Godzilla: The titan that will not die

Before the superheroes, before the cinematic universes and billion-dollar franchises, there was Godzilla—an ancient titan rising from the sea, scales glistening with the weight of history, jaws parted in a roar that cracked the sky. A force of nature wrapped in nightmare and forged in the furnace of nuclear fire.

From the moment it stomped across a black-and-white Tokyo in 1954, Godzilla was never just a monster. It was rage. It was grief. it was the ghost of war haunting a nation still clawing its way out of the wreckage.

Decades passed, the world changed, and yet the beast never stopped coming. It shifted, adapted, conquered new screens and new audiences. And in the Philippines, an archipelago no stranger to typhoons and shifting earth, the King of Monsters found a second home — on late-night TV, in battered VHS tapes, in childhood imaginations where skyscrapers crumbled and the ground shook beneath giant feet.

Born from fire

Godzilla did not come from myth, nor did it rise from the deep just to terrorize a city. It was created by men, birthed from the horror of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In 1954, when producer Tomoyuki Tanaka needed an idea for a monster film, he found it in the Pacific — where a Japanese fishing boat had strayed too close to a US nuclear test site and returned with its crew poisoned, eventually dying slow, invisible deaths.

With director Ishiro Honda and effects wizard Eiji Tsuburaya, Tanaka shaped that horror into something tangible. A creature that did not merely exist but loomed — a behemoth sculpted in rubber and sweat, stomping through miniature cityscapes with the unstoppable weight of history itself. Gojira was its name, a guttural fusion of “gorilla” and “kujira” (whale), something vast and primal. It was a monster, yes, but also a warning.

The first film was unrelenting. It did not flinch, did not soften its message. It showed Tokyo as a battlefield, civilians crushed under rubble, radiation burning through the streets. Godzilla was not a villain in the traditional sense — it was retribution made flesh, a living reminder that the scars of war never truly fade.

From nightmare to hero

The monster did not stay in the shadows. Audiences, for all their fear, loved it.

As the years rolled on, Godzilla transformed. The original nightmare gave way to something grander, wilder. Villains arrived — Mothra, a celestial moth with shimmering wings; King Ghidorah, a golden three-headed demon from the stars; Mechagodzilla, a steel-plated doppelgänger. Battles exploded across the screen, and suddenly, Godzilla was no longer just destruction — it was defender, the reluctant guardian of a fragile Earth.

Through each era, the creature adapted. The somber tones of the early films shifted into the roaring camp of the ‘70s, where Godzilla threw dropkicks and fought kaiju like a prizefighter. The ‘80s and ‘90s returned to its roots, reimagining it as a primordial colossus, ancient and unknowable. The 21st century made it sharper, faster, heavier — Shin Godzilla (2016) twisted it into an evolving horror, pulsing with grotesque mutations, while Hollywood’s MonsterVerse turned it into a battle titan, standing against cosmic threats in IMAX-sized glory.

The monster and the islands

The Philippines, with its fault lines and restless tides, has always understood monsters. Here, where legends whisper of kapres in the trees and aswang in the dark, Godzilla was not some distant fantasy. It was something that could exist — just beyond the edge of the sea, beneath the volcanic bones of the earth.

The country made its mark on the franchise, if only in glimpses. Godzilla (2014) placed the opening moments of its story in a Philippine mine, where a skeleton the size of a cathedral lay buried in the earth, waiting to be uncovered. The older films name-dropped Manila in passing, a waypoint in the endless war of kaiju. But even without direct invasion, the monster left its imprint.

Filipino kids watched Godzilla on bootleg DVDs, on television marathons where the King of Monsters reigned for hours. It was the star of toy aisles, a plastic behemoth with roaring sound effects. It was drawn in school notebooks, scribbled in the margins of math lessons, always mid-battle, always victorious.

Godzilla belonged to everyone.

A monster that will never fall

Decades have tried to kill it — time, trends, Hollywood missteps. It never worked. Godzilla is too big, too deeply rooted. Too necessary.

The world will always need monsters, and it will always need Godzilla. Not just for the spectacle, but for the reminder — of power unleashed, of nature’s fury, of humanity’s own fragility. Of the things we try to forget but never can.

So the monster walks. Through Tokyo, through San Francisco, through Manila. It burns, it roars, it rises again.

For those who want to witness its fury firsthand, many Godzilla films — including the Academy Award-winning Godzilla Minus One — can be found on Netflix.