The Most Sublime Godzilla Movie
Godzilla is one of those cinematic characters, like James Bond or Batman, who has sustained many different approaches over the better part of a century. There are over thirty Godzilla movies, and they cover a wide range of tones, styles, and genres. Some, like Ishirō Honda’s 1954 original, are quite serious. Others (more than not, really) are very silly. Some Godzilla movies (for instance, those with Mechagodzilla) have more pronounced science fiction elements; others (like 2016’s Shin Godzilla) lean more heavily into horror. The characterization of the monster himself also varies. Sometimes Godzilla is merely a large and scary animal, a destructive force to be survived and, if possible, protected against. Other times, he is anthropomorphized to a more or less significant extent, becoming sympathetic and even lovable. Sometimes he becomes humanity’s de facto protector against worst monsters; other times he is actively malicious.
All of this is to say that it is difficult to settle on criteria for what constitutes “the best Godzilla movie.” I won’t argue too hard against what seems to be the consensus: that the original 1954 film, a carefully composed black and white drama that uses Godzilla as a metaphor through which to reckon with the impact of the atomic bomb on Japan less than a decade prior, is the greatest Godzilla film and a great film in its own right. It is the only one that could reasonably be described as a “classic.” Last year’s Godzilla Minus One also has a plausible claim to the title, by virtue of the fact that it has the most emotionally involving character work in any Godzilla movie by a sizable margin: in Minus One, the titular monster is almost incidental to the story of a traumatized kamikaze pilot healing from the wounds of World War II and learning to live again. However, my personal favorite Godzilla movie is Gareth Edwards’ 2014 remake, and the aesthetic philosophy of Edmund Burke explains why.
According to Burke, the sublime is that which affects us with a kind of aesthetically pleasurable fear – a “sort of delightful horror, which is the most genuine effect and truest test of the sublime.” The sublime inspires awe and reverence because of the way it arrests, astonishes, and overwhelms our imagination, and nothing overwhelms the imagination quite like fear. Burke writes that “terror is in all cases whatsoever, either more openly or latently, the ruling principle of the sublime.” He goes on, “To make anything very terrible, obscurity seems in general to be necessary. When we know the full extent of any danger, when we can accustom our eyes to it, a great deal of the apprehension vanishes… It is one thing to make an idea clear, and another to make it affecting to the imagination.”
By Burke’s definition, no Godzilla movie is more sublime than Edwards’ 2014 film. Edwards does not allow us to “accustom our eyes” to Godzilla. If he were to simply show us the creature clearly, as many other Godzilla movies do – from afar, say, in broad daylight – we would see that he is only a big, computer generated dinosaur and his sublimity would be diminished. Edwards, however, keeps his monsters wreathed in obscurity. Much of the film takes place at night, in thick darkness that renders Godzilla an enormous, indistinct shape; and as Burke observes, “in nature, dark, confused, uncertain images have a greater power on the fancy to form the grander passions, than those have which are more clear and determinate.”
Moreover, Edwards almost never shows us all of Godzilla in one shot; instead, he will choose his light sources carefully and sparingly to reveal a gigantic tail sweeping through the air or a huge foot stomping into view. By only ever unveiling his creatures incompletely, Edwards makes us feel that they are simply too immense for our eyes to take in all at once, and this, too, fits neatly with the Burkean theory of the sublime. According to Burke, “greatness of dimension” and “infinity” are among the most powerful sources of the sublime. Though few or none of the objects of our senses are truly infinite, Burke argues that if an object is big enough that its limits cannot be neatly defined, it can tap into the same vein of sublime terror: “the eye not being able to perceive the bounds of many things, they seem to be infinite, and they produce the same effects as if they were really so.”
Edwards’ Godzilla combines this illusion of infinity with a judicious use of obscurity to invest Godzilla with a sublime presence that I do not think he has had in any film before or since. Although I have seen the film a number of times in the ten years since its release, and thus accustomed my eyes to it to some degree, it continues to inspire me with astonished delight.