Finding the Kaiju/Human Balance

There’s been a lot of buzz in the social media circles I find myself in about the human characters in the recent film Godzilla vs Kong. While I think that film is still great in the “ooooh, big monsters” sense, the human characters and the plot as a whole are poorly executed. This was even more clear upon a rewatch with my little brother. None of the characters outside of Kong himself have an arc. The characters—even the interesting ones like Kaylee Hottle’s Jia, a deaf girl who has a special bond with Kong—just exist to be where the plot is happening. This is disappointing because at least the other films in Legendary’s Monsterverse series made attempts at having characters with real arcs (the executions may have not always been good, but they still tried). There have been a lot of fans who, tired of sitting through boring or flat human moments, demand that kaiju movies start to forgo humans altogether and just make them about the monsters. Other fans have said that to have better stories you must cut down even more of the monster scenes.

As a fan of great stories and giant monsters walloping each other, I think fans are demanding the wrong thing. The solution is not to have more monsters or more humans—the solution is just to have better quality monsters and humans. Yes, yes, that is easier said than done, but hear me out. It’s easy to see why Legendary opted to cut out many of the arcs from the humans in Godzilla vs Kong based on reactions to the human scenes in their previous movies. But the stumbles that those movies made was in not making their most interesting and arc-ripe characters the main protagonists. In Godzilla(2014), Bryan Cranston’s character, a scientist who lost his wife to a kaiju attack at a power plant and has dedicated his life to proving the existence of monsters, should’ve been the main character. Cranston brought the character to life with power, as Cranston always does, and the arc that began between him and his character’s son, Ford (Aaron Taylor Johnston), was a great start to that movie and it should’ve been something carried throughout the film. Instead, Cranston was killed off in the first 45 minutes and his kind of bland son became the protagonist. In Kong: Skull Island, the most interesting characters, like John C. Reilly’s and Samuel L. Jackson’s characters, or even the endearing band of soldiers, are sidelined in favor of Tom Hiddleston’s and Brie Larson’s characters who are the least interesting members of the cast. By sidelining the most interesting characters, audiences reacted negatively to the main characters they were given. So Legendary went in the wrong direction snd decided to cut down on humans across the board, when they should’ve gone a different route.

If interesting, well-written humans are at the forefront of a kaiju story, fans will eat it up. Make us come for the giant monsters but stay for the humans. Look at Toho’s Shin Godzilla (2016). That film doesn’t have too many Godzilla scenes but all the scenes in which Godzilla appears are epic. And the human scenes that make up the bulk of the film are interesting. Even though they take place in office buildings and meetings, the film shows a realistic take on how a modern government might respond to a kaiju threat. The film explores how bureaucracy can stand in the way of helping others. Shin Godzilla offers plenty of cool monster scenes as well as a plot with substance. I wish more kaiju projects would understand that you can have both!

Look at superhero stories. From comics to television, to movies, to even videogame as superhero stories boast big action while still make room for endearing characters and deeper themes. Not every scene in a superhero movie, or action/adventure films like Mission Impossible or Indiana Jones, are spent during the action. But we fans of those series don’t complain because the scenes out of the fights are filled with good dialogue and dynamic characters. Kaiju stories, no matter the medium, should look to the successes of superhero stories. Superheroes and kaiju share a lot of the same DNA, and I think it is possible to create human characters that we can root for just as much as we root for the monsters. We don’t need fewer humans (though having a lot of monster fights is good, still), we just need better humans. I don’t think there is a right balance. Every project should be different. Some stories might need 90% human and 10% monster, or 60% monster and 40% human. The key is that both the monster snd human sections should be given 100% love and execution no matter what the formula is.

If we are looking to create kaiju stories that are all kaiju, I think this could only really work in an animated or comic book format, for the sake of budget. A possible blueprint for our hypothetical 100% kaiju story might be Primal (2019). The animated series has no dialogue but has plenty of amazing action and touching character moments. The series focuses on a caveman and a T.rex who team up to battle snd survive in a primal wasteland. A kaiju television series, with this caliber of action, animation, and nonverbal storytelling, would be something I’d love to see.

Writing my own kaiju story has been on my bucket list for a long time, so one day I will hopefully get to put my kaiju theory into practice. Thank you for reading!

-- Logan M. Cole