It may seem at odds with my hard-nosed position on Superman in the previous post, but I've always sort of wished that there was a Godzilla. This, despite the mayhem and destruction that always seem to prance hand-in-hand with the big "G" as Godzilla fans, or G. Fans as they refer to themselves, refer to him.
Godzilla is a natural disaster with personality. I know, "we have more than enough natural disasters as it is." But suppose you could add Godzilla to the mix, without increasing the total natural-disaster "pie"? If you could take a bunch of your regularly-scheduled natural disasters of comparable magnitude off the board, and replace them with Godzilla, wouldn't you do it? Wouldn't you just about have to do it?
The thing is, all of your other natural disasters are too implacable. They don't even know you're there. They're just spiraling or surging or buckling along the lines of least resistance, and there isn't a thing you can do about it. You can't really reason with Godzilla, either, but at least you can anthropomorphize the brute! At least you can have a sense that the disaster happened for a reason - even if the reason is only that Godzilla doesn't like the cut of your city's jib.
Another point is that, under the right conditions, and given a streak of luck or two, a Godzilla event can be managed. Possibly even, minimized. You can throw all your Godzilla Defense Forces into the field, lull Godzilla into a false sense of security by pounding him with several hundred tons of conventional ordnance (to which he is manifestly immune), then use the recorded calls of seabirds to lure him across a nearby plain and right into the handy row of tricked-up super-high-voltage towers. This sort of thing doesn't hurt Godzilla, but he's a pretty good sport about it and will usually wander off back to the ocean again afterwards, if you can pull it off with any sort of panache at all.
It's no use fooling ourselves, though: Godzilla cannot be stopped. Not by conventional weapons. Not by nuclear weapons. Not by germs and not by Superman. Nothing Can Stop Godzilla.
The best you can do is hope he changes direction.
2 comments:
Godzilla's imperviousness to weapons probably explains why there are never any environmentalists in those movies seeking to have him declared endangered.
I've wondered about that!
But most of what you'd consider real Godzilla movies were made a bit before the heyday of those sorts of concerns. Alas.
Although, Godzilla vs. The Smog Monster was a triumph of consciousness-raising in the form of quality entertainment!
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