Hopefully, I’m not going to go insane from the process of trying to make sense of this movie.
Did you know that the Heisei series wasn't
supposed to end with Godzilla vs.
Destoroyah? Originally, Toho
promised to bring back the Heisei series by 2004, while letting the American
line of Godzilla movies have center stage until that time.
...But rather than get the one that
TriStar initially promised, which was basically a high budget take on the 1960s
Godzilla movies and cancelled late-70s projects combined into one awesome thing
(it's a great story, you should read it!), they got
something completely different, due to Toho over-interfering during the early
stages, and TriStar's subsequent over-resisting Toho's over-interfering.
In particular, a major cause of conflict
and cancellation was that TriStar wanted to make a sidekick for Godzilla so
that they could have an OC that they could use as much as they wanted since
they realized that Toho staff would give them Hell if they made sequels without
giving Toho a huge cut of the deal, or, for that matter, without following all
of Toho’s very constraining rules for how Godzilla should be depicted, rules
that ironically, Toho themselves seldom ever followed. Because the intended director, Jan Du Bont,
thought that the sidekick idea was too contrived and would be hard to fit into
the script anyway, and probably because TriStar staff were just that peeved at
Toho at this point, poor Jan du Bont was basically ousted from the project (no,
really, Sci-Fi Japan did a series about this, here's part1.)
The result? TriStar gave it to Roland
Emmerich and Dean Devlin, who seemingly disliked the original script because
they thought Godzilla was silly (and to be fair, Roland Emmerich spent years in
a Soviet-ran country, so when the Iron Curtain lifted, he became tremendously
obsessed with the higher-budget work of Ray Harryhausen, and he desperately
wanted to combine Harryhausen with Godzilla), and desiring tons of creative
freedom, they made their own. The
agreement was that they would only work on it if TriStar would back out, which
they did, and Toho was no longer going to interfere with the project. By the time they were shown what was happening,
it was too late, and they just had to approve of it anyway. And that's how 1998's GODZILLA was
born. Needless to say, reviews were
mixed during the two months of its release, and then flat-out negative after it
was out of theaters and the hype died down.
To show people who the "real
Godzilla" is and probably also to flip off the TriStar staff, Shogo
Tomiyama planned three different Godzilla movies, each taking place in a
totally different reality, the only consistent thread in any of them being some
fairly blatant tribute to the original Showa series of Godzilla movies, and the
one that got the most popularity would either get sequels or inspire a new
series, and if none were popular, they would just go back to waiting until 2004
to resume the Heisei series. GMK
naturally did the best, but since the director didn't want to do any more Godzilla movies, and also probably because the topic, Nanking denial in Japan (it was
hinted that Godzilla's spirits were basically angry that the Japanese were
pretending that the Nanking Massecre never happened!), was almost too
controversial at the time anyway, Toho instead decided to make a line of
similar movies, but not the same. These
were the Kiryu Saga, which was probably made to recover Godzilla's reputation
after TriStar's un-Godzilla-like thing.
Still, they had their promise to keep, and for the 50th anniversary,
they had to make a movie that continued the Heisei continuity...but what they
ended up with was something else entirely...
One of the earliest drafts of Godzilla Final Wars was written about a
very specific incarnation of Godzilla, Godzilla Jr., he was frozen in ice
during the late 1990s, probably around 1997, and was awoken again by 2032. This was to fulfill the promise to have a
sequel movie to the Heisei series, in spite of all of the Millennium-series
movies before. It was probably
structured that way because Toho couldn't financially back a whole new Heisei
series after all their Millennium movies, so it would have been better to
simply wait and renew interest for the character.
However, when producer and writer Shogo
Tomiyama got a new director, Ryuhei Kitamura, who admitted that he didn’t care
about the Heisei series at all, but rather, leaned more towards the 1970s
movies (especially the Mechagodzilla movies), because they were “more relevant”
(was this guy seriously living under a rock
during the early Heisei era? The Heisei series was relevant too! Just played it
a bit more “safe”), he tried to partially remove Final Wars from the overall
direction of the Heisei series. Thus, he
began greatly altering the intended project, not changing the story too much,
but definitely making huge changes to the Universe it was set in and altering
the overall style of the story, so somewhere along the lines of production, it not
only got re-written into the strange thing that it is today, but it was hardly
even a sequel to the Heisei series; the only conclusive coherency it had to
anything previously existing was that it was simply continuing on the usual
Millennium series pattern of Showa-era tribute.
In fact, Godzilla Final Wars, as it currently is at the moment, seems to be the
Schrodinger's cat of Godzilla canon: It fits with anything and fits with
nothing. A lot of fans believe that
Godzilla was frozen around 1964/5 and released around 2004/5; after all, there
was talk about the 1954 movie and the 1960s in the backstory according to
fairly sketchy claims and interviews.
However, a lot of promotional material and, it seems, one of Toho's
"Completion Books", asserts that after a rampage in response to when
the Earth's environment was destroyed in the early 21st century (apparently
caused by the same disaster that took his family away from him), Godzilla was
frozen around 20XX, and then released again twenty years later, so most of it
happened further to the future than many would have guessed, but he obviously
was not frozen around 1965 or 1997.
From the information given about the movie
from various sources, sewn together with guesswork to fill in the holes, this
seems to be the entire backstory behind the final product of Final Wars:
Godzilla first appeared around 1954, and
after physical evisceration by the Oxygen Destroyer, he was reduced to almost
nothing, but from some stray G-Cells, he soon grew back a new body, and
frequently terrorized the globe during the 1960s. He became less of a consistent and serious
threat after that point, and by 2005 (?), he apparently discovered at least one
other member of his species and had gained a family.
However, that same year, a super-massive
ecological disaster (probably a nuclear one) not only awoke and possibly
mutated some new monsters (probably the creatures in the montage and also the
beasts that attacked during the movie..except, oddly enough, Zilla; Zilla's
backstory was apparently that he was an X-alien attempt to make a Godzilla-like
creature from scratch, without any G-Cells!
Needless to say, it didn't work) and activated the latent M-Base in the
humans descended from the X-aliens, resulting in the Mutants we see in Final Wars, but it also destroyed entire ecosystems and seemingly killed Godzilla's family (but Minilla actually survived; perhaps
his egg hatched during Final Wars), so he went on a huge rampage all around the
globe, for years destroying entire civilizations. However, this and all of the other monsters
caused the humans to stop fighting each other, and instead unite to stop the
beasts. This resulted in the Earth
Defense Force and the M-Unit. The
mutants were probably chosen to fight Godzilla in particular because, as
observed in Final Wars, they had the enhanced reflexes and limited
pre-cognition needed to deal with Godzilla's own swift breath and good aim
(Most Godzillas can accurately hit supersonic jets for crying out loud!), and
so they were ideal for fighting against him.
By 2012 (?), the E.D.F. subdued most of the
kaiju at the time, whether by killing, maiming, driving away, relocating, or
capturing them...except for Godzilla. He
was still rampaging and resisting any effort they dished out to defeat him
(because he’s Godzilla; he’s actually technically beatable, but it’s never easy). They lured him to Antarctica to deal with him
without killing civilians. The gigantic
army prepared against him was destroyed, but there is a surviving trump card,
the Gotengo. With help from the
instability of the Earth, perhaps caused by Godzilla's struggle, Douglas
Gordon, probably the only non-mutant who isn’t a warranted officer on the
Gotengo, proves himself by launching missiles at the mountain and creating an
avalanche that sealed Godzilla. And
there he remained, for twenty years, while the world lived in peace and staved
off whatever giant monsters came...
...And that might be the backstory behind Final Wars! It's really hard to tell,
given all the contradictory information given about the vague backstory. Most who try to understand this movie go
completely insane, and there are blogs out there that have been heavily
dedicated to understanding this odd bit of Godzilla lore that attest to
this. It's like The King in
Yellow: The more you try to understand it, the crazier you get!
So that is Final Wars, a troubled movie
that suffered from a troubled production.
My sources are G-Fan magazines and Toho’s Completion Books. Hopefully I’m still sane. Now if you excuse me, the little voices in my
head are telling me to free all of the zoo animals in order to defeat the cult
that secretly performs rituals on honeybees in my local post office. Hopefully they won’t mind the scones.
Editor's Note: From studying this confusing movie's equally perplexing history, this human has ended up like Dalek Caan.
Editor's Note: From studying this confusing movie's equally perplexing history, this human has ended up like Dalek Caan.
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