I’m sorry, but I’m a cliche. I was lying in bed half asleep last night when my wife came to bed, and I’m fortunate that she didn’t ask what I was thinking.
Because my brain was whirling like a hamster in a cage about…kaiju. This past summer, I have watched Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (big meh, Hollywood exploding the whole premise) and Godzilla Minus One (really good), and of course I’ve watched the original King Kong, which is the only one to get even close to handling this problem properly.
Here’s the problem: energy defeats flesh. People successfully hunted elephants with sharpened sticks and bows and arrows. They hunted whales with harpoons tipped with flint or copper. Thick skin and scales are hard to penetrate, but apply enough force and you can punch through them. In an animal of vast bulk, it is going to be difficult to get through to a vital organ, but if nothing else, make enough holes and it will eventually bleed out. It’s probably going to be enraged first, and try to kill you, but that’s why you don’t pick on an elephant or a whale — it’s the risk, not the invulnerability.
It bugs me in a kaiju movie that everything just explodes on the surface or bounces off Godzilla. He can’t be denser or tougher than the steel and concrete buildings he smashes with nary a scuff or a scratch — there is no armor thick enough in a mobile animal to resist heavy arms fire. Yet the movies just show modern tanks firing at him, and he isn’t even set back, let alone scored with damage. Good ol’ King Kong gets it right, since [spoiler!] they killed him with repeated machine gun fire that caused enough accumulated damage that he fell down dead.
Don’t get me started on Pacific Rim. Why are they building elaborate, complex, giant robots to grapple with the huge biological horrors rising from the deep? One GBU 12 Paveway launched from an F-15, and it’s splattered. I don’t care what it’s made of, if it can’t survive getting punched in the face by a robot, it’s not going to cope with being torn apart by a 500lb bomb and falling back into the sea as a rain of gibs.
So that took care of my concerns about kaiju, and I could get back to sleep.
But then I thought of other problems. What does Mothra eat? Is she denuding entire forests to grow to tremendous size? And possibly, she doesn’t eat as an imago — all she might have on her mind is sex!
I’ll think about that some other night.
Plot armour and movie magic. How does it work? Very well apparently..
Force Fields naturally generated? Mutant superpowers?
So long as you are obsessing about Godzilla’s near invulnerability, what about the bad breath/energy beam and the glowing fins. Clearly something more than flesh and blood going on there.
Once you allow magical thinking, anything is allowed.
According to Pathfinder (1st ED) all Kaiju have Damage reduction 20/epic as well as Fast Healing 30 and a resistance of 30 to all elements.
So you would need a very big damage source (or an extremely magic weapon) to punch through this. For comparison, WWI ship cannons deal a measly 8d6 for an average of 28 of damage.
So I can believe it.
The only vaguely plausible explanation for how a creature that’s orders of magnitude larger than even the most dubious claims of the largest sauropod dinosaur and can shoot nuclear lasers from his mouth works is “magic.”
I like Pacific Rim, it’s a superb “popcorn all the way down” movie. And it’s everything that Transformers wasn’t. The physics isn’t realistic, but we’re talking about giant robots beating giant monsters for franks sake.
Something something Square Cube Law.
Because I paid to see Godzilla get punched in the face by giant robot.
Because they’re supposed to be metaphors for problems that can’t be solved by great big weapons, or that great big weapons make worse?
@6 Recursive Rabbit: According to one source, the original Godzilla was 64 ft. tall (50 m). The largest T Rex found so far is about 13 m if you squint hard. Suppose they could get to 16-ish m. That makes the cube/square ratio ~ 27/9. So yeah, even the original Godzilla would have trouble standing up. Could be he was right at the limit, and that’s why he moved so slowly. The later giants, meh!
John Scalzi has a novel out: The Kaiju Preservation Society that is fun for Kaiju fans.
I read recently that Scalzi’s “Kaiju Preservation Society” has been optioned for a movie.
That story is all about the physics of Kaiju monsters and the problems with them.
I thought in Godzilla Minus One that the big G did take visible damage from large enough explosive weapons – but had an impressive healing factor that repaired those injuries as we watched. From which it follows that they could have taken an expected amount of damage from smaller weapons, but healed too quickly for us to notice the wounds, and it was as if those weapons were actually ineffective.
If you want have a stroke, watch the Gamera kaiju films for children. I forced myself to watch Brandon’s Cult Movie Reviews for each film in that series.
‘Tokyo Gore Police’ also has some physics weirdness.
And then there is anime… like the ‘Dynamite In The Brain’ episode of “Chargeman Ken”.
Like mosquitoes, kaiju need to draw some blood to reproduce.
Icaridin works pretty well to make them draw blood from someone else though.
This, sorta, relates to a question I’ve had for awhile if an elephant gun could fell a T. rex.
@1 StevoR wrote about ‘Mutant superpowers’
I ask: are you referring to movie mega monsters or as I posted earlier,
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/robert-reich/111064/beware-the-mump
Beware the Mump — Donald Trump | Elon Musk
by Robert Reich | July 25, 2024
And, lest we forget, the original Japanese ‘Gojira’ was intended to be a metaphor for the problems of nuclear contamination. New nuke weapons and nuke power plants funding everywhere and how long before we’re up to our asses in nuclear waste and glowing in the dark??
Just read this while slightly drunk. Not sure I’m more drunk than I thought
@15. Walter Solomon :“This, sorta, relates to a question I’ve had for awhile if an elephant gun could fell a T. rex.”
Depends how well & securely the museum has mounted their particular fossil there I reckon.
Thanks @19 StevoR. that’s a great joke. I think we all needed that!
In keeping with the theme:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/7/22/2256550/-Cartoon-The-sensible-pundit-meets-Godzilla
O.K. I’m sure you’ve had enough of me for now. I’ll go get to work.
@15. Walter Solomon :“This, sorta, relates to a question I’ve had for awhile if an elephant gun could fell a T. rex.”
Hmm, Even with the biggest calibre of the Schwerer Gustav at 80 cm, you’d have to chop up the elephant into a fair few strips to fit it in the barrel…
In Pacific Rim the excuse is that they could simply shoot or bomb the monsters. But that they didn’t want to. The monsters were full of environmentally destructive goo, and beating them to death or using superheated/cauterizing blades to cut them into discrete chunks meant containing and cleaning up that goo was much easier than if you exploded them into millions of small bleeding pieces.
@23 Strewth:
Is that in the movie, or a fan retcon? I don’t remember that line.
Not sure it saves it, in any case. There’d be plenty of ways to use modern weapons against kaiju without blowing them into millions of pieces. For example, a carefully calibrated proximity blast would kill them with concussion, without necessarily even breaking the skin. Or build a kaiju-sized knife missile and slice them into the same discrete chunks, but without any risk to big expensive robots and pilots.
For that matter, if swords can slice them, then regular kinetic tank weapons should be able to penetrate kaiju bodies easily. It might take a few shots, but sooner or later you’re bound to hit something vital, while causing minimal external damage (or leaking).
Any way you slice it (ha ha?) kaiju movies definitely rely on underestimating the (frankly terrifying) capabilities of modern weapons.
Because I want to watch a fun movie, that’s why. The rule of cool carries Kaiju from start to finish. Don’t bother me with the details, unless the details are equally fictional technobabble. I love that.
If I want to watch an accurate physical simulation of large animals I can go to the zoo.
Here’s the problem: kaiju aren’t flesh. They’re ideas, as cartomancer so rightly points out in #8. Take the original Gojira, in which in the titular kaiju is a metaphor not just for the atomic bomb in particular, but also for the horrors of war more generally.
What PZ is proposing here is that the solution to the horrors of war is bigger, more powerful weapons, a claim that is specifically addressed by the movie. The hero scientist of the film, a man tormented by the horrors of WWII (horrors in which its suggested that he played an active role) creates a weapon more terrible than the atom bomb. He resists using it precisely because he knows what it will mean if he does- that the great powers of the world will stop at nothing to possess such a weapon. He finally relents when confronted directly with the devastation caused by Gojira, but he destroys all his research and commits suicide rather than play a role in the continuing, ever-escalating cycle of destruction.
Saying “we could just shoot it/blow it up” goes beyond merely missing the point of Godzilla, because the point is that that attitude is what causes so much suffering in the first place. It’s not much different than the attitude that says that the only way to stop mass shootings is to much sure everyone has access to assault weapons and the legal right to carry them everywhere.
There is a perfectly logical explanation for all your concerns.
It’s FICTION
Because it’s fun and makes for an entertaining movie when done right. I’ll wait serious dramas for the gritty realism, but for a popcorn movie, as long as it’s done well I’ll buy into any premise.
For years now my response to why the Klingons changed between the original series and the Next Generation is that make-up technology got better and they now look more cool. I really don’t need a canon, in story reason. It’s also why ships in the prequels look more advanced than in the original series.
@9 “According to one source, the original Godzilla was 64 ft. tall (50 m)”
One of these things is not like the other…
All of you missing the point that looking for holes and thinking up other solutions is also a fun way to interact with fiction (for some of us at least)
If your wife is anything like mine was, there’s no need to be concerned about that hypothetical question. It would be a very short conversation.
“What are you thinking about, honey?”
“Kaiju.”
[sigh] “Again?!” [turns over and goes to sleep]
The problem with that is that there isn’t actually one right way to respond to a movie. The original Godzilla might be a metaphor for nuclear weapons (or a sleeping giant awoken by the hubris of man, or the implacable destruction of war…), sure. But it’s also a physical entity, made of flesh. In the end, when Serizawa uses his device, it asphyxiates. Like any other living creature starved of oxygen.
Nobody is really talking about the 1954 original anyway, not in particular, but rather the genre it spawned. The subsequent movies in that lineage — especially the more recent specimens like Pacific Rim or the Godzilla x King Kong franchise — have maintained the metaphor…imperfectly. I’m sure there’s still some meaning or another in, say, Pacific Rim — environmental destruction, probably? — but let’s be honest, it’s mostly a fun summer movie about implausibly giant robots punching implausibly large dinosaurs.
And it’s equally fun to poke fun at how implausible that is.
In that poster I see two, maybe three people paragliding straight toward Godzilla, trailing plumes of red smoke. Whiskey Tango Actual Foxtrot?!
@ jack lecou, #32
Okay, if that’s the route you want to take.
We are told that the “Oxygen Destroyer” destroys the oxygen in the water, causing whatever is living in it to asphyxiate, but that is not what we are shown. Whatever else the OD does, we see that it dissolves flesh in seconds, leaving behind only bone. Whether or not its mode of action would cause asphyxiation is kind of irrelevant, given that fact.
We know nothing about how Godzilla breathes, or even if they need to. They are supposedly a mutated theropod, which suggests that they most likely breathe air, and have the capacity to hold their breath underwater. If the OD merely destroyed the oxygen in the water and caused asphyxiation, then Godzilla wouldn’t be bothered by it. But, again, that’s not what we see the OD doing.
Consider, too, that Godzilla dies screaming, which they would be unlikely to have the capacity to do if they were asphyxiating. Also, Godzilla sets an entire city on fire and walks through the blaze unfazed; if the flames and smoke from that didn’t harm them, then they’re unlikely to be bothered by simple asphyxia.
Here is what I think: the Oxygen Destroyer is not what Dr. Serizawa says it is. Keep in mind that we already have plenty of ways to render the air or water deadly to anything in it- if all the OD did was what Serizawa said it did, then it wouldn’t be that big of a deal. Certainly it wouldn’t be worse than nuclear weapons. I think the OD must do something far more horrific, something that Dr. Serizawa didn’t even want to hint at it, lest he leave behind some clue that might lead another scientist to the same discovery.
That’s a thread that runs through (almost) all Godzilla movies- Godzilla is the worst of war incarnate, and that means that none of the weapons we have can defeat them. Only something worse, be in an “Oxygen Destroyer,” or an invasion by tyrannical aliens, or some monster even more terrifying, can truly defeat Godzilla on their own terms. The price humanity pays every single time that happens is horrific devastation. Yes, it’s true that a lot of the movies gloss over that, because focusing on the horrors wouldn’t make for a fun popcorn flick, but that essential element of being more than mere flesh is still there. Godzilla may bleed, Godzilla may even die, but without that allegorical nigh-invulnerability Godzilla isn’t Godzilla.
Leaving aside the points of “it’s a popcorn movie” and “it’s a metaphor”, there’s two things to note.
[1] At least in some versions, Godzilla (at least) is nuclear powered (yet, inexplicably, vulnerable to hypoxia). That provides the energy to move in very heavy armor and to unleash glowing energy beams and similarly destructive phenomena.
[2] Regarding Pacific Rim, the ecological consequences of them bleeding out (“Kaiju Blue”) is very briefly referenced in the early “how we got here” montage near the start of the film … as is the fact that, although you can shoot and bomb them to death, it takes long enough that they (combined with your own efforts to kill them) can flatten two or three cities by the time they are brought down. Wrestling them with Jaegers lets you restrain their movements, keep the fighting away from civilians and key infrastructure, and such. Except when things go wrong, of course.
I think the observation that a “science device” doesn’t quite obey the rules anyone who knows some science would imagine it should is kind of par for the course in a 1950s sci-fi flick. I don’t think we can be expecting throughgoing rock solid scientific consistency from a movie about a 50-meter tall nuclear-powered lizard – that’s kind of PZ’s original point.
More to the point, whether you want to call Godzilla’s death throes “asphyxiation” or something else is pretty irrelevant. I’d agree it looks a little more exciting than mere asphyxiation, but whether that’s just how the filmmakers imagine asphyxiation looks — at least in a giant dinosaur, when pumped up to make it look dramatic for cinematic purposes — or because they correctly anticipated that something that removes all the oxygen in an area is doing some plenty weird shit (possibly down at the level of atomic decomposition) doesn’t make much difference to the point.
The point is that whatever is happening there, what we are seeing is his death. On screen. Killed by the deployment of a super weapon. And in that death, and its aftermath, he is clearly shown to be an animal, a creature, made of flesh and bone like the rest of us — as evidenced by the fact that the former dissolves away to leave the latter behind.
There is no doubt a lot of allegorical stuff on top of that, allegorical stuff that requires invulnerability to work. But all of that is based on something that is, in the screen universe, undoubtedly real and physical at its core. It’s not wrong to analyze it at that level. In some ways, the observation that the invulnerability doesn’t actually work down on the physical level pokes a hole in the allegory as much as it does anything else.
I don’t remember if it’s explicitly in the 1954 film, but later canon definitely establishes that Godzilla has gills. It isn’t just holding its breath. (They may be a mutated theropod, but the mutations are clearly pretty extensive. I think a good first clue to that is the nuclear laser breath.)
Reviewing the footage, this is apparently exactly the case: Serizawa demonstrates the device in a fish tank at one point, and observes, “That’s right, I destroyed all the oxygen in the water. All the organisms in the tank suffocated. Their remains were then liquefied by my Oxygen Destroyer. It splits oxygen atoms into fluid.”
Your guess is as good as mine as to what “splits atoms into fluid” means, but it seems to be some some gesture toward some kind of novel atomic power mechanism. More interesting is that he clearly indicates that there is a defined sequence of action there: removal of the oxygen in the water, then suffocation, then after the creature is dead, the oxygen in the creature is also liquefied, and their flesh is destroyed. Perhaps the idea is that the atoms inside a living body are initially protected from the effect, but lose the protection once it succumbs to suffocation. (Or who knows — like I say, it’s 1950s sci-fi science.)
The important part is that Godzilla later dies in exactly the same way. Not like an invincible super monster, but like any other fish: suffocation followed by liquefaction. It does thrash about for somewhat longer during the suffocation phase, perhaps due to sheer size, but the end result is exactly the same.