This Was the Year of Prestige Godzilla Content

GQ; Getty Images

To close out the year, GQ is revisiting the most fascinating ideas, trends, people, and projects of 2023. For all of our year-end coverage, click here.

When it comes to monster franchises, there’s only one king. Headed into its staggering 70th year of relevancy, the legacy of the Godzilla franchise is one of survival through evolution. The original Japanese Godzilla exploded onto the scene in 1954, rich in postwar paranoia; over the next two decades, the films became increasingly kid-friendly. The 1998 American reboot, from the gonzo mind of Roland Emmerich, added disaster-movie conventions and Taco Bell tie-ins, while Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla, from 2014, launched an MCU-style interconnected universe and prompted a Japanese reboot, 2016’s Shin Godzilla. But in 2023, two very different Godzilla projects found the King of the Monsters entering a brand-new realm: the prestige play.

Monarch, an Apple TV+ series about the titular MonsterVerse kaiju-hunting organization, was a no-brainer idea that still took five years to develop. “It always struck me as nuts, if anything else, just because I would want to watch this show,” Monarch co-showrunner Matt Fraction recently declared. But the series couldn’t just be monster fights every week– that’s the formula for a great YouTube compilation, not the foundation for a compelling television series. Instead, in the hands of Fraction and veteran TV creative Chris Black, the show became a reflection of what makes all of Fraction’s comic book work so great — it’s a decidedly familial tale.

A year after Godzilla’s re-emergence (as depicted in Gareth Edwards’ 2014 reboot), schoolteacher Cate (Anna Sawai) searches for her missing father, Hiroshi (Takehiro Hira). The hunt leads her to discover he had another family living in Japan— and that she has a brother she’s never met, Kentaro (Ren Watabe). As the newfound sibs unearth the truth about Hiroshi, they run into an old Monarch staffer named Lee Shaw (played in flashbacks by Wyatt Russell and in present day by Kurt Russell) who has secrets of his own dating back to the organization’s founding in the 1950s.

For all the MonsterVerse’s strengths— giant monsters, beating the shit out of each other, to entertaining effect — its human characters have mostly been narrative set-dressing until now. Monarch isn’t light on monster fights or appearances from the big man himself, but both Cate and Kentaro feel like actual characters. Cate continues to have horrendous flashbacks to losing her students when Godzilla tore through the Bay Bridge, but finds tremendous resilience to move forward. Kentaro’s equally headstrong, but yearns for the deep connection he had with his father. And Shaw is Monarch’s most fascinating character, a literal throughline from past to present who’s watched Monarch turn from an altruistic, research-driven experiment into a mysterious force specializing in secrets and lies.

Monarch functions extremely well as a metaphor for our own unprecedented times; at this point we all know a thing or two about what it’s like to watch a new normal set in around the world. As Fraction puts it, “It's not a 9/11 show. It's a 9/12 show. It's about the first time you have to take your shoes and belt off at the airport.”

Godzilla Minus One takes the notion of unrivaled times back to, arguably, its genesis. In the last days of World War II, a would-be-kamikaze pilot named Kōichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) bails on his fated run and lands on a small island instead. Feigning engine trouble overnight, he and the other troops stationed there become some of the first humans to encounter a fledging Godzilla head-on. When he’s ordered to use his plane to kill the creature, Shikishima literally can’t pull the trigger. He returns to Tokyo with tremendous survivor's guilt, and his failure to stop Godzilla soon becomes everyone’s problem, as the King of Monsters– strengthened by the United States’ nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll—sets his sights on the devastated mainland of postwar Japan.

Writer/director Takashi Yamazaki’s approach to Minus One pulls from a lot of modern blockbusters. The aerial sequences evoke Top Gun: Maverick, a mid-movie set piece is inspired by Jaws, and the final battle pays homage to Dunkirk. Like all of those films, Minus One manages to thread the needle between sheer blockbuster spectacle and prestigious, weighty themes; it’s a Godzilla movie that would play well on a double bill with Oppenheimer. The postwar setting echoes the atomic-age themes of the original, but Yamazaki uses it to dive head-on into societal issues. When the Japanese government tells the denizens of Tokyo they’re unable to help due to global Cold War tensions, the people pull together in solidarity to find a solution. And the trauma of war lingers over it all, especially with Shikishima, who is seemingly hell-bent on carrying out his failed suicide run against Godzilla instead at the cost of his new life with a child and loving partner.

He spends the entirety of the film dealing with what it means for him to live in the wake of so many dying — and so many more in jeopardy, thanks to the threat of Godzilla. Minus One never lacks big ideas or shies away from exploring them in depth, using nuclear imagery to great effect; rarely is the cinematic depiction of Godzilla’s atomic breath as horrific as it is here. The reception to Minus One reflects the King’s titanic status, exploding into theaters to $11 million and the highest opening of 2023 for a foreign film in the US and rave reviews.

The thing about Godzilla is that if you don’t like one form, there’s always another mutation around the corner. Last week, a trailer for the latest MonsterVerse film Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire arrived, in which the big boys appear to be extremely back in town. Minus One and Monarch prove, however, that there's room on Godzilla’s throne for all kinds of stories — especially ones with grand ambitions — and there will be for another 70 years to come. Long may he reign.

Originally Appeared on GQ