I guess the thing about Godzilla is that it represents a massive national trauma which eviscerated nature and the human soul, but the USA versions fall somewhere on the spectrum between “vaguely about 9/11 or recent natural disaster” and “giant monster smashy smash.” I think that stems from trying to conceptualize Godzilla as representing a particular and isolated instance of disaster and translate that into something of a similar nature in the USA.
But the real deep down soul death and national trauma in the USA isn’t anything recent, you can’t point out something uniquely bad like an atomic bomb. Really the kaiju for the USA needs to be symbolic of how this whole place is an infinite recursive system of devouring its population, starting from colonization and going right up through to the present day. The crucial difference is that if a kaiju was to represent the deep, unhealed, and still bleeding scar at the heart of the nation, it has to by definition be some ancient dead thing which rises on the anguish of everyone consumed in the name of this country and burns it into the ground. There’s not an easy way to make a USAmerican kaiju because the only way to do so accurately means the kaiju has to be the protagonist, and ultimately has to show how much the people in the USA are unified when the hyperwealthy and our government are destroyed.
Who is gonna make that?
who else?
You get it.
I’ll let Mr. del Toro make the movie. I’ve already got something monstrous cooking in one of the labs so I can make it real; you know, so it’ll really drive home the metaphor after it starts eating folks.
