Images from the most recent trailers for Godzilla: King of the Monsters seem to suggest that director Michael Dougherty has more on his mind than giant monsters.
A key image shows the film’s main antagonist, the three-headed King Ghidorah, perched upon a volcano, his enormous bat-like wings spread wide and the mountain beneath his colossal feet spewing magma and sulfur as lightning erupts ominously all around him. So far, this is par for the course in the Godzilla franchise, for which Ghidorah has long been a popular antagonist.
But it is the cross in the scene’s foreground — framing the creature in an apparently demonic light — that has garnered the most interest. While this isn’t the first time that the film’s marketing campaign has suggested a Biblical theme for Ghidorah’s villainy, it is certainly the most straightforward to date.
One of the first plot details released in Legendary Studio’s viral marketing campaign described a creature buried in the Antarctic ice, concluding with the cryptic message that “the Devil has three heads.” As many of our readers will recall, Dante’s Inferno depicts a tri-faced Lucifer frozen in ice at the lowest level of Hell, an imprisonment following his rebellious fall from Heaven. If the new version of Ghidorah is confirmed to be a space monster as most previous versions of the character have been, then the parallel will become even clearer.
As intriguing as all of this may be, the director will most likely turn out to be more concerned with making an enjoyable piece of monster cinema than in applying weighty symbolism. Then again, Dougherty hasn’t been too guarded about his thematic intentions. In a recent interview with Total Film, he is quoted as follows:
“Myself and my writing partner, Zach Shields, we kept saying that we wanted to put the ‘god’ back in Godzilla. By that, I mean, the way that I always saw the creatures growing up. I didn’t see men in rubber suits. I saw ancient, powerful, mythic creatures. To me, these creatures were intelligent beings fighting out old grudges. They were the equivalent of dragons and giants, and all the creatures you read about in mythology and the Bible. That’s what they were. That’s the sort of element that we wanted to add to the film.”
In other words, giant monsters alone aren’t always enough; they have to stand for something even bigger.
In terms of subject matter, the Godzilla series has sometimes veered wildly from the deadly serious (such as Hideaki Anno’s excellent Shin Godzilla) to the purely fun (like Godzilla vs. Monster Zero, from which Dougherty’s film appears to take several cues).
Nevertheless, by inserting Biblical and mythological themes appropriate to the titanic scale of the action, Dougherty might surprise us by crafting a more compelling story than the simple monster’s ball that audiences expect.
Whichever tone Godzilla: King of the Monsters finally favors, it will be interesting to see whether these hints of religious metaphor reflect the finished product.
Godzilla: King of the Monsters is set for release on 31 May, 2019. It is rated PG-13 for sequences of monster action violence and destruction, and for some language.
Michael Saltis
A proud native son of Akron, Ohio, Michael currently teaches English to business professionals in Prague, capital city of the Czech Republic. While he doesn't often get away from the "City of a Hundred Spires," he enjoys exploring the rest of the Old Continent whenever possible—especially those storied corners that help him recall the vividly-imagined knights and dragons of his youth.