feel like the character of Rick Stanton was kind of wasted. I don’t think I need to tell you that he’s basically the Director of the One-Liners Department. He has his moments, like when he helps coordinate the air-strike on Rodan, or when he sounds legitimately crushed at Godzilla’s apparent death, or when his voice cracks a little when Serizawa goes to deliver the nuke to Godzilla, but other than that, he’s just the movie’s joke machine, and he got as old as he was really quickly. It’s honestly a pity, because he’s listed as a Crypto-sonographer; he works in the sounds department. If I was writing the movie, I think I would have him work with Mark more on trying to decipher the missing piece of the ORCA signal; he’d be a sort of cool uncle-type character, making a few jokes here and there, but always being there to talk to and confide in.
The rest of the characters were just kind of “meh” to me. I really think Sam Coleman should have been the one to get the Argo’s hangar doors open, seeing as how he’s Monarch’s Director of Technology and all. If there were any characters in the movie that I legitimately didn’t care for, it was the three military people, Barnes, Martinez, and Griffin. I just couldn’t get into them at all.
Readers: “Hey, wait a minute! What about Tywin Lannister and the Crazy-PETA-Lady? Aren’t you gonna talk about them?”
I’m getting them, I’m getting to them. I just saved them for last because I needed more time to sort my thoughts out on them.
First, Jonah Ala–I mean, Alan Jonah. Again, he was okay. I’m not really into Charles Dance, so I wouldn’t know how to gauge him against his other roles, but I thought he was okay. There’s an interesting tidbit in the novelization that I really wished made it into the movie, where he tells Emma that his daughter was abducted and murdered while he was out fighting a war, which helped fuel his misanthropy. I think this little bit of trivia would have helped fleshed out his motivations, at least a little.
And now we get to the person that everyone talks about. Dr. Emma Russell, Monarch Chief Paleobiologist and Director of Bioacoustic Studies, and the lady who thinks releasing the Titans upon an unsuspecting world in the name of restoring the natural balance is a good idea.
A lot of people have said that her motivations are really confusing. But that’s the idea. Emma’s a mentally broken nutcase; she really has no stinkin’ clue what she’s playing with here. And isn’t that the theme of the Godzilla franchise? Playing with forces we don’t understand will inevitably bite us in the rear end? Don’t get me wrong, I got a little tired of her after the movie went on, but I still can’t deny what the point of her motivation was.
Something that I’ve come to realize about Emma and Mark is that they were both broken by Andrew’s death. But they were broken in different directions. Mark blamed Godzilla for the death of his son. But Emma went the other way; she blames humanity for awakening the Titans and resulting in Andrew’s death.
Of course all of this doesn’t change the fact that I did get a little tired of Emma after a while. I remember after that flashback was over and it cut to a close-up of her crying face I was like “Gah! Where did that come from?”. It doesn’t really help that the movie tries to milk her sympathetic side when I honestly think she would have worked better as a straight-up madwoman.
So for those of you who plowed through to the end, here’s my final summary: I don’t think the human characters of KOTM were cinema-endingly bad. I thought they were mostly okay, with a few that actually stuck out to me. Having watched Godzilla movies for a while now, average characters is nothing new to me. That doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t try and write better characters; I’m just saying that I’m used to it and one more so-so character roster isn’t going to bother me too much as long as I get my monsters. Which I did. I feel like they still cut away a little too often, but I still got my monsters.
So I’m happy.
