Godzilla starts Spanish-American War

[three]

i believe it was lost to time after that event, however, and that our reasoning was not that Godzilla was or has been proven inherently dangerous.

What, the Maine?

It was breifly raised and later disposed of in the Florida Strait.

Or do you mean Godzilla?

Godzilla. after sinking the maine, he was lost to the annals of time and forgotten. i don't believe that event in particular spurred on our dislike or mistrust of the creature.

[Jatahaxe]

Interesting detail. I feel like it's meant to show that humankind will go to war over anything, including stuff that isn't even actually between them. They just go pointing fingers and before you know it hundreds of thousands are dead. On a related note, the most unrealistic aspect of Pacific Rim wasn't the mechs or monsters, but rather the idea that humans would cast differences aside to achieve survival for the species in the long run. In reality, the aliens would've needed to make but one or a few attacks, then sit back and watch the humans annihilate each other over whose fault it was, who gets the resources, stubbornly and openly refusing to help other countries because of past grudges like a bitter child. Sorry if I come off as misanthropic, but giant, world-destroying monster fiction is kind of a misanthrope's hobby, when you think about it.

[Manticore]

Dayum, I took it as just a little curiosity for the opening credits, nothing to be offended about or to nitpick/wish Borenstein to go away.
It's not like they're attributing the Holocaust to Godzilla.

[Mr. Xeno]

wouldn't it then be equally tasteless to make use of Godzilla as a nuclear allegory? that did kill thousands and influence a century a political decisions, wars, economics, and culture. lets not overblow the use of the Maine here.

No, for several reasons:

The main difference is that Godzilla being a nuclear allegory is just an allegory. He didn't cause Hiroshima or Nagasaki to occur, it was things like that which caused HIM to appear. Everything Godzilla does is fictional.

Another is that it's just weak. It displaces blame from humans onto a benevolent monster. One of the big themes of Godzilla is that mankind is incredibly self-destructive; we learn to split the atom, and use that knowledge to create bombs that will kill each other. We then start creating bigger and bigger bombs that will kill ourselves even more. It's humanity's fault that humanity dies. By saying that "Godzilla did it", it completely erases such meaning, which was a huge part of the original Godzilla. Not to mention, the entire original film was built around the very basis of the nuclear allegory, took itself very seriously, and properly developed all of it's themes without the need for extensive, last-minute shit world building that contradicts everything else in the film.

Third, and the biggest problem for me, personally, is that it's contradictory to the movie's portrayal of Godzilla. The movie itself specifically states that Godzilla is a force of nature that exists to balance the world. Evil occurs (the MUTOs attack) and good will balance it out (Godzilla defeats the MUTOs) and returns the world to a neutral state. It portrays Godzilla as a hero, complete with a triumphant scene at the end where everyone cheers as he returns to the ocean while a screen in the background calls him our savior.

And then it turns out that Godzilla caused the Spanish-American War. Wow, what a hero that is. What force of evil was he balancing out when he did that? Was there just too much good going on in the world so he had to start some shit? Does he just do whatever he wants to? Are the writers horribly incompetent and don't know a thing about Godzilla? Do they even care?

The whole idea just reeks of awful to me.

[Space Hunter M]

Godzilla caused the great Kanto Earthquake after a tiff with a giant catfish.

[gatorzilla]

I was going to stay out of this but I couldn't after I read this-

No, for several reasons:

The main difference is that Godzilla being a nuclear allegory is just an allegory. He didn't cause Hiroshima or Nagasaki to occur, it was things like that which caused HIM to appear. Everything Godzilla does is fictional.

Another is that it's just weak. It displaces blame from humans onto a benevolent monster. One of the big themes of Godzilla is that mankind is incredibly self-destructive; we learn to split the atom, and use that knowledge to create bombs that will kill each other. We then start creating bigger and bigger bombs that will kill ourselves even more. It's humanity's fault that humanity dies. By saying that "Godzilla did it", it completely erases such meaning, which was a huge part of the original Godzilla. Not to mention, the entire original film was built around the very basis of the nuclear allegory, took itself very seriously, and properly developed all of it's themes without the need for extensive, last-minute shit world building that contradicts everything else in the film.

Third, and the biggest problem for me, personally, is that it's contradictory to the movie's portrayal of Godzilla. The movie itself specifically states that Godzilla is a force of nature that exists to balance the world. Evil occurs (the MUTOs attack) and good will balance it out (Godzilla defeats the MUTOs) and returns the world to a neutral state. It portrays Godzilla as a hero, complete with a triumphant scene at the end where everyone cheers as he returns to the ocean while a screen in the background calls him our savior.

Xeno you are seriously going overboard on this. This is simply just a fun trivial piece at the beginning and you are making it out to be a personal vendetta and using it to further attack the movie just because you dont like it. Aside from that screenshot from the beginning NO WHERE is this being further dived into.

For god's sake it adds further to the Godzilla mythology. You don't have to like it but let someone else tell their vision and build their own universe.

Heisei Godzilla is supposed to be a force of nature but yet Godzillasaurus outright kills American soldiers? Where is the outrage over that? Or is just because Toho did it that makes it ok?

What the hell was the original Gojira doing before it attacked in 1954?

How do we know Godzilla purposefully started the war? He was most likely minding his own business

And then it turns out that Godzilla caused the Spanish-American War. Wow, what a hero that is. What force of evil was he balancing out when he did that? Was there just too much good going on in the world so he had to start some shit? Does he just do whatever he wants to? Are the writers horribly incompetent and don't know a thing about Godzilla? Do they even care?

The whole idea just reeks of awful to me.

Yeah you just lost any credibility by that asinine bolded part

GODZILLA IS MORE THAT JUST A PRODUCT OF THE ATOMIC BOMB OR AN ALLEGORY FOR NUCLEAR WAR WHICH IS WHY HE HAS SURVIVED FOR 60 YEARS

[Space Hunter M]

GODZILLA IS MORE THAT JUST A PRODUCT OF THE ATOMIC BOMB OR AN ALLEGORY FOR NUCLEAR WAR WHICH IS WHY HE HAS SURVIVED FOR 60 YEARS

[HannibalBarca]

What the hell was the original Gojira doing before it attacked in 1954?

Sleeping in an undersea cavern before being awakened by nuclear tests.

[Space Hunter M]

Remember Janjira? Fukushima, people.

Teruyoshi Nakano blew up Fukushima first though.

[gatorzilla]

What I dont understand is why are people suddenly getting so anal about movie events tying into historical events when films do it ALL the time?
Why is this suddenly so different?

And then to suggest the people working on this movie don't know a thing about Godzilla or even care??? WTF??

[HannibalBarca]

What the hell was the original Gojira doing before it attacked in 1954?

Sleeping in an undersea cavern before being awakened by nuclear tests.

And then proceeded to attack boats similar to the manner Lucky Dragon No. 5 was hit by radiation. An incident that occurred that year.
And we're complaining about something that happened 106 years ago. Remember Janjira? Fukushima, people. Three years ago and not one word.

I don't care about any sort of potential moral outrage over the "tasteless" appropriation of a historical event. I just think it was a silly historical event to pick. Godzilla, who is rarely if ever shown leaving the Pacific, manages to sneak undetected into the 42-foot deep Havana Harbor (probably more shallow in 1898 before the Cuban government began infrastructure projects with American capital, but that's beside the point) and blows up a US warship for...some reason? Just seems silly to me.

As a Godzilla fan though, what gets me is that, the catalyst for Godzilla's emergence has always been the dawn of the nuclear age. The Godzillasaurus is a bit of a special case, but to be fair it was just an overgrown animal protecting its turf, not yet the sort of "force of nature" that the fully-powered Godzilla would become. And the insane timeline of that movie presents its own question as to which Godzilla, exactly, they were dealing with. In any event, you could say something like "well Godzilla was known to the Odo islanders!" but it's never explicitly stated that the "Godzilla" of Odo Island legend was the actual monster; they just took the name from there. That's why I thought that the sea monsters were a nice touch during the opening credits of G'14: are they actually supposed to represent Godzilla? Who knows? I saw them as a neat little glimpse at how man has always interpreted the mysteries of nature, a contrast to the shot of "On the Origin of Species" that heralded a new, more scientific way of examining the natural world. I thought it was cool.

By explicitly associating Godzilla with the Maine sinking, though, you're pretty much confirming that Godzilla has been awake and active since before the nuclear age. Man's reckless experimentation with the power of the atom, then, is not responsible for it. You can talk all you want about how Godzilla has meant different things through the years, but even something like Final Wars or GMK, that went in pretty radically different directions with the character, always pinpointed the beginning of the nuclear age as being the thing that caused Godzilla to appear. I mean, Legendary's free to toy around with that principle if they want to, I guess, but we're free to criticize that decision too, I feel like.

[HannibalBarca]

Radiation doesn't magically recreate a whole complete functional body from a skeleton. If you're gonna get yourself in a tizzy over the backstory of G'14, you better be irked over the Showa duo also being active prior to the atomic age lest you make yourself look like a hypocrite.

Godzilla's standard origin is that he was asleep/in suspended animation (I'll break out the DVD to get the exact terminology if you want) in an undersea cavern and was awakened from that by H-Bomb testing...no one was ever saying that radiation turned fossils into living creatures.

[M.U.T.O.]

By explicitly associating Godzilla with the Maine sinking, though, you're pretty much confirming that Godzilla has been awake and active since before the nuclear age. Man's reckless experimentation with the power of the atom, then, is not responsible for it. You can talk all you want about how Godzilla has meant different things through the years, but even something like Final Wars or GMK, that went in pretty radically different directions with the character, always pinpointed the beginning of the nuclear age as being the thing that caused Godzilla to appear. I mean, Legendary's free to toy around with that principle if they want to, I guess, but we're free to criticize that decision too, I feel like.

Like I said on the last page or two, he's been coming up to the surface every once in a while, then when the nuclear tests started happening he became more active because now there was fallout to feed off of on the surface, not just the bottom of the ocean.

Yes, I agree with this. And the Maine could've been just a sideswipe while he was quickly trying to get to a radiation pocket somewhere else. His sudden appearance could've easily stunned the witnesses, leaving them with nobody to blame it on but an obvious target (Spain), thus starting the Spanish-American War.
Does that make any sense?

[GodzillaRangerPrime]

Would be awesome if Godzilla totally sank the Titanic too
xD

[InstinctiveGigan]

How do we know it was Godzilla that caused that? Does it specifically say Godzilla caused it? What if another monster did it? It would give the U.S. government reason to believe ALL monsters are destructive like that and attack Godzilla even if he's minding his own business.

[gatorzilla]

This point has been brought up before and it is a good point. For all we know some monster in a future film caused it.

So you're saying some people are really going overboard on something so trivial that it may not have anything to do with Godzilla himself?

[Mr. Xeno]

What I dont understand is why are people suddenly getting so anal about movie events tying into historical events when films do it ALL the time?
Why is this suddenly so different?

And then to suggest the people working on this movie don't know a thing about Godzilla or even care??? WTF??

As stated, my biggest issue with it wasn't that it was tampering with history, but that it doesn't work within the context of the movie, let alone the greater themes of Godzilla. There have been countless discussions about what Godzilla represents, and in a film that was dead-set on "going back to Godzilla's roots", the movie completely missed the point of what Godzilla is.

And spare me the "Other movies do it too!" argument. What other movies not even tangentially related to Godzilla do or don't do is irrelevant. That's like saying that it's ok for Batman v. Superman to suck because Batman and Robin sucked, too.

[Variola]

What I dont understand is why are people suddenly getting so anal about movie events tying into historical events when films do it ALL the time?
Why is this suddenly so different?

And then to suggest the people working on this movie don't know a thing about Godzilla or even care??? WTF??

As stated, my biggest issue with it wasn't that it was tampering with history, but that it doesn't work within the context of the movie, let alone the greater themes of Godzilla. There have been countless discussions about what Godzilla represents, and in a film that was dead-set on "going back to Godzilla's roots", the movie completely missed the point of what Godzilla is.

And spare me the "Other movies do it too!" argument. What other movies not even tangentially related to Godzilla do or don't do is irrelevant. That's like saying that it's ok for Batman v. Superman to suck because Batman and Robin sucked, too.

Attempting to limit Godzilla's meaning to just "he's nuclear warfare" is to miss the essence of why the character has remained relevant for 60 years; his meaning is not fixed, he changes with the times. He's been everything from defender of mother nature to the incarnation of Japan's WW2 crimes. Godzilla's "theme" can be whatever the particular film wants it to be.

[HannibalBarca]

But the dawn of the nuclear age is almost universally the starting point.

[three]

But the dawn of the nuclear age is almost universally the starting point.

And why does this matter? People have been complaining that we as America's took the creature from the land it hand meaning to and made it a tool for profit. At least now there's a tie in to a major event in American history that makes Godzilla both a threat and relevant to our culture, which it arguably was not before.

Further, considering past us - Cuban relations, it does have a bit of a nuclear theme.