King of the Monsters: Film vs Novelization Differences

[HannibalBarca]

The movie doesn't go into detail about the ORCA/whale thing, but he mentions offhand that it was first designed to keep pods of whales away from the shore.

[BlankAccount]

The movie doesn't go into detail about the ORCA/whale thing, but he mentions offhand that it was first designed to keep pods of whales away from the shore.

And the first time they used it was a disaster as five whales beached themselves, 3 of them cutting themselves on rocks and getting themselves killed. That's why Mark destroyed the original and was pissed to learn a new one was made, it's more than just fear of luring a monster to a city, it's playing god and causing harm to the natural world. He felt no human should have that kind of control over nature.

[HannibalBarca]

The movie doesn't go into detail about the ORCA/whale thing, but he mentions offhand that it was first designed to keep pods of whales away from the shore.

And the first time they used it was a disaster as five whales beached themselves, 3 of them cutting themselves on rocks and getting themselves killed. That's why Mark destroyed the original and was pissed to learn a new one was made, it's more than just fear of luring a monster to a city, it's playing god and causing harm to the natural world. He felt no human should have that kind of control over nature.

Yeah that's the part the movie doesn't have.

[Can of Conspiracy]

Finished it today. Loved how the opening quotes in the last two chapters were from Serizawa, first the "Let them fight!" speech, then musings from his notebook.

It felt a bit weird to get some last minute backstory details on the Russels' during Emma's final scene, about her work being the cause of them initially moving from Boston to San Francisco (and how Mark blamed her for what happened, but secretly so did she), which I don't think ever came up earlier in the novel. The emotional closure felt earned and really satisfying though, and the way the theme of balance came up while she was reflecting on their broken family was great.

Oh yeah, Barnes drops F-bomb number 3 during the final fight, upon seeing Burning Godzilla. And during the epilogue the fisherman selling Ghidorah's head, who's "made a good catch" and muses that "again luck had been with him" is called Santiago - I'll be damned if this is not a reference to Hemingway and The Old Man and the Sea. Beautiful.

Overall it seems like a bit more thought went into this one than you would normally expect from a novelization. I can't recommend it enough, especially as a lot of you loved the movie a great deal more than I did. It was the first work I've ever read from Greg Keyes and the first narration I've heard from Michael Braun, but I have both of their names on my radar now.

[TheInfiniteAeon]

So their work on the ORCA is what made them go to San Francisco huh? You think they went for a cruise on the GoWhale Tours boat?

[GoWhaleTours]

So their work on the ORCA is what made them go to San Francisco huh? You think they went for a cruise on the GoWhale Tours boat?

I hope they took a ride on me

[ClandestineCanine9]

So their work on the ORCA is what made them go to San Francisco huh?

who watches movies for human drama? it isn't relevant to the plot at all. I don't care, I want big monster!
addendum: the bad part is, one of my friends actually has this viewpoint. he does not care about the humans in movies like this in the slightest, and used their time on screen to go to the bathroom and get refills.

but seriously, the Russells were honestly the most disappointing part of the movie. they had next to no backstory and as such, I don't really care about them.

[GuardianGhido]

Just found a part of the novelization where it seems like when Madison was in the bathtub, she didn't randomly breathe on her own, Mothra actually healed her with some kind of vision of contacting her in Larva state or some Magical Mothra Mumbo Jumbo like that.

[Desghidorah]

So they decide to keep connected Godzilla to Leviathan even though they have a Titan named Leviathan? Might as well have linked Kong to Behemoth.

Except, and weirdly enough, we got a monster explicitly named Behemoth.

We have one named Leviathan in the novel.

Keep in mind those are Monarch designations. Not all of them might have a mythology explicitly naming them like Gojira or Kong. So basically the Titan they are calling Leviathan is just called that, whereas Godzilla literally is what the myth of Leviathan, as stated in the story of the biblical Job, is based on. It's sort of like how they are calling one of the titans Behemoth as a designation, but the novelization seems to imply it's actually the Mapinguari (as it's sloth-like).

One thing to also keep in mind is that special powers seemed to be a fairly rare trait amongst titans. Most of them seem to be fairly tooth and claw. Leviathan in the Old Testament is explicitly stated to breath out fire or lights of some sort, which seems to fit Godzilla better than anybody else.

[MegaEvilSaurus666]

There's one question that's been eating away at me. What was Madison truly trying to accomplish with the Orca in Boston? Does the novelization expand upon this?

It seemed like it was a setup for the final battle, and she didn't know that it was going to happen at all, so what was the point of it?

[Pkmatrix]

There's one question that's been eating away at me. What was Madison truly trying to accomplish with the Orca in Boston? Does the novelization expand upon this?

It seemed like it was a setup for the final battle, and she didn't know that it was going to happen at all, so what was the point of it?

That was explained in the movie, though: it was to stop the attacks. That's why they showed the news reporting that the Titan attacks had all stopped, she was broadcasting the "Be Calm" command Emma used to pacify Mothra at the beginning. Ghidorah showing up wasn't part of her plan.

I think Madison assumed when Emma said they would pause the plan, draw Ghidorah to Boston, and then figure out how to control Ghidorah that Parts 2 and 3 were things that would have to be initiated not the direct immediate results of Part 1. Which is probably also why Emma was in such a panicked rush to find Madison after they figured out what she'd done, Emma knew that Ghidorah would be drawn to the Orca once she used it to stop the other Titans.

[MegaEvilSaurus666]

There's one question that's been eating away at me. What was Madison truly trying to accomplish with the Orca in Boston? Does the novelization expand upon this?

It seemed like it was a setup for the final battle, and she didn't know that it was going to happen at all, so what was the point of it?

That was explained in the movie, though: it was to stop the attacks. That's why they showed the news reporting that the Titan attacks had all stopped, she was broadcasting the "Be Calm" command Emma used to pacify Mothra at the beginning. Ghidorah showing up wasn't part of her plan.

I think Madison assumed when Emma said they would pause the plan, draw Ghidorah to Boston, and then figure out how to control Ghidorah that Parts 2 and 3 were things that would have to be initiated not the direct immediate results of Part 1. Which is probably also why Emma was in such a panicked rush to find Madison after they figured out what she'd done, Emma knew that Ghidorah would be drawn to the Orca once she used it to stop the other Titans.

Thanks for the detail, but I knew that much about the movie. I had assumed the character should've known of Ghidorah's tendency to follow the Orca, considering her usage of it in Antarctica that caught his attention during his attack. The plan was convoluted? I was hoping that the novelization would have worked in more information about this.

[daveblackeye15]

I'm fine with Madison's action since it's a combination of being brave and youthful lack of hindsight/planning.

[GojiDog]

I just ordered my copy of the novelization.

Can't wait to read it!

[G2000]

Interesting excerpt from the novel that I was reminded of today because it was so similar to a fan series I once read. There’s a bit during Rodan’s emergence in Mexico in which Mark speculates that Godzilla, Rodan and similar Titans are far more ancient and far more different than we initially thought, possibly having evolved during Earth’s infancy in the Hadean or Archean eons:

“Maybe the Monarch scientists had it wrong. They kept telling him the Titans were part of the natural order, but he didn’t see it. How could that be natural? Maybe the Titans didn’t arise when the rest of life on Earth did. What if they weren’t part of life as we know it at all? What if they came from before, when there was no water or free oxygen, when everything was a volcanic hellscape, the atmosphere a perpetual lightning storm, when radiation sleeted from the sky and pulsed from the ground at levels that would strike a human dead in the time it took to draw a breath of the poisonous atmosphere. The Earth was like that for billions of years, before it started to rain, the sky to cool, seas to form. Before bacteria. Before the first photosynthetic organism started pumping oxygen into the air. Plenty of time for another kind of life to evolve based on some other chemistry that didn’t need water or oxygen. It was easy to believe, watching the terrible flaming bird gain on them, that life as they knew it was just a pale attempt to imitate what came before, those earlier[…]”

[LamangoKaijura]

Wasn't there a titan in the novel that wasn't in the movie? I specifically remember 'Kraken' being tossed around and even rampaging.

[HannibalBarca]

Wasn't there a titan in the novel that wasn't in the movie? I specifically remember 'Kraken' being tossed around and even rampaging.

There's a giant squid monster contained in the Indian ocean that the movie doesn't touch on at all.

[BlankAccount]

Wasn't there a titan in the novel that wasn't in the movie? I specifically remember 'Kraken' being tossed around and even rampaging.

Several. Karken is one of them.

[G2000]

Wasn't there a titan in the novel that wasn't in the movie? I specifically remember 'Kraken' being tossed around and even rampaging.

There were at least two. The most prominent is Mokele-Mbembe. Unlike the “real life” cryptid it’s named after (generally depicted as a sauropod living in the Congo) here it’s depicted as some sort of horrific reptilie-elephant beast with downturned trunks, a glowing green horn in the center of it’s head, a long reptilian tail, and a “snakelike” trunk that snatches people off the ground and throws them into it’s “crocodile-like” jaws. It sleeps beneath the Nubian Pyramids in Sudan, and when it wakes up it eats most of it’s containment personnel. We later get a scene where it defeats an attempt by MONARCH and the Egyptian military to kill it, and is about to eat a POV character before Maddie activates the ORCA in Boston, causing it to freeze in place and allowing the survivors to escape.

The Kraken is depicted as a massive shelled cephalopod sleeping curled around the wreck of a nuclear submarine in the Indian Ocean, with multiple brains for each limb and a mentioned ability to camouflage. In it’s single scene after Ghidorah sets off the Mass Awakening, the Kraken is able to deceive MONARCH scientists and their equipment by lowering it’s natural radiation levels to make it appear as if it is dead; the Kraken is then able to escape containment, destroy the underwater MONARCH base monitoring it, and massacre the personnel inside as they try to escape.

As mentioned earlier, a few other Titans seen in the movie get some extended sequences; we get to see Scylla fully emerge from her containment site in Arizona, while with Methesulah we get to learn a little about his history before he emerges (two Germans on picnic across from Methesulah’s resting place discuss how according to local legend during the Middle Ages a man returned to his village to find it had disappeared, with the mountain having taken it’s place). Behemoth gets the best treatment of them all, with an extended breakout sequence where his escape is abetted by a MONARCH traitor who declares allegiance to Emma Russell. It’s also discussed that he’s more related to ground sloths than mammoths, that his “true name” is Mapinguary, and he is shown to be fireproof when MONARCH tries and fails to kill him with a souped-up super-flamethrower/jet engine type thing.

And then we have two Titans that are pretty much just namedropped; the Loch Ness Monster is briefly confirmed to be codenamed “Leviathan” and Typhon is mentioned exactly once by Maddie while she’s looking at a map of worldwide Titan attacks, with no detail about where he’s from or what he looks like

Oh yeah, Rodan is also evidently capable of setting off volcanoes simply by flying past them

[Shoopwoop17]

Oh yeah, Rodan is also evidently capable of setting off volcanoes simply by flying past them

Thank god he didn't fly over Yellowstone.