The 10 Best Godzilla Movies, Ranked

The 1984 film starts over from Honda’s original and has the good sense to treat the return as a problem of international jurisdiction as well as national survival. Japan has to respond to a creature it cannot keep off its coast and to larger powers that believe they have useful answers for a country in immediate danger. The Cold War is felt in the difference between the willingness of those powers to propose a response and the location in which its consequences will be felt. The film takes the negotiations seriously enough for the monster’s presence to change what a political refusal might cost.

Its images of Godzilla in the modern city have the surprise of a body that refuses the scale on which contemporary life has been organized. The people surrounding the emergency are less memorable than that disparity, and some of the machinery assembled to meet the threat has more screen personality than the people arguing over it. The film earns its place for the severity of the reset. It makes the creature dangerous again and lets the argument over who has the authority to respond have weight of its own. The Japanese cut is the one ranked here.

There are more rival claims on one monster’s body in Biollante than most films would know what to do with. Scientists, commercial interests and national authorities all see different uses for what was left behind after the earlier attack. At the center is a grieving researcher whose daughter’s death gives the experiment a reason entirely out of proportion to the demands around it. The resulting creature, bound up with a rose and a daughter he cannot recover, has an expressive capacity no boardroom would have thought to ask for.

The film becomes more adventurous as Biollante ceases to resemble something that could occupy a laboratory. The spread of vines and the ungainly size of the creature’s later form make Godzilla look briefly like the more familiar body in the encounter. That reversal is worth the years of plot the film sometimes seems to fit into its middle. There are too many people with a professional interest in explaining the stakes, yet the strange sorrow of the experiment survives them. Few Godzilla opponents look so much like something somebody made without having imagined how it would move.

The red fissures on Godzilla’s body give the Heisei finale an arresting premise before anybody has explained it. The creature has become a visible source of danger to itself, and the glow makes every arrival look a little further along in an irreversible process. The new adversary recalls the means by which the original film answered its emergency. A solution once made available at a terrible moral cost has left a consequence for people who were not there when the decision was made.

There is pleasure in seeing a long-running series find a way to make the future of its monster feel uncertain. Godzilla Junior gives the conflict a vulnerability that the larger body could no longer supply on its own, and the ending lets the practical aftermath of a spectacle outlast the fight. The humans sometimes have too much to explain about an image already doing powerful work. The film is most moving when it trusts the red of the body to carry the audience’s knowledge that there is no familiar way out of this one.

Shūsuke Kaneko makes a striking change to the face. Godzilla’s white eyes leave very little for a person to meet when the creature turns its head. That absence suits a film in which the attack has been connected to the neglected dead of the Pacific War. History acquires a presence that a modern city can be very poorly prepared to recognize, even after it has found a word for the physical danger. The monster’s hostility feels directed without ever requiring the audience to imagine it possesses a human motive.

There is a welcome perversity in making Ghidorah one of the guardians and allowing Baragon to make so much of the first encounter out of the difference in size. The film’s myth is sometimes more persuasive in the land and bodies than in the accounts people give of it. Kaneko has a good sense of when to drop low enough for the landscape to become a place somebody might actually be trying to cross. The picture ranks here because its changes to the familiar lineup have a moral shape. A spectator who arrived knowing which creature ought to be on which side has real work to do.

The second Yamazaki film is at its best in the years between attacks, even though it has only a limited amount of time to show them. Shikishima and Noriko have had the opportunity to acquire habits that belong to a household, and the streets give people reasons to be outside that have nothing to do with preparing for a crisis. King Ghidorah introduces a new danger on a scale that can make those signs of recovery seem absurdly small. That disparity is the sequel’s strongest source of feeling. A disaster takes something from a person who had only recently begun to use it.

Adding another monster also makes the staging more difficult. The clearest images locate the danger in relation to a street or a cluster of people, sometimes letting debris hide part of the creature. When the melee asks us to follow several large movements at once, the perspective can drift away from the people whose reactions made the arrival frightening. Professor Murakami’s visions give the film a more unsettling kind of scale, with the danger briefly visible in a form nobody else can test. There is enough imagination in those passages and enough history in the human company to put the sequel comfortably inside the list.

A giant egg washes ashore and the first people with the means to take possession see the beginning of an attraction. That decision gives Honda one of the most lucid human stories in the early series. The people who regard the egg as property have done something perfectly comprehensible within their own idea of business. The reporters and the tiny emissaries asking for its return have to make an argument whose premises the owners have little reason to accept. When the trouble starts, the movie has already given several people plausible ways of deciding it belongs to someone else.

The islanders have reasons of their own to consider an appeal for help, and Mothra’s willingness to act has an effect the film has taken time to prepare. In the contest with Godzilla, vulnerability belongs to the defenders from the outset. The later use of the larvae changes the rhythm of the fight instead of simply adding another body to it. There is a graceful match between the attention Honda gives to the recovery of the egg and the ingenuity with which the creatures answer the emergency. The spectacle is generous because the film has already made the object of the struggle worth seeing.

Yoshimitsu Banno brings in images a more decorous film would have kept out. Fish faces appear in a nightclub, animated inserts interrupt the action, and the people living with the pollution are sometimes given a much less flattering place in the picture than a commercial adventure usually offers its audience. Hedorah can change form because the waste feeding it keeps turning up in new places. The creature’s persistence makes a useful change from an invader who could be expelled and leave an otherwise sound world behind.

The movie can be crude about the point and wildly funny about the means of making it. Godzilla’s flight is the sort of image an audience may spend years deciding what to do with, and the movie’s willingness to put it alongside real disgust is part of its personality. I rank it this high because the form has a life independent of the message. Banno can make a cut or a piece of music feel as dirty, surprising or exuberant as the behavior it interrupts. The film’s conviction is visible in its readiness to risk an ugly image that the viewer would rather be able to put aside.