Understanding Godzilla: Final Wars Continuity (and Going Mad in the Process) · 5:57am Apr 26th, 2016
The Heisei series wasn't supposed to end with Godzilla vs. Destoroyah. Toho promised to bring back the Heisei series by 2004, while letting the American line of Godzilla movies have center stage.
...But rather than get the one that TriStar initially promised, which was basically a high budget take on the 1960s Godzilla movies and cancelled late-70s projects combined into one awesome thing (it's a great story, you should read it!), they got something completely different, due to Toho over-interfering during the early stages, and TriStar's subsequent over-resisting Toho's over-interfering. This lead Jan du Bont to be forced out of the project over budget disagreements and because TriStar wanted to make a sidekick for Godzilla to make their own sequels without having to pay any money to Toho and deal with how much they interfered with every little thing, and perhaps also to flip them off for doing so (no, really, Sci-Fi Japan did a series about this, here's part 1), and Jan du Bont didn't like this, because the script wasn't written to accommodate a sidekick in the first place, it would have been forced, so he was basically kicked out of the project.
The result? TriStar gave it to Roland Emmerich, who hated the original script because he thought Godzilla was silly, and made his own, and he would only work on it if TriStar would back out, which they did, and Toho was no longer going to interfere with the project. By the time they were shown what was happening, it was too late, and they just had to approve of it anyway. And that's how 1998's GODZILLA was born. Needless to say, reviews were mixed during the first year of its release, and then negative after it was out of theaters and the hype died down.
To show people who the "real Godzilla" is and probably also to flip off the TriStar movie, Shogo Tomiyama planned three different Godzilla movies, each taking place in a totally different reality, and the one that got the most popularity would either get sequels or inspire a new series, and if none were popular, they would just go back to waiting until 2004 to resume the Heisei series. GMK naturally did the best, but since the director didn't want to do anymore movies, and also probably because the topic, Nanking denial in Japan (it was hinted that Godzilla's spirits were basically angry that the Japanese were pretending that the Nanking Massecre never happened! It's the Japanese equivalent of Holocaust denial, and it was fairly commonplace in Japan until some times around the early 20th century), was much too controversial at the time anyway, Toho instead decided to make a line of similar movies, but not the same. These were the Kiryu Saga, which was probably made to recover Godzilla's reputation after TriStar's un-Godzilla-like thing, and Godzilla vs. Megaguirus (which really didn't fly over well with the public). Still, they had their promise to keep, and for the 50th anniversary, they had to make a movie that continued the Heisei continuity...but what they ended up with was something else entirely...
One of the earliest draft of Godzilla Final Wars was written about Godzilla Jr., he was frozen in ice during the late 1990s, probably around 1997, and was awoken again by 2032. This was to fulfill the promise to have a sequel movie to the Heisei series. It was probably structured that way because Toho couldn't financially back a whole new Heisei series after all their Millennium movies, it would have been better to simply wait and renew interest for the character. However, somewhere along the lines of production, it got re-written so much that it eventually turned into the strange thing that it is today. In fact, the new product is like the Schrodinger's cat of Godzilla canon, it fits with anything and fits with nothing. A lot of fans believe that Godzilla was frozen around 1964/5 and released around 2004/5; after all, there was talk about the 1954 movie and the 1960s in the backstory. However, a lot of promotional material and, it seems, one of Toho's "Completion Books", asserts that after a rampage in response to when the Earth's evironment was destroyed in the early 21st century (apparently caused by the same disaster that took his family away from him), Godzilla was frozen around 20XX, and then released again twenty years later, so most of it happened further to the future than many would have guessed, but he obviously was not frozen around 1965 or 1997.
From the information given about the movie, sewn together with guesswork, this seems to be the story behind the final product of Final Wars:
Godzilla first appeared around 1954, and after physical evisceration by the Oxygen Destroyer, he was reduced to almost nothing, but he grew back soon and frequently terrorized the globe during the 1960s. He became less of a consistent and serious threat after that point, and by 2005 (?), he apparently discovered at least one other member of his species and had gained a family. However, that same year, a super-massive ecological disaster (probably a nuclear one) not only awoke and possibly mutated some new monsters (probably the creatures in the montage and also the beasts that attacked during the movie..except, oddly enough, Zilla; Zilla's backstory was that he was an X-alien attempt to make a Godzilla-like creature from scratch, without any G-Cells! Needless to say, it didn't work) and activated the latent M-Base in the humans descended from the X-aliens, but it also destroyed the entire ecosystem and seemingly killed Godzilla's family (but Minilla actually survived; perhaps his egg hatched during Final Wars), so he went on a huge rampage all around the globe, for years destroying entire civilizations. However, this and all of the other monsters caused the humans to stop fighting each other, and instead unite to stop the beasts. This resulted in the Earth Defense Force and the M-Unit. The mutants were probably chosen to fight Godzilla in particular because, as observed in Final Wars, they had the enhanced reflexes and limited pre-cognition needed to deal with Godzilla's own swift breath and good aim (Most Godzillas can accurately hit supersonic jets for crying out loud!), and so they were ideal for fighting against him. By 2012, the E.D.F. subdued most of the kaiju at the time, whether by killing, maiming, driving away, relocating, or capturing them...except for Godzilla. They lured him to Antarctica to deal with him without killing civilians. The gigantic army prepared against him was destroyed, but there is a surviving trump card, the Gotengo. With help from the instability of the Earth, perhaps caused by Godzilla's struggle, Douglas Gordon, probably the only non-mutant who isn't a warranted officer on the Gotengo, proves himself by launching missiles at the mountain and creating an avalanche that sealed Godzilla. And there he remained, for twenty years, while the world lived in peace and staved off whatever giant monsters came...
...And that's might be the story behind Final Wars! It's really hard to tell, given all the contradictory information given about the vague backstory. Most who try to understand this movie go completely insane, and there's a whole blog to prove it. It's like The King in Yellow: The more you try to understand it, the crazier you get!
If you want to know my sources, I cite Sci-Fi Japan, and Toho's various Completion Books, which tell a lot of the backstories in the real world and to a lesser extent, in the fictional worlds, and Japanese websites...or more accurately, the people who could read the Kana of this material better than I can!
Huh....fascinating I've personally never considered a lot of this.
Granted in terms of story I always just accepted it as this is a Godzilla universe where all the showa monsters lives and Godzilla is Godzilla.
I honestly didn't know about them wanting to continue the Hesai series heck even Hesai reviewers I talk to never bring it up.
3897141
Because that's exactly what the final product is; the Heisei continuity was pretty much, for better or worse, written out of the movie.
Honestly final wars is one of those movies were i sit back and enjoy turning my brain off and just say "fuck it, its junior from the hesiei era"
And watch that motherfucker kill everything with a smile on my face
3897144 True Dat! True Dat! I never actually knew Hesie stuff was supposed to continue. I know some like to argue Godzilla 2000 is Godzilla jr.
3898228
Strange to say, in Godzilla 2000, he wasn't Godzilla Jr., except maybe in the very first stage of pre-production. The cd that for the movie's soundtrack sure did claim he was, but all other promotional material claimed that Godzilla 2000 was a direct sequel to the 1954 Godzilla movie (Toho were probably sticking to their promise to resume the Heisei series around 2004, so any other Godzilla movie before that point was going to be in a different reality), and it was a reality in which somehow, the 1954 Godzilla, or a clone of him, came from the leftover remains of the original (the same premise as the rest of the original Millennium trilogy), and repeatedly attacked Japanese power plants, especially when the lights were on. I presume that like the 1954 Godzilla, he hated bright lights and possibly also the pollution generated by using fossil fuels for energy, but he was smart enough to know how to make them go away.
3898258 Most likely, Megaruius (While not good) does have a interesting premise of what if Godzilla never died post 54.
3898909
The two certainly share very similar realities namely that in Godzilla 2000, it's not a bad guess that Godzilla was either never killed or his body reconstituted after the Oxygen Destroyer, because it's said to be a direct sequel to the 1954 movie. Same with Godzilla vs. Megaguirus. However, there are key differences, namely that in Godzilla 2000, he attacks perennially, and as more energy is being used to fuel more bright lights (the 1954 movie implied that bright lights draw him out, and in Godzilla 2000, he attacks the lighthouse after it shined a light on the sea), he attacks more and more. In Godzilla vs. Megaguirus, he attacks on a much more sporadic rate, probably because he's not angry about the lights, but rather, he wants to absorb energy, and nuclear fission was a way to go, and later plasma aka nuclear fusion (why they call it "plasma energy" in vs. Megaguirus, I don't know; a plasma generator is basically a nuclear fusion reactor; probably harder for the fission-dependant Godzilla to feed on, but he basically feeds on the chemical reactions of stray neutrons and stray electrons, and the "dross" in the process of ionization are electrons, so obviously, he'd feed on a "plasma generator", or a nuclear fusion reactor.)
3904393 That's true but most Godzilla feed on nuclear radiation....but lets not get started on Godzilla "Weakness" with Electricity :P