Even Without Much Godzilla, the 2014 ‘Godzilla’ Still Rules

It took 70 years, but Godzilla finally has an Oscar. The big guy’s latest rampage, Godzilla Minus One, picked up Best Visual Effects at the 96th Academy Awards a few weeks ago—a long-overdue honor for a movie monster who’s been wreaking resourceful, frugally realized mayhem since the days when he was still a stuntman trampling model cities. Incidentally, one of the movies Minus One beat was The Creator, a lavish sci-fi epic from writer-director Gareth Edwards. Something tells us that Edwards didn’t take the loss too hard. After all, he’s had nothing but nice things to say about the film that bested his own. “It’s what a Godzilla movie should be,” he gushed in a recent interview.

Edwards should know: He, too, has made a Godzilla movie. That movie, titled simply Godzilla, was released 10 years ago this May. A box office success, it did what Roland Emmerich couldn’t and finally ushered the skyscraping Japanese star into an ongoing Hollywood franchise. Multiple sequels have followed; the latest, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, stomps into multiplexes this Friday. The series has even expanded into television via an Apple TV+ spinoff set before, during, and after the events of the monster movie that inspired it.

For all the groundwork it’s laid, the 2014 Godzilla occupies an unusual place in the oeuvre of everyone’s favorite radioactive reptile. It’s not nearly as acclaimed as its recent Japanese cousins, Minus One and 2016’s satirical Shin Godzilla. (Fans from that side of the world had a field day, in fact, with the portliness of the creature design, joking that of course an American take on the G-man would be fatter.) And even within its own so-called MonsterVerse, Edwards’ hit now looks like something of an outlier: In response to complaints that there wasn’t enough Godzilla in his Godzilla movie—a reservation echoed by a recent Variety ranking of the entire canon—the sequels have offered much more kaiju bang for your buck, as if apologizing for their own ground zero.

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