A review of the scientific lit on Godzilla, a field sometimes known as kaiju-biology (where kaiju means, naturally, “monster”). What kind of dinosaur is Godzilla, how does he stand, how does he spew radioactivity? Inquiring minds want to know!
Godzilla is meant to be something like 100 m tall and between 20,000 and 60,000 tons in weight (his size fluctuates in the various films). Of course lots of people who like doing sums and talking about cubes and so on have used the mathematics of scaling to show why – duh – Godzilla couldn’t really walk, stand, or even exist. Michael Dexter presents the argument here, and also brings in thoughts on blood pressure, circulation and physiology to show that a living Godzilla would variously fall to pieces, tear itself
apart, have its organs turn to jelly, explode due to a build-up of internal heat… you get the picture.
Nevertheless, much like the movie fans, the biologists tend to think better of the “old school” Godzilla than the 1998 Americanized version (known also as GINO, “Godzilla in Name Only”).
Indeed TriStar’s GINO did look far more realistic, with its horizontal body posture and flexed hindlimbs making it look like an immense theropod; this despite the fact that it was meant to be a mutated lizard of some sort. The TriStar Godzilla also behaves a bit more like an animal than the real Godzilla: it doesn’t seem to have a sense of honour, doesn’t talk to other monsters, doesn’t use martial arts, and doesn’t have atomic breath, for example. But given that it’s over 120 m long, 90 m tall and weighs
over 24,000 tons, yet is slim-legged and slender, able to run at over 300 mph, and capable of leaping over skyscrapers and such, I somehow sense that Devlin, Emmerich and their colleagues were not striving for biomechanical accuracy in creating the new-look monster. Or, at least, let’s hope not.