There’s a broad perception of giant monster movies having a fatal flaw of sorts. It’s not always the case, but the genre is oftentimes lousy with its human stories and characters, unable to conjure the sort of investment necessary to make the bits between the destruction flow smoothly.
As someone who’s seen every single live-action Godzilla movie at least once, this is an undeniable problem for the series, whether the films come from the United States or the King of the Monster’s country of origin, Japan. However, Japan has been far more successful in crafting human characters worth caring about on the whole. The original film from 1954 managed this with most of its cast, and yet so many of the films in the nearly 70 years of Godzilla’s existence since have struggled to match it with rare exceptions.
They swapped these human stories for the spectacle of watching monsters fight, and admittedly it has worked for the series in terms of pure entertainment. Yet, over the last 10 years, filmmakers around the world have tried to recapture the human-driven drama of the 1954 film in different ways.
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