Godzilla is big. Godzilla is too big.
No matter the design, backstory, setting, the only consistent element must be that this monster is too big for wherever he is, and wherever he is pays the consequence of being too small.
This is the story: the big thing is too big for the small things. It’s as simple as a fit-the-shape block toy. How does this translate to film? By making darn sure the creature never fits in the frame: make Godzilla the perfect size for your camera and you have shrunk him away. He extends beyond our perspective; his roar exceeds the speakers.
And so, scattered around, we see all the things that do fit. We see people occupying the scene with room to spare. We see how very small they all are, fitting into their houses, into their fighter jets, their little boats. We see their weapons and tools, all made of little bits and little things. We see the space around them, waiting to be exceeded, daring a too-big boy to come stomping through the land. When he does, he hardly looks down: he would be as happy to fit as not fit. He doesn’t crush for evil intent. He crushes because he is big. His motivation is intrinsic.
The story starts small in the latest instalment, Godzilla: Minus One. A small man in a small plane, coming in to land on a small island. He meets the big creature, and it haunts him, stalks him. His brain cannot take the bigness and all the stomping consequences. And that’s where we stay: for the next two hours, we remain in the tiny brains, in the fear, in the people who lack any ability to size up to the big thing. No matter how many people, how many boats, Godzilla proves inexorably too big—and each time he is hurt by a little thing, he gets bigger.
They realise, in time, that to be small against a big thing is an advantage, that a small thing can fit inside a big thing and if the small thing can grow, then the big thing has no option but to accommodate it beyond its own boundaries: to be made too big by one more small bit of stuff. Big goes boom.
Godzilla is not a literary monster. I doubt Godzilla would translate well to text: words and letters are entirely too accommodating. Sentences are as flexible as their content demands and their meaning cannot exceed them. So what can Godzilla teach literature?
Mind your scope. Mind your sizes. More than anything, mind how your pieces scale against each other.
Case in point: Godzilla occasionally fights Mecha-Godzilla. This is interesting because they have exactly the same scale (M.G. is literally a robot copy) but without anything to compare against, they become normal. Put them in a desert and they may as well be six feet tall than six hundred. The compelling factor? When Godzilla fights Mecha-Godzilla, every single human underfoot—everything smaller than the standard they now set—is absolutely guaranteed to lose. The outcome is a tragedy at worst, a pyrrhic victory at best.
Compare this to Godzilla tackling Mothra—a big moth. The moth is larger in area, smaller in mass, stretched out but floating above; it looms, its shadow greater than its size, darkening great swathes of the earth and with its winds controlling a force greater than itself, just as Godzilla contains within himself the infinite expansive potential of the atomic bomb. The dynamic is still comprised of equal blocks of substance, but one is spread out.
The shapes change, the scale remains. Keep the balance the same—refuse to allow Godzilla to grow or the humans to amass, or only scale them up equally—and your conflicts will repeat, and repeat, and repeat. No bad thing if you nail the scale from the outset (this allows you to build spectacle by bulking your existing elements without distracting the story with any new things) but a straight line does not make for a compelling arc. The line must run too long, must creak, must snap. Who snaps and who falls and who bears the brunt, that is your ending.
No story is more complicated than a block toy; no story needs to be. Our world operates around size, mass, density, motion, and so every relationship, every dynamic, adheres to these rules. This is no limiting thing, nor saying that all stories are the same, or can be boiled down to a single dynamic: there are infinite shapes of infinite sizes to bounce off each other in infinite ways.
Mind your sizes, follow the physics—don’t cheat—and your conflicts will decide themselves. Nobody wants a story more complicated in its essence than a block toy. Nobody’s curiosity cannot be maintained by holding two rocks on two pieces of rope, bringing each up to a certain height, lining them up just right, scattering some vulnerable bits and pieces in between, on the floor, in the air…
After that, it’s the scientific method all the way: speculate, observe, record, and draw whatever conclusion is best described by that last blast radius.
Photo credit: Toho Company Ltd. – Scan of the original photograph, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=130132849