Forum - Why a Human-less Godzilla movie just wouldn't work.

In the wake of KOTM's release, I've seen a lot of people talking about how they want to see a movie that's just about Godzilla and not about "boring human drama". I'm not gonna lie, this kind of talk is actually starting to drive me up the wall.

I actually already made a statement about this on my summary of KOTM's human characters. For convenience, here is what I wrote (and I quote):

"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.

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."

Now, admittedly, this argument kind of falls apart if the human characters aren't any good. The late Showa era, the 1998 film, and the Anime Trilogy are the first examples to come to mind (your mileage may vary). I think my point still stands, though.

I still stand by this, but I wanted to expand on it a little bit.

I mean, let's be honest: do we really want to watch a two-hour movie that's nothing but the monsters? I want you to really think about it. Just the monsters, with absolutely no breaks in between. No dialogue, no explanations, no time to breath between scenes. It probably wouldn't even be just the fighting. Do any of you guys think of how much time Godzilla spends in these movies just swimming from point A to point B? Even the monster fights would get dull. You know how everyone jokes that the Transformer movies are nothing but Michael Bay explosion fantasies or whatever? Yeah. All that city destruction would get really old after a while.

I'm fairly certain that if we did get a Godzilla movie that was just two hours of literally nothing but monsters, even the best of us would be bored out of our minds. The fact is, kaiju fights and destruction really work better in doses. You can't have a movie that's just that with no substance to back it up, however little of it may be there.

Now maybe if they did a movie where the monsters were anthropomorphic, like The Lion King or whatnot, or if it was a nature-type documentary like Walking with Dinosaurs, a wall-to-wall monsters feature could work. But as typical, feature-lenght movie production? No. It wouldn't work at all.