Reviewing Monsters: Legendary Pictures Kaiju Movies

So yeah, we reviewed Pacific Rim kaiju a while back, and I still haven't watched most of the Toho Godzilla movies yet... but hey, there's the Legendary Pictures "Monsterverse", consisting of the 2014 Godzilla movie (an actually good Godzilla movie by Hollywood), Kong: Skull Island, Godzilla: King of the Monsters and the upcoming Godzilla vs. Kong. Most of you guys can watch Godzilla vs. Kong soon, but not me, so I'll have to make do with watching the older movies. 

Because I can, I'm going to review the monsters from the Godzilla movies first, then to Skull Island. It's more thematic that way, anyway.

(Other articles are briefly delayed for the next couple of weeks, IRL stuff has been keeping me from writing too much this month)

Godzilla!

What's there not to say about Godzilla? The Big G, Gojira, has a far, far more faithful adaptation of his actual backstory from the source material -- an ancient beast awakened by humanity's nuclear bomb testing. Obviously a lot of the 1954 movie's subtleties about Godzilla being a stand-in for nuclear war is severely toned down, but, thankfully, not the fact that he's a primal, immensely powerful being from Earth's prehistory that has the right to be the 'true ruler' of the world, and us humans are just sort of a curiousity he tolerates. Again, I'm not going to talk too much about the plot of these movies (they're pretty good and there's only a handful of them, go watch 'em) and I don't think there's a whole ton I can talk about good ol' Godzilla that people haven't talked about before. A gigantic, upright-standing dinosaurian beast with massive jagged spikes, and the ability to consume and unleash nuclear blasts? Yeah. As always, the design of Godzilla is primal enough to make him terrifying when he rampages around and flattens human cities, but still a fair bit more heroic than the monsters that Godzilla fights against to (kinda-sorta?) defend humanity. Not a whole ton to say here. Godzilla is a classic, and this is a pretty faithful adaptation of how he looks in the source material while giving that good ol' Hollywood CGI budget to make him blend in better with photorealistic buildings and humans. 

The MUTO

The antagonists of the 2014 Godzilla movie are a pair of nuclear-eating bug-lizard monsters that are attempting to reproduce, called the MUTO (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Oragnism). While MUTO seems to be intended to be the catch-all term for all kaiju, it would later just be applied to this species and the sequels would use the far catchier 'Titans'. As with most fictional giant bug monsters, we get a fun little bit of sexual dimorphism between these two monsters -- the male one is a lot smaller, but it can fly; while the female one is much larger but has larger arms. They look very cool in motion! The general look of them are otherwise pretty similar, and they walk around in what could be best described as a combination in aesthetics between a spider and a bat, with the head of some sort of demon-lizard. The result ends up being utterly alien (especially in comparison to Godzilla), but still close enough to a natural animal for us to believe that these guys are creatures that mutated from something in the earth. The combination of their larger, bat-wing-like locomotive arms and that sleek, lizard-bug face... yeah, the MUTO's are pretty cool. 

They're not named beyond being called 'the male' and 'the female' (the script calls them 'Hokmuto' and 'Femuto'), and I do find it interesting that the species, as well as Godzilla, go around feeding on nuclear energy. It's a plot point in the movie that they're using nuclear bombs to lure the MUTO's around. And if I'm not misremembering things, I think they are able to channel these nuclear-feeding abilities into electromagnetic blasts that really fucks up the weapon systems of us puny humans. In a rather rare move for a big-monster movie, I do enjoy the fact that the MUTO aren't entirely unsympathetic despite being portrayed as the more bestial and monstrous creature next to Godzilla; the two are just trying to feed and reproduce, and even show some tenderness towards each other. It's just that their attempts to do so will wipe out both Godzilla and humanity. 

Mothra

In Godzilla: King of the Monsters, we get to see a whole bunch of classic Toho kaiju showing up, though, as the other 'Titans' that lie slumbering all over the planet. The first we're introduced to is Mothra, first as a giant grub, and then as the gigantic, aircraft-carrier-sized giant moth we all know and love. Say what you will about the quality of scripting and pacing in King of the Monsters, we're all here to see giant monsters fight and not to see some silly plot about humans -- that's called 'background noise'. And for the rather chopped-up screentime that she got, Mothra's visual appearance is pretty awesome -- particularly the movie's constant depiction of Mothra as this almost heavenly being. A combination of her quite literally parting the clouds, shining like a giant bug angel, and the sound effects? Yeah, she's a badass. 

The movie sort of implies that Mothra and Godzilla's species have some sort of a symbiotic relationship, and they can transfer their consumed nuclear energy to each other... kinda Dragon Ball-y, but okay, sure. Mothra herself actually gets to fight a fair bit in the movie. I won't spoil everything, but suffice to say that her gigantic kaiju-mantis claws and her wasp-like stingers aren't just for show, and she doesn't just go around shooting silk. Honestly, they didn't stray too far from the source material again -- I could see a version of this where they decide to adapt Mothra but decide to make her appearance more 'realistic'. She's still a big-ass giant moth, she's got big pretty moth wings, and I love that. 

King Ghidorah

Who else to menace Godzilla and Mothra, but Big G's most well-known nemesis, King Ghidorah? And while King of the Monsters does call him 'Monster Zero' like one of those 'too cool for our source material' pragmatic adaptations... turns out that, nah, they're a cool adaptation and end up calling him by his proper name, King Ghidorah, around halfway through the movie. Ghidorah's pretty badass, and I'm frankly surprised at how much they managed to cram in from the source material. Even the fact that Ghidorah is an outsider species not native to Earth, and is about to fuck up the entire ecosystem -- something that, admittedly, the movie sort of struggles to work in well, but Ghidorah Bad Godzilla God, let them fight, okay? 

So, yeah. Ghidorah's a huge three-headed dragon that breathes lightning (okay, 'gravity beams') and creates a localized hurricane around him. That's badass! And he can regenerate his heads when it's destroyed and stuff -- something that all the humans note is pretty bizarrely alien even in a setting with giant nuclear monsters the size of buildings. We get some pretty amazing shots of Godzilla and Ghidorah roaring at each other. Having big-ass dragon wings really does make Ghidorah feel so much more menacing, and the fact that he's actually intelligent enough to hunt down a specific human is also pretty eerie. And if you pay pretty close attention to Ghidorah's fights, he actually learns between each encounter with Godzilla. The movie does sell that he's an alien abomination pretty damn well, I must say. And, y'know, a three-headed dragon with massive wings is always going to be cool no matter how you slice it up. 

Rodan

No disrespect to any of the other scenes in the movie, but Godzilla is badass, Ghidorah is awe-inspiring, and Mothra is heavenly... but Rodan? My boy Rodan ('Radon' to Japanese viewers) here gets what, I think, are the best scenes in the movie. And he sticks around for far, far longer than I thought he would! From the utterly primal awakening scene where Rodan quite literally bursts out of a volcano with the same force of a volcanic eruption, and the follow-up scene where the sheer force of his wingbeats unleash a storm that wipes out a town, and the subsequent utter massacre of fighter jets... yeah, Rodan is pretty goddamn badass for what's essentially just a big pterodactyl with funny horns. He's also got volcanic cracks all over his wings, too, and I absolutely love everything about this guy. It's mostly just that awakening scene and the chase scene, really, but I think that scene ended up being the one that made me feel the wonder and terror that I felt the first time I stumbled upon the giant monster genre as a kid. 

Behemoth
I have been doing nothing but fanboying about Ghidorah, Rodan and Mothra and how well they adapted them from the source material. And honestly, there's a significant amount of bias there, since one of my earliest exposure to the kaiju genre is, well, Ghidorah the Three-Headed Monster. But we're here to talk about monsters, and there are more monsters than the main four in King of the Monsters. Like this guy here, Behemoth! He's a big-ass shaggy gorilla-man with no mouth and giant mammoth tusks. I love how at a glance he kinda looks like something more familiar; an elephant or a gorilla depending on where your mind goes, but there's just something wrong about him until you take in the anatomy as a whole.

Methuselah

Speaking of badass 'giant slumbering kaiju awakens' scenes, Methuselah might be a bit character, but the visuals of a giant mountain just standing up is just so, so badass. The design isn't anything super special, it's honestly a pretty basic 'giant quadruped that's sorta like a dinosaur, but with a more human gait' vibe that many video game monsters tend to employ. But that scene alone is pretty badass, right? 

Methuselah, Behemoth and a bunch of other Kaiju (including a 'Queen' MUTO!) are basically background characters that get unleashed from their slumbering parts, and end up being drawn to either destroy the earth or stay relatively stable depending on whether Ghidorah or Godzilla becomes the new 'alpha' of the Titans. Not sure how that works across many different species, though. 

Scylla

They've got a giant spider monster with a mass of squid tentacles hanging down her mouth. Yeah, two of my favourite animals in the whole world, combined into one? Scylla here is a lot more mundane-looking than the MUTO, honestly, but since the MUTO also hangs out with her in this movie I can't mind. Take a look at her awakening scene, and see her gigantic crab/spider legs just bursting out of the grounds and obliterating those mining equipment! Actually, not going to lie, as cool as Scylla ended up being, my imagination went so wild when I first saw that scene in the movie, wondering just what sort of creature has anatomy like that. Turns out Scylla just slumbers upside-down, and she's a pretty ordinary giant spider monster. A giant spider with legs striding through cities is still pretty fucking badass, though. 

King Kong

Next up is Kong: Skull Island! It's set in the same continuity as the two Legendary Godzilla monsters, but is otherwise very much standalone as a bunch of people from different walks of life end up being strung along into what seemed to be an innocuous survey of an uncharted island. Turns out it's Skull Island, home to a gigantic ape, Kong, who rules as king there. He's a big ape, and he gets a lot of badass scenes in his movie. My favourite is probably the opening scene where he shows up very suddenly and wrecks house with a bunch of helicopters, but the final fight where he actually shows that he's smart (well, as smart as your average ape, anyway) is also pretty badass. He truly feels like a proper, primal giant beast and not one that's going to be taken down by biplanes shooting at him any time soon.

Like Godzilla, Ghidorah and the rest, Kong is a pretty classic monster in pop culture, so there's not a whole ton for me to say here. 

Skullcrawlers

Kong isn't actually nice, and more or less just tolerates the funny humans that native to Skull Island, but he acts as a deterrant against these subterranean monsters called Skullcrawlers -- which the movie quickly establish had killed Kong's parents, and the arrival of modern humans and their bombs have roused them from their deep nest. It's very, very cool how utterly bizarre these guys look -- having a creature run around with only two legs but having a more reptilian body is a simple but very effective way of having them scream 'unnatural', huh? Their heads aren't actually bone, they're just coloured and textured like it, I believe -- the effect is still pretty creepy, though. 

They're large enough to gulp down humans with their whip-like tongues, and the movie quickly establishes that while a bunch of the smaller Skullcrawlers are more of a threat to humans (due to being the size of dinosaurs) Kong can more or less beat them down given time. The largest one, the Skull Devil ('Ramarak' in the novel adaptation) is far bigger, and far, far more intelligent, with a particularly cool scene having it realize that one of its prey is trying to trick it into swallowing a bomb. Overall it's just a bigger version of its small Skullcrawler buddies, but the general design of this thing in general is just so unsettlingly cool and pretty well done all around. 

Leafwing

The best part of Kong: Skull Island is that it isn't just about Kong-vs-the-Skullcrawlers. Skull Island is filled with a bunch of weird monsters, but instead of just making it dinosaurs-but-slightly-mutated, we have a bunch of fancy monsters! The Leafwings aren't particularly different, essentially acting like vultures or pterodactyls, but as the characters in the movie point out... that sure is one ugly-ass face. That skull, the saw-shark beak, and that grin... yeah, the Leafwings look pretty ugly! Not a whole ton for me to say here. 

Sker Buffalo

The first of Skull Island's unconventional (non-Kong) wildlife that our cast meet is a gigantic buffalo, which seems to basically have a forest grow on its back. The first one we see rises up from being submerged underwater, so either they can hold their breath for a long time, or they are amphibious? Whatever the case, they sure are big herbivores. Pretty cool, and ancillary material would actually establish them to be symbiotically bonded to the algae that grow on it, so much that part of its circulatory system specifically pumps chlorophyll. 

Mother Longlegs

The subject of a pretty badass action scene, a bunch of our human soldier characters suddenly see one of their men impaled through a giant bamboo tree... which is bizarre, and then they realize that part of the forest is actually the legs of a particularly gigantic spider. A fucking badass concept for a monster, and when one of the soldiers get caught by whip-like tentacles (its abdomen appears to open up entirely into these tentacles), we see that the Mother Longlegs has a set of crab- or whipspider-esque claws on its mouth. Is this a juvenile version of Scylla from King of the Monsters? The head doesn't look similar enough, but bugs do change a lot as they mature... I do really like the idea of this monster and the very eerie scene we see it in. Giant spider-crabs also appear in the 2005 King Kong movie, and I enjoyed them there, although they're far smaller than 'Mother' here. Or maybe I just really like giant crab-spider monsters in general. 

Spore Mantis

Not actually a mantis, but more of a big, fat stick insect, this guy actually pretends to be a log. Its face does look kind of locust-like, and I do really like the scene where the Spore Mantis rises up and surprises one of the soldier characters. It is driven off with gunfire, and the way we see the bullets impact on the 'mantis' seems to imply that the body of the creature is actually made up of wood. We don't get to see much of this guy, but he's pretty cool!

Mire Squid

Our last one here is another one with a misnomer for a name. It's an octopus, and it bursts out of a lake to try an ambush a wounded King Kong. Kong turns the Mire Squid into sashimi, and apparently its appearance here is a reference to how Kong fought a giant octopus in King Kong vs. Godzilla. Not much to say, it's just a big cephalopod!

...and that's it for this time around. Honestly, a lot of my goodwill towards this movie series is just how faithful the feel of the series is in making these giant kaiju the star of their show instead of being upstaged by the human characters -- something that the 1996 adaptation fails in. But having pretty cool monster design helps too, for sure!