Godzilla King Of The Monsters 2019 / Tropes # to H

Tropes # to H | Tropes I to P | Tropes Q to Z | YMMV | Trivia

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Godzilla: King of the Monsters provides examples of the following tropes:

#-B

• 11th-Hour Superpower: Mothra's sacrifice allows Godzilla to become Burning Godzilla and use a supercharged version of his Nuclear Pulse to obliterate Ghidorah.
• Action Girl: Madison Russell among the humans due to receiving survival training from her mother, and Mothra among the kaiju.
• Actionized Sequel: The previous movie had three kaiju who only truly fought onscreen towards the end (with one scuffle only briefly shown earlier). This movie ups the ante considerably, not only offering multiple Titan battles between the four main kaiju (three rounds of Godzilla vs. Ghidorah including the climactic battle, Ghidorah vs. Rodan and Mothra vs. Rodan at various stages) but having them start considerably earlier in the film's running time.
• Actor Allusion:
  • After King Ghidorah dominates the other Titans, Charles Dance quotes, "Long live the King."
• Adaptational Badass: All the leads get this treatment, harkening back to the Showa Era depictions.
  • Rodan is capable of lasting two minutes alone with Ghidorah, and has a long drag out fight with Mothra, making him considerably stronger than his Heisei and Millennium incarnations (who were largely manhandled by their opponents in short order) and the strongest incarnation since the Showa Era.
  • Mothra is also more in line with her Showa counterpart where she rivaled Godzilla in power, rather than later versions who often needed help to do the same. She's even referred to as the "Queen of the Monsters." Notably, advertising refers to her as an 'Alpha', a term also used to describe Ghidorah and Godzilla. She's capable of defeating Rodan one on one, finishing the fight by impaling him with her stinger.
  • King Ghidorah was a badass already, but this version is capable of generating a cataclysmic storm simply by being awake and is the largest Ghidorah in live action film. He has an incredible Healing Factor to the point it takes being completely atomized to kill him, and even that may not have been enough if the post-credits scene is any indication. Also, whereas every Ghidorah since the original except the Rebirth incarnation has been The Dragon to someone else, this Ghidorah is the one giving the orders to other monsters.
• Adaptational Expansion: The accompanying novelization goes into greater detail about the surrounding events and the character/backstory of the Titans (including the background ones), includes references to both the Godzilla: Awakening and Godzilla: Aftershock comics, begins with a prologue from Godzilla's point of view, has a segment on Skull Island from Kong's point of view during the story, and appearances from Titans that were only briefly mentioned by name in the film. It also expands on the Rodan vs Mothra fight and shows more of it.
• Adaptational Explanation: The novelization provides quite a bit:
  • The film doesn't really explains how the rumors that more Titans besides Godzilla and the dead MUTOs are being secretly housed by Monarch sprung up, but the novelization states investigative reporters and intel agencies are responsible.
  • In the novelization, Jonah obtains up-to-date information on the locations of the other Monarch outposts from Outpost 61's computer before heading to Outpost 32.
  • It's explained in the novelization that Godzilla chooses to focus on threatening Castle Bravo when he's intimidated by sensing the ORCA's signal in Antarctica because he sensed Castle Bravo drawing their maser cannons on him.
  • In the film, the soldiers in Antarctica stopping and firing on Ghidorah seems like a real case of Too Dumb to Live. But in the novelization, it's made clear it's actually a Heroic Sacrifice where the soldiers are trying to keep Ghidorah's attention on them so that the Monarch brass, Mark and the rest of the G-Team in the Osprey have a chance of escaping.
  • Depending on how long Mark was out cold after Antarctica (implied by the conversation on the Argo's bridge to be not that long), Emma and Jonah seem to proceed to awakening Rodan next surprisingly quickly after they've only just awakened Ghidorah, against their intent to release the Titans somewhat gradually. The novelization indicates Emma is speeding up her plans because after Ghidorah's escape in Antarctica, the government will quickly mobilize to take control from Monarch and enact their kill-all-Titans plan.
  • In the film, it seems pretty implausible after the audience sees the devastation Rodan's sonic winds cause to Isla de Mara that once Rodan has passed, the G-Team who were on the island have a (semi-)functional Osprey with which to leave the island. The novelization describes how the Osprey survived the winds.
  • Madison staying put at Fenway Park after activating the ORCA despite knowing Ghidorah will be coming for the ORCA seems in the film like a real Idiot Ball. The novelization explains Madison's reasoning for not trying to leave the stadium.
  • For those viewers to whom it wasn't obvious when watching the film, the novelization explicitly spells out that the reason Emma pulls her Heroic Sacrifice instead of just leaving the ORCA where it is and gets on the Osprey (something HISHE poked fun at) is because she rightfully realizes that if someone doesn't draw out Ghidorah's pursuit for as long as possible while the Osprey carrying Madison and the others is taking off, then Ghidorah will chase the Osprey down effortlessly and kill everyone on it.
• Adaptational Intelligence: While King Ghidorah has never been exactly stupid, previous versions' plans amounted to 'kill everything by spamming it with gravity beams' (with the Rebirth version adding a mass kidnapping to that plan) or are the minion of alien invaders. This version is the mastermind leading the invasion, has a more complex plan (use Earth's Kaiju to raze the planet, ostensibly remaking it in his own image), and shows more complex strategic thinking in combat than his previous counterparts (such as keeping Rodan close so he has back up if he needs it or absorbing the entirety of Boston's power supply to power himself up to get the upperhand on Godzilla).
• Adaptational Mundanity:
  • The Shobihin are re-adapted into Drs. Ilene and Ling Chen respectively. Instead of explicitly being supernatural fairies, the Chens are notably human twin sisters who have an apparently-hereditary Psychic Link to Mothra, and a preternatural family history of producing identical twin sisters in every generation.
  • The Eco-Terrorists also appear to do this for the Xiliens and other such Human Aliens from the old Toho movies, serving the same role of attempting to control the Titans' actions for their own ends by using a bioacoustics device. However, true to the MonsterVerse's aesop change (adapting the Kaiju from an allegory for nuclear weapons as they were in the old movies, to an allegory for forces of nature in this film) and perhaps also as a Take That! at earlier King Ghidorah incarnations' Villain Decay, the Eco-Terrorists are ultimately a Big Bad Wannabe at most who suffer Evil Is Not a Toy in regards to the Titans (particularly Ghidorah).
  • Downplayed with Mothra, who is still very much a powerful kaiju, but some of her seemingly-supernatural abilities here get Doing In the Wizard explanation which changes her status as a supernatural goddess to a case of Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane. Her magical energy rays are re-interpreted as bioluminescence, her connection with Godzilla is explained as a "symbiotic relationship", and the iconic Shobijin are instead the Chens, who are presented as humans with an uncanny family history of identical twin girls.
• Adaptational Villainy: Zig-Zagged and downplayed.
  • This film's portrayal of Rodan is quite malevolent and hostile: a temperable and bloodthirsty magmatic beast, who grins while mercilessly slaughtering the Gold Squadron (who can barely even annoy him) after he's been provoked into defending his territory. More than that, this version of Rodan actually sides with King Ghidorah, becoming the Omnicidal Maniac's right hand who helps him to try and destroy the Earth and kill Godzilla and Mothra (albeit only after Ghidorah forced Rodan into submission in a fight). Rodan in previous continuities despised Ghidorah to the point he was willing to ally with Godzilla and Mothra against him.
  • The novelization expands on Alan Jonah's evil, giving him several vile and nasty traits and actions that weren't displayed in the movie. The novel version of Jonah threatens to shoot Madison for verbally snapping at him; and when Emma is arguing with Jonah because she wants to stop Ghidorah destroying the world, Jonah eventually resorts to pointing a gun at her, telling her that "the fewer [humans] there are the better it is for me", and he orders one of his men to slit Madison's throat if Emma does anything to try and impede the global apocalypse.
• Adaptation Amalgamation: The movie primarily adapts the story of Ghidorah's original debut, Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster: Godzilla, Mothra, Rodan and Ghidorah all battling for the first time in this continuity in a two-sided war, the former two acting to stop the latter monster, who serves as the Big Bad, from destroying Earth. However, it also has a ton of references and mythology gags to other Toho instalments and other Godzilla continuities.
  • Human(oid)s trying to used sound-based Mind Control on the monsters (Ghidorah among them) for their own ends is a major plot point like in Ghidorah's second Toho appearance, Invasion of Astro-Monster.
  • Ghidorah having a regenerative factor is also a significant plot point, with said regenerative factor being used to hint that he's not completely dead after his entire body except for a severed appendage is vaporized, like in Rebirth of Mothra 3. Also, the concept of Ghidorah being sealed away in ancient ice underground before he's awakened in the present day originates in the Millennium movie Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack!. And the explicit Multiple Head Case which the three heads on this version of Ghidorah display seems to reference the Heisei incarnation's origin in Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah as a mutated fusion of three single-headed creatures.
  • Rodan's introduction emerging from a volcano is based on the character's pre-Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster debut in his title film, while Rodan's Adaptational Villainy as Ghidorah's sidekick fighting against Godzilla's sidekick is based on Gigan's roles at Ghidorah's side in the Showa film Godzilla vs. Gigan, and the Millennium film Godzilla: Final Wars. Rodan's new pyro-biology is also based on his transformation into Fire Rodan in Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II.
  • Mothra's Heroic Sacrifice, which ends up being vital to stopping Ghidorah in this movie's climax, is based on Giant Monsters All-Out Attack again (her dying taking the bullet from the Big Bad to save a heroic monster ally of hers), and also on Final Wars again (her transferring her power into Godzilla to empower the latter against Ghidorah).
  • Humans needing to locate Godzilla on the sea floor with a submarine, and then using a nuclear warhead to juice him up so that he can stop Ghidorah's rampage and save the day, is based on the Heisei movie Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah again. While Dr. Serizawa sacrificing his life via manually detonating a bomb in Godzilla's presence on the sea floor, in order to safeguard humanity's survival against the apocalyptic crisis driving the movie, originates in the original Godzilla (1954). Godzilla nearly being defeated, only for one of his kaiju allies to sacrifice their life force to him and unlock his Super Mode which turns the tide, is based on the Heisei movie Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II again. Godzilla also references the Heisei incarnation's swan song movie Godzilla vs. Destoroyah, transforming into Burning Godzilla due to a nuclear overload, which enables him to kill the main antagonist at the cost of irradiating a whole city at the climax.
  • Although the movie mostly uses modernized versions of the Big Four kaiju's signature roars, several times the original Toho versions are inserted as a shout-out.
  • The concept of a Jerk with a Heart of Gold human lead who starts out despising Godzilla for killing his family, but gradually comes to accept that Godzilla is environmentally and combatively necessary to the world's survival against worse threats like Ghidorah, is also present in the other most recent (at the time of this film's release) Godzilla adaptation, the AniGoji trilogy.
  • Having paramilitary terrorists that are trying to control the monsters acting as the movie's main human antagonists originates in Red Bamboo's role in the Showa Godzilla film Ebirah, Horror of the Deep. And the concept of a female member of the terrorists that cause Ghidorah's emergence defecting to the heroes' side originates, again, in the aforementioned Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah. Speaking of whom, the concept of a scientist being driven by a life-changing tragedy involving their child to team up with the humanoid bad guys is based in Terror of Mechagodzilla, while the concept that a scientist deliberately sets the film's plot in motion with the intention of avenging mankind's abuse of the environment via the monsters' rampage is based on Shin Godzilla.
  • The Oxygen Destroyer which killed the original Godzilla in the 1954 movie is a major plot point: once again, the weapon is launched with the intention of saving humanity from the monsters and it hits Godzilla, but this time, the weapon's usage instead causes things to go From Bad to Worse at the movie's Halfway Plot Switch, enabling King Ghidorah to initiate a spontaneous global monster invasion which threatens to wipe out humanity and all other life on Earth as we know it.
  • The idea that ancient humans worshipped the kaiju as gods, which is a key part of the story in this film, originates in Atragon and Godzilla vs. Megalon, and like in both instances, said civilizations' remains are discovered underwater.
  • One of Godzilla's kaiju allies (Mothra instead of Rodan this time) sacrificing their life energy to heal him when he's nearly defeated originates in Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II again.
• Adaptation-Induced Plot Hole: The novelization describes Ghidorah's decapitated head at the end as being covered with barnacles, a detail which seems to be absent in the film. Wasn't the Oxygen Destroyer supposed to wipe out all life in the affected area of the sea?
• Admiring the Abomination:
  • As much as Dr. Tim Mancini admires Mothra and doesn't want to make an attempt on her life in the opening, he doesn't hesitate to try and activate the termination protocol when she turns aggressive, and Emma has to stop him from pressing the Big Red Button.
  • Mark Russell, even during the early part of the movie. For all his ranting and raving about wanting the Titans dead because of his son's death, he seemingly can't help but be entranced when he sees Godzilla up close during the Castle Bravo stand-off, and this is long before he finds it in himself to let go of his grudge against the Titan.
• Advanced Ancient Acropolis: The Monarch submarine finds itself in one of these beneath the ocean in the Hollow Earth, with frescos and carvings depicting its populace worshiping Titans like Godzilla and having architectural styles older than most of the other civilizations that have similar architecture. This is also where Godzilla has made his nest.
• Advanced Ancient Humans: The Advanced Ancient Acropolis suggests the civilization who built it was this, and Mike Dougherty confirmed it on his Instagram account. The Titans were once worshiped by a widespread semi-subterranian civilization that existed roughly 20 000 years ago and possessed technology comparable to the Romans; implied to have been annihilated when the Titans lashed out against tribes who sought to use them for war. It's also indicated this civilization is the precursor of all other civilizations and cultures due to containing elements of other prehistoric cultures — Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Mayan, etc. While this is only briefly discussed in the film, the novelization and redacted text in the end credits go into more detail about it.
• An Aesop: As stupid as humans can be when it comes to interfering in nature, that doesn't mean we aren't responsible for being the ones to clean up the mess, nor does it mean we should step back and let giant monsters take care of everything for us. Serizawa's direct intervention was crucial to cleaning up the mess humans made in injuring Godzilla and leaving the Alpha position up-for-grabs to Ghidorah. And had it not been for the Russells' direct intervention in Boston — the ORCA disrupting Ghidorah's control over the other Titans, and later all three of the family using the ORCA to stop Ghidorah from Vampiric Draining a downed Godzilla — Ghidorah would've almost certainly won for all the benevolent Titans' efforts to stop him.
  Mark Russell: "This time we join the fight!"
• Aggressive Categorism: Twofold in regards to the Titans generally. Both of the Russell parents are the establishing type, categorizing all the various Titan species at the movie's start and recognizing later in the film that their categorism was wrong.
  • Mark Russell repeatedly makes it clear that he feels all the Titans should be wiped out, assuming in his anger and rashness that every last one of the creatures (not least Godzilla, but also the others generally) are nothing more than walking bombs waiting to go off. He seems to loosen up as the film goes on.
  • On the other end of the scales, the more idealistic Emma Russell aggressively categorizes all the Titans in a positive light. Having found evidence that Godzilla and the MUTOs caused a vegetation boon wherever they treaded, she assumes that all other Titans are ultimately good for the Earth in the same way. So much so that when she plans to manipulate the Titans to heal the Earth, she intends to indiscriminately release every Titan Monarch knows about in a free-for-all instead of carefully picking which Titans she'll awaken and which she'll leave alone based on their temperaments and roles in the natural order. Emma also incorrectly assumes that the ORCA can control all the Titans to an extent beyond anything she's actually come close to proving. She's completely blindsided when it turns out that Ghidorah (1) will destroy the world's natural order if he reigns unchecked, and (2) responds to the ORCA with nothing but a focus on hunting down and murdering whoever is at the source of the device's signal.
• Air-Vent Passageway: Trying to escape the eco-terrorists' base, Madison sneaks through the base's ventilation shafts to avoid detection, and the vents are plenty spacious enough for a twelve-year-old girl to climb through.
• Alien Blood: Ghidorah's blood is a deep purplish-black, while Rodan's has the appearance of molten lava.
• Alien Invasion: It turns out that King Ghidorah is an alien who arrived on Earth and is attempting to perform Hostile Terraforming to convert it to his liking.
• Aliens in Cardiff: Admit it, you wouldn't expect that frickin' Boston, of all places, would be the final battleground of the four legendary Japanese kaijus, would you?
• All Flyers Are Birds: Rodan has many features more akin to birds of prey than to pterosaurs (at one point in the concept art he was even supposed to have feathers ^note Fossil evidence shows that a majority of pterosaurs had fluffy coats on them for warmth, but these coats weren't made of feathers but actually pycnofibers.).
• All Myths Are True: All but stated, and it's explored a lot more in the novelization. It's also implied that Ghidorah in particular and possibly other Titans are cases of this trope overlapping with One Myth to Explain Them All due to their contact with the Advanced Ancient Humans from which most to all historical ancient civilizations descended. Several of the Titans are named after, or might actually be the basis of, legendary deities. Of particular note are Leviathan, an unseen Titan which emerges from the Loch Ness, the Mokele-Mbembe (described in the novelization as having a mammoth-like trunk, glowing horn, and very large tail), and elephant-like Behemoth (which may or may not be the actual Behemoth). In the tie-in comic prequel Godzilla: Aftershock, the dead member of Godzilla's species in the previous film was known as Dagon by ancient Phoenicians (although the interpretation of Dagon as a sea god is questioned nowadays). It's also hinted in the novelization that the Hollow Earth influenced the lore of the Popul Vuh and Olympus in Greek myth. Chen says this almost word-for-word after seeing the ancient, underwater reliefs depicting Godzilla, Ghidorah, and other kaiju.
• All Your Base Are Belong to Us:
  • Alan Jonah stages an assault on the Monarch outpost 61 that contains Mothra. He succeeds in killing every outpost guard and conquers the base, before taking Madison and Emma hostage.
  • King Ghidorah takes over Washington D.C. (the capital of United States) and reforms the area as his own base of operations. His Titan army is mentioned as attacking capitals all over the world as well.
• Alpha and Beta Wolves: Mark Russell perpetuates the outdated theory that wolf packs in the wild are dominated by an Alpha, who earns the position through fighting and physical intimidation. As it turns out, Titans follow that same dynamic. Godzilla is the Titan pack's rightful Alpha (with Mothra as another Alpha in a symbiotic relationship with him). Ghidorah is a rival Alpha, who does command the other Titans' loyalty after Godzilla is apparently killed.
• Alternative Foreign Theme Song: "Pray" by the Japanese rock band [ALEXANDROS] will serve as the main theme of the movie in Japan.
• Always Identical Twins: Dr. Ilene Chen and her twin sister Ling are descendants of a lineage of twin priestesses who worshipped Mothra as a goddess and may have possessed telepathic powers, if the redacted text from the credits is any indication.
• Ambiguous Situation: When Godzilla saves Madison from being obliterated by Ghidorah, did he realize that Ghidorah was just about to kill her and intervened or did he not even notice she was there and thought that his rival meant the attack for him and simply preemptively blasted him first?
• Anachronism Stew: It may be minor, but the Katakana characters written on the wall of the ancient megalithic city looks out of place. The said writing did not come to the world until 794 - 1185 A.D. nor did the Japanese people in ancient history ever travel to the Atlantic Ocean and build a city there. Then again, an advanced civilization "much older" than Egypt on the other side of the world in and of itself is already an extreme example of deliberate anachronism, so the writing on the walls of the city are the least of its issues.
• Ancient Evil: King Ghidorah. As hinted at in Kong: Skull Island, he's been around a long time - enough that his existence is noted in the mythologies of all the world's oldest civilizations, but in hushed terms, as if they were actively trying to forget him. He's also genuinely evil and malevolent.
• And Man Grew Proud:
  • The U.S. government and military want to kill all the Titans while they're asleep, and are extremely confident that they can succeed if they try. The ignored experts consider this a bad idea and are trying to stall it for as long as possible (Serizawa) or outright stop it (Emma), because: (A) they fear that wiping out the Titans could cause a global environmental collapse that could be no less devastating for humanity, whereas re-introducing the creatures to the world's environment could rejuvenate all the damage mankind has inflicted on the environment; and (B) it's implied in the movie, and more explicitly noted in the novelization, that there's no guarantee trying to kill sleeping Titans won't just wake them up ahead of schedule and aggravate them into actively attacking humanity in self-defence, seeing as mankind's previous attempts to kill Titans with the most powerful weaponry in our species' arsenal failed to do anything except make the creatures even stronger. In the movie, the military launch a Fantastic Nuke in a bid to kill Rodan and Ghidorah without contacting Monarch first, but the strike goes horribly awry, enabling King Ghidorah to take global control of the baseline Titans while Godzilla is out of action, which leads to most likely millions of deaths, the near-eradication of the U.S. military, and the worldwide devastation of many major cities before Ghidorah is finally stopped for good.
  • The Easter Egg reveals that Advanced Ancient Humans originally coexisted in symbiosis with Protector Titans, sheltering under Protectors against more hostile monsters, and scavenging Titan corpses for resources; but in time, they tried to enslave the Titans as weapons of war, which led to the Titans being provoked into rebelling and attacking them. This culminated in a global cataclysm which triggered the Ice Age, and it destroyed the ancient humans' civilization, leaving only desolate ruins (such as the submerged Advanced Ancient Acropolis in the movie), and scattered living colonies and remnants which would give rise to the more well-known ancient civilizations like that of Egypt.
• Animals Respect Nature: This movie particularly explores the concept that not only Godzilla but the continued existence of Titans generally is essential to maintaining the world. The eco-terrorists believe that if all Titans are set loose, their Fertile Feet will replenish the ecosphere. However, it turns out that with the exceptions of Godzilla and Mothra, the majority of Titans only care about the natural balance insofar whichever Alpha they're currently answering to cares. When Ghidorah – an extraterrestrial Omnicidal Maniac who couldn't care less about the balance of nature – is in charge of them, the Titans help him do even worse global damage to the ecosphere than humanity could have. However, the Creative Closing Credits reveal that Godzilla's reign after Ghidorah's death has calmed the other Titans down and enabled ecosystems worldwide to regenerate under their influence. Furthermore, it's indicated that Godzilla is actively commanding the Titans to leave humanity's cities alone now, lending a lot of credence to the idea that Godzilla (if not the subordinate Titans) is consciously enforcing the balance of nature.
• Antagonist Title: Part way through the film, Ghidorah usurps Godzilla's throne, and thus the title also refers to him.
• Anyone Can Die: In order to show how high the stakes have been considerably ramped up by the presence of Ghidorah, Dr. Graham is eaten alive by Ghidorah and later both Dr. Serizawa and Mothra sacrifice themselves to save Godzilla.
• Apocalypse How:
  • Upon taking control of the other Titans, King Ghidorah promptly begins a global apocalypse, which Dr. Stanton speculates based on Ghidorah's hostile extraterrestrial nature might be a xenoforming process. Spreading massive storms over the planet^note The novelization notes this alone could create the practical effect of an impact winter if it keeps up, and commanding the other Titans to actively Kill All Humans and create a global Natural Disaster Cascade, Ghidorah firmly establishes himself as an Omnicidal Maniac. In the film, Emma Russell notes that the end result if the destruction continues will be nothing short of an extinction event. The novelizations of both this movie and the sequel explicitly state that the likeliest end result if the destruction continues would be the extinction of everything except for Ghidorah and some adaptable bacteria within a few years max; with Serizawa observing that Ghidorah's anti-human behavior means it's likely no amount of human ingenuity will permanently stop the Titans from finding and killing all of the last human survivors. Serizawa also speculates that once Ghidorah is done cleansing the Earth's surface down to the bedrock, he'll repeat the destruction on the Hollow Earth's inhabitants.
  • Although Ghidorah is stopped before his campaign of global destruction can go too far, he still causes multiple Class 0's around the world, with the likely overall fallout approaching a Class 1. The novelization outright states that even with the subordinate Titans' Fertile Feet, the cataclysm managed to wipe away several ecosystems completely, and the sequel's novelization likewise supports this; indicating Ghidorah succeeded in causing a very mild Class 4 to the overall biosphere.
• Arch-Enemy: Godzilla and Ghidorah, as ever. The film explains that this is because Godzilla is the rightful Alpha of the Titans, with Ghidorah being an alien outside their natural order challenging him for the role. This shows heavily in their body language and interactions: the two loathe one another and every scene the two are in together is spent trying to murder each other as brutally as they possibly can.
• Armor-Piercing Question: When things escalate out of control after Ghidorah wakens the other Titans, Emma tries to claim to Madison she can fix this. In response, Madison queries that she thought she was doing it all for Andrew's memory—would he have wanted any of this? It renders Emma totally silent as her daughter storms off.
• Armor-Piercing Response: When Emma calls up Monarch to explain why she's doing what she's doing, she and Mark exchange two armor-piercing responses with each-other. The later one from Mark renders Emma silent, and visibly fazes a listening Madison.
  Mark: It's not all math, Emma. There's some things you can't control!
  Emma: And there's some things that you can't run from!
  [beat]
  Mark: This won't bring him [Andrew] back to us.
  [longer beat]
• Art Evolution: Godzilla's dorsal fins have been slightly redesigned to resemble the classic maple leaf shape from previous incarnations. His tail tip also shortened, and his feet now have larger claws.
• The Artifact: The official novelization for Godzilla: King of the Monsters recaps the events of the Godzilla: Awakening comic, which was later rendered Canon Discontinuity by Monarch: Legacy of Monsters.
• Artistic License – Biology:
  • The concept of "Alpha of the Titans" relies on the theory of "Alphas" in wolf packs, with the Monarch scientists explicitly referencing said theory, despite it being debunked about 20 years before the film's release (by the same scientist that originally proposed it, no less!). That said, the idea could still work in terms of the Titans, since the old idea of "Alphas" can form amongst unrelated individuals forced into a pack, which is basically what is happening here (although a scientist referencing this idea straight still falls under artistic license).
  • Social animals rarely, if ever, form packs with members of other species (in the case of wolves, packs are pretty much exclusively members of the same family), so the idea that all the wildly different Kaiju are forming a pack is a pretty big stretch. It's implied Ghidorah has some unique ability to make the Kaiju obey him, but the human characters are still using faulty logic when they unironically use the "pack" analogy.
  • The idea that radiation can generate new growth in barren landscapes or lead to a resurgence in the populations of endangered species. While it is true that radiation can spur the evolutionary process by increasing DNA mutation rates, this is only feasible at fairly low rates of continuous exposure (such as a small percentage increase in UV rays due to ozone depletion). The kind of radiation that Godzilla and the other Titans pump out would only serve to give most ecosystems harmful acute radiation exposure. (That said, given that biological processes that run on radiation is dubious at best, it makes more sense to Hand Wave it as the Titans absorbing "bad" radiation, processing it in their systems and excreting it as "helpful" waste radiation). It's also specifically stated that their radiation helps the growth of vegetation, so maybe these happen to be flora species that are adapted to the activities and radiation of the Titans.
  • Godzilla, Mothra, Rodan and the other Titans are classified under the genus "Titanus". In reality, the genus is reserved for a group of very closely related species (think lions, tigers and leopards), so seeing arthropods, reptiles, mammals and cephalopods all lumped together into such a specific group makes no sense. Even stranger is King Ghidorah is also classified under Titanus, despite being an alien from another planet with completely different biology. You could possibly choose to interpret it as a codename and not as a strict scientific name to make sense of it.
    • Alternately, since all the Titans are functionally a Single Specimen Species, one could postulate "Titanus" is a Phylum, and Godzilla's "proper" scientific name is "Titanus gojira gojira gojira gojira gojira," being the single extant specimen of his Class, Order, Family, Genus, and Species. This still requires some extreme massaging of scientific nomenclature to work.
  • Mothra is able to grow up and lay an egg within the span of two days. While one could argue she had grown within the egg due to how long she was in it, this doesn't excuse how long it took her to create an egg within a day. Potentially justified by Mothra being implied to be an actual supernatural goddess rather than a giant animal.
• Artistic License – Geography: Although the film keeps very good continuity in general during the climactic battle in Boston, it did take a few liberties for the sake of spectacle:
  • As shown in his grand entrance and in several aerial and long-distance shots, Godzilla makes landfall from the Charles River. But one in-between shot shows him stepping out of the Boston Bay at the Financial District, several miles East, with the Monarch fleet in tow. (There's also the issue of Godzilla having to take a circuitous route to navigate the Charles, which is too shallow to accommodate a creature of his girth, instead of just stomping into town directly from the ocean.)
  • At one point, Maddie runs from Fenway all the way to the northeast end of the Boston Common in less time than it would take a professional marathoner.
  • Additionally, the fictional Isla de Mara, geographically placed at the border between Texas and Tamaulipas, is too far North to exhibit the kind of tightly-packed, colonial Spanish architecture shown in the film. This type of urban layout and construction is more appropriate to colonial towns in Central and Southern Mexico. (To wit, street-level scenes were in fact shot in the preserved historical district of Santo Domingo in Mexico City.)
  • The oil derrick-covered dusty plains that Scylla emerges from are stated as being in Sedona, Arizona, despite, more closely resembling west Texas than the oil-free red rock mountains actually found there◊.
  • The location of Skull Island shown on Monarch's big map (somewhere far south and somewhat east of Hawaii) makes absolutely no sense considering a dogfight happened there between an American and a Japanese pilot in 1944.
• Artistic License – Nuclear Physics: When Godzilla is revived and supercharged by radiation by a nuke from Serizawa, he leans close to the Monarch members and Mark. Even something large like Godzilla would give serious radiation poisoning getting that close to him as it happens in Godzilla (1954). In the next film, Mark is no worse for wear and is perfectly healthy.
• Artistic License – Physics: When King Ghidorah picks up and drops Godzilla in Boston, Godzilla is shown visibly glowing and generating vast amounts of heat around his edges, as if he were re-entering the atmosphere outright. However, Ghidorah seemingly only lifted him into the clouds, as the tops of the storms he generated are still above the two monsters by the time he lets go. At this low altitude, there would be insufficient friction with the air to create this sort of effect.
• Ascended Fridge Horror:
  • Pulling a Happy Ending Override on the 2014 movie, King of the Monsters confirms that after the cheers of the San Francisco survivors died down, the entire world went on long-term high alert partly out of fear of Godzilla, and agencies have been trying to track him down since.
  • The previous movie's tie-in graphic novel opened the door for the possibility Godzilla and the MUTOs aren't the only living Titans that are still hidden around the world. In this film, Monarch have found seventeen more Titans and counting.
  • The 2014 movie demonstrated just how catastrophically destructive Kaiju like Godzilla and the MUTOs can be without even trying to harm us. Ghidorah gives us a good glimpse at just how devastating a Godzilla-level kaiju that really is trying to hurt us can be; something which the 2014 movie only hinted at when Femuto attacked the HALO team for destroying her eggs.
  • The movie explicitly demonstrates that if humanity did succeed in killing Godzilla back in 2014, then without him around, the world would be completely helpless against the onslaught of more aggressive Titans, with nothing in manmade arsenals capable of permanently stopping any of them.
  • The previous movie implied that nuking Godzilla (as the U.S. military were planning to do) wouldn't negatively affect him at all and if anything would make things even worse, but thanks to the MUTOs, the military's Nuke 'em plan never got that far in practice. In this movie, Godzilla tanks an exploding nuclear warhead point blank, and he comes out without so much as a scratch but is basically turned into a walking, ticking hydrogen bomb who's set to explode, and he's running on atomic steroids in the meantime.
• Asian and Nerdy: Dr. Serizawa returns as the de facto leader of Monarch's new board of directors, and the movie also introduces the Chinese Dr. Chen as Monarch's top mythographic expert; and it's later revealed that being a Monarch operative with an interest in myths and archaeology has run in Dr. Chen's family for three generations. The novelization lists the names of several other Monarch eggheads whom are evidently of Asian descent, and are considered smart and capable enough to be among the staff at Titan-containing outposts: Li, Lang, Ikande, and Mariko.
• Asshole Victim: Jonah and Asher mention in the novelization that they once targeted big game hunters in the Democratic Republic of Congo. You'd have to be a piece of work to argue those particular victims didn't have it coming.
• Asskicking Leads to Leadership: A big part of the rivalry between Godzilla and Ghidorah: the other Titans bow down to whoever is the strongest at the time, and will obey the Alpha's will regardless of how benign (Godzilla) or destructive (Ghidorah) it is. Ghidorah claims the title by beating Rodan into submission (with an unwitting assist from the military, who accidentally take out Godzilla with the Oxygen Destroyer missile) while Godzilla later gets it back by incinerating his three-headed rival.
• As You Know: Invoked by Sam when he starts explaining to Mark what the ORCA is. Mark immediately lampshades it.
  Mark: I know what it does, I helped build the prototype!
• The Atoner: Honestly, this should be the Russells' family motto...
• Authority in Name Only: Notably subverted: while Godzilla has always been called King of the Monsters, it's normally only a symbolic title. In this movie, he's the Alpha of the Titans and thus literally their King. Mothra's title of Queen of the Monsters likewise signifies her status as his symbiotic counterpart and another Alpha. Likewise, King Ghidorah's title signifies he's also an Alpha Titan and becomes the King of the Monsters after defeating Godzilla.
• Awesome Moment of Crowning: The final scene is of the newly awakened Titans, Rodan included, surrounding Godzilla and bowing before him, as he roars triumphantly into the sky.
• Ax-Crazy: Ghidorah, mixed with a good dose of Sadist. He tries to destroy the retreating Argo with an entire city's population on board unprovoked, is happy to cause humanity's extinction with the other Titans and later would have blasted the tiny, defenseless Madison to ashes with all three of his gravity beams despite her not having the Orca any more. The novelization explicitly states that unlike any other animal Mark has encountered, Ghidorah lives for killing, and at another point speculates on Ghidorah's nature thusly:
  Maybe he was a god - but there was nothing that said a god had to be sane.
• Battle Amongst the Flames: During the Final Battle, most of the city's ruins are gradually and increasingly set alight by the battling Titans' fallout, creating together with the storm-blackened sky a very effective, hellish-apocalyptic landscape for Godzilla and Ghidorah's final showdown for the fate of the world.
• Battle in the Rain: Every battle with King Ghidorah is this. Though this is justified as he can manipulate storms.
• Beast with a Human Face: Giant statues resembling quadrupedal mammals with the heads of men and what appear to be wings guard the entrance to the underwater ruins; which pre-date Ancient Egypt and Rome, yet are far more architecturally-advanced than either of them.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: Mark spends most of the early part of the film repeatedly advocating that Godzilla be killed due to his continuing rage over his son's death. Thanks to the military and the Oxygen Destroyer he (seemingly) gets his wish - and soon discovers that life without Godzilla, with Ghidorah taking his place as the Titans' Alpha and their ensuing attempted annihilation of human life, is a far, far worse alternative. Serizawa even lampshades it for him.
• Being Evil Sucks: Guilty over countless deaths, second-guessed and belittled by a second-in-command who wants to go further than simply restoring balance to the Earth, and called a monster by her own daughter, Dr. Russell doesn't have a swell time for much of the movie. When Maddie escapes the bunker, she catches a glimpse of her mother sitting by herself and crying in an empty cafeteria.
• Berserk Button: Ghidorah's regarding the ORCA signal as this becomes a major plot point by the end; every time it's used on him, Ghidorah hears it as the cry of another Alpha and immediately goes ballistic, intent on wiping out the threat to his control of the other Titans. It's not only used to lure him to Boston and break his hold over the other Titans, but Emma uses it at the end to distract him when he's moments away from killing Godzilla, giving him time to recover and leading to Ghidorah's demise.
• Beware the Nice Ones:
  • Mothra is by far one of if not the most benign and forgiving Titans around, period, acting docile towards humans when pacified, but she's no pushover. She'll use force the moment that you cross her, although she goes out of her way to non-fatally incapacitate a Monarch guard and the Ghidorah-controlled Rodan. When directly defending herself, her King and the Earth against the omnicidal threat posed by King Ghidorah at the Final Battle, she doesn't hold back, if her unsheathing her bladed forelimbs and her part in Ghidorah's Cruel and Unusual Death are any indications.
  • In the novelization, Mark Russell's thoughts when first meeting G-Team soldier Anthony Martinez are as follows:
    Square-jawed Martinez seemed affable enough, but Mark sensed toughness below the surface.
• Big Bad: While he initially shares the role, upon his introduction King Ghidorah immediately proceeds to outclass Jonah and Emma in every regard, taking control of the other Titans and having them begin inflicting a global extinction event. Emma quickly has a Heel–Face Turn, while Jonah is content to sit back and let him wipe out humanity.
• Big Bad Duumvirate: A pair of them (see Big Bad Ensemble). Alan Jonah is the Big Bad of the human antagonists, with Emma Russel as his reluctant Evil Genius. For the bulk of the film, Ghidorah is the Big Bad on the monster side of things (and the film's overall Big Bad) with Rodan as The Dragon.
• Big Bad Ensemble: The film initially has Alan Jonah and Emma Russell], who free Ghidorah with the intention of having him act as their agent in bringing balance back to the world's ecosystem. But then Ghidorah turns out to have his own plans, and wakes all the Titans at once to wipe out humanity - by the end of the film he's the only active threat (aside from Rodan who serves as his The Dragon), with Emma having a Heel Realization and Jonah content to passively let Ghidorah annihilate everything without doing anything by himself.
• Big Damn Heroes: There are multiple instances in the movie where someone is in danger, whether that be the humans or even Godzilla himself from Ghidorah, only for the latter to have his plans foiled from someone else's interventions.
• Big Red Button: Outpost 61 which contains Mothra at the start of the film has one for use in an attempt to kill her in an emergency. Dr. Mancini almost uses it when she gets provoked into attacking, but Emma narrowly stops him pressing it so she can try calming Mothra with the ORCA. The novelization explains that most if not all Monarch containment sites have a "kill switch" for use in the event the contained Titans attempt to breach containment, but there's no guarantee that the Titan-killing mechanisms at any of these outposts will do anything more than piss the Titans off.
• Bioluminescence Is Cool: Godzilla's glowing fins and Mothra's glowing wings are used in multiple scenes to demonstrate their majesty and power.
• Bird vs. Serpent: Rodan vs. King Ghidorah. Rodan is a pterosaur-like Brutal Bird of Prey kaiju, while Ghidorah is a Draconic Abomination based on the serpentine Hydra and Beast from the Book of Revelations. Ghidorah defeats Rodan with ease and forces the later to become his underling.
• Bittersweet Ending: The films ends with Ghidorah dead, Godzilla as Alpha once more and the other Titans submitting to him, helping the Earth rebuild its ecosystems. However, both Serizawa and Mothra sacrificed themselves to save Godzilla, many people died during Ghidorah's rampages, numerous cities were devastated by monster attacks/Ghidorah's natural disasters, and the Russell family is now further shattered by Emma's death. Worse still, Jonah is still at large and has claimed one of Ghidorah's severed heads for use later.
• Blue Is Calm: When the bioluminescent Living Mood Ring Mothra hatches as a larva, blue light signifies that she's calm and placid when the ORCA soothes her, in contrast to the red glow which signifies when she's aggravated. Alan Jonah meanwhile is a cold-blooded Misanthrope Supreme who has Icy Blue Eyes from his actor. Inverted big time with the marine Godzilla: his atomic powers produce a blue light when he's using them to ferociously kick his enemies' asses, and at one point even when he's just feeling agitated.
• Blue Is Heroic: Both of the major heroic Titans produce bluish-themed light as part of the movie's Good Colors, Evil Colors.
  • Godzilla, who dwells in the ocean, has a bright blue Breath Weapon and dorsal light, and (for the first time in this incarnation) he has blue Glowing Eyes of Doom. He's also more explicitly heroic in this movie: fighting to save the planet from being destroyed by Ghidorah, having more direct interactions with humans where he non-violently acknowledges them as allies, and, at the movie's end; going out of his way to make sure the others Titans don't bother humanity's population centers while repairing the environment.
  • Godzilla's queen, the angelic Mothra, can produce bioluminescent light in just about any color of the rainbow, but greenish-blue are often the most prominent shades, with pure blue bioluminescence in her larval form signifying when she's calm and placid. The "Heroic" comes in in that this incarnation of Mothra is unambiguously benevolent, all-loving, and fiercely protective of other life against threats.
• Blue Means Cold: Antarctica is portrayed with a perpetual blue tint to emphasize the icy location, in contrast to the orange tint associated with Isla de Mara.
• Book Ends:
  • The film begins with a flashback to 2014 with the Russells standing in the ruins of San Francisco, as Mark screams out the name of one of his children that he's trying to find among the chaos of Godzilla and a hostile Titan fighting. Close to the end, the Russell parents find themselves in a similar situation, with Mark screaming Madison's name and trying to find her amidst the chaos of Godzilla and Ghidorah battling. Both battles also see a member of the family die in the destruction.
  • During Ghidorah and Godzilla's first battle, Maddie is in a helicopter with her mother, flying away from her father who is on the ground. In their last battle, she is yet again on a chopper, this time flying with her father and watching her mother.
  • The ending credits for the movie mimic the opening credits for the previous movie, including the white-out of various words that obscure the credits and scientific journal articles with photographs and headlines about the Kaiju.
• Both Sides Have a Point: Serizawa and Emma butting heads over the latter's radical scheme proves to be this over the course of the film. Emma royally screws up by freeing a rival Alpha Titan she didn't fully understand (a danger Serizawa warned her of), who subsequently turns out to be a hostile Alien Invader who does the opposite of restoring balance to the planet, and of course she wasn't expecting things to go out of her control like Serizawa forewarned. Serizawa continues advocating non-interference in the face of Emma's plot, despite the potential risks involved if the government who clearly don't feel the same way succeed in shutting down Monarch to try euthanizing the Titans (see Broken Aesop) — and ultimately, the military go ahead with utilizing the Oxygen Destroyer on Godzilla, and Serizawa and his colleagues are forced to personally intervene to heal Godzilla so he can stop Ghidorah.
  Serizawa: This is a dangerous path! You are meddling with forces beyond our comprehension, gambling with the lives of billions!
  Emma: And what are you gambling with, Serizawa? Monarch is broken. It's on the verge of being shut down by a government who's only objective is to eradicate the creatures; and if that happens, what will our chances be?!
• Bottomless Bladder: Mothra and Behemoth — neither Titan's feeding habits are observed nor are they revealed by their respective Kaiju profiles in supplementary material. This is particularly notable in Mothra's case, since she goes from an egg to a larva to her much-larger adult form over the course of the movie. Mothra's raptorial forelimbs and stinger indicate that she was a predator when she originally evolved, but Word of God said these traits were actually evolved as a form of defense against other creatures in such a time.
• Brainwashed and Crazy: Played With when Ghidorah takes over Godzilla's position as Alpha Titan and directs the other Titans to aid him in destroying the very planet they're meant to protect.
• Brainy Brunette: Most of the super-smart people happen to have dark hair, in contrast to the blonde-haired Emma; whose plans and arrogance the intelligent brunettes at least have reservations about or at most rightly fear could spiral catastrophically out of her control. On top of Serizawa and Graham from the previous film returning, this film introduces Sam Coleman and Drs. Ilene and Ling Chen (all of whom specialize in different scientific fields and are basically Monarch directors), and Madison Russell (the girl who had the brains to operate the ORCA and single-handedly sneak out of an eco-terrorist occupied bunker with it, and who is a child prodigy according to her bio). Downplayed with Mark Russell: he's a zoology specialist and is further ahead of the curve than Monarch when predicting the Titans' behavior; but unlike with the others, Mark's Hot-Blooded personality limits his forward-thinking and colors his judgment.
• Breaking Old Trends: This film is the first time where humanity decides to ally with Godzilla on a large scale, with Monarch sending in The Argo, multiple aircraft, and a small fleet to back up Big G against Ghidorah. While humanity has aided Godzilla before, they've never done so on this scale.
• Broken Aesop: The intended message is that humans are not meant to tamper with nature (namely the Titans) for good or for ill intentions, as doing so always leads to calamitous consequences. However, at the end of the film, the awakened Titans' presence on the planet is healing dying ecosystems, causing endangered species to bounce back and providing humanity with new resources — and the Titans are awake because Ghidorah, a hostile alien who explicitly exists outside of nature as terrestrial lifeforms know it, forcefully woke all the Titans up at once whereas before their awakenings were slow and gradual. Ghidorah in turn was awakened by a Well-Intentioned Eco-Terrorist who wanted the Titans awakened precisely to achieve the end results that occur at the film's end. This is somewhat downplayed, in that while the ending implies the future is now brighter for humans and the planet alike after the Titans' awakening, in the present, humanity specifically have suffered massive devastation and loss of life due to Ghidorah's actions.
  • What really breaks the aesop is that at the film's start, Monarch is inching towards being taken over by the government and military, who either don't see or don't care for the Titans' ecological value, and only want the monsters all killed off while they're sleeping. And based on the military's rude response to the Mexico crisis which made it clear how little faith they had in Monarch's intervention, the takeover of Monarch would've probably become a certainty after Rodan's awakening if not for Ghidorah's rampage. It's unknown how the military would've achieved their aim of exterminating the Titans, but if they'd succeeded, it would've likely had devastating future ecological consequences, on top of flouting Genocide Dilemma and ridding the world of numerous admittedly majestic creatures forever. And if the military's extermination attempts failed or didn't get every waking Titan (like how Monarch's attempt to kill the male MUTO in its cocoon in the first film spectacularly failed), it could very well lead to the Titans retaliating against humanity, and most of them retaining negative or at least neutral relations with the surviving humans afterward (this last point is especially relevant if you're among the viewers who believe Godzilla is keeping Titans away from human cities at the end precisely because of Serizawa's sacrifice). So in summary, the Well-Intentioned Extremist meddling with nature set off a chain of events that brought about the best possible future for everyone overall, after nearly causing The End of the World as We Know It (it's this messy).
• Broke Your Arm Punching Out Cthulhu: Played With. It's implied the military designed the Oxygen Destroyer specifically so they'd have a method of killing any Titans. Them firing it at Godzilla and Ghidorah in an attempt to kill the latter and Rodan manages to cripple Godzilla (though it doesn't kill him), but Ghidorah is completely unaffected due to his literal Bizarre Alien Biology, and Ghidorah immediately proves that without a benevolent Alpha Titan like Godzilla to keep him in check, there's absolutely nothing defending humanity and the world from the likes of Ghidorah inflicting an extinction event (especially bad in Ghidorah's case, since he's distinctly the worst of the worst among malevolent Titans and he's an invasive alien who's liable to wipe out all non-Titan multicellular life). As for Godzilla, the human race are lucky once he's healed that he seems to be letting the military's act with the Oxygen Destroyer go for the time being, and that Mothra has no interest in vengeance.

C-D

• Call-Back:
  • Joe Brody's studies in bio-acoustics from the first film get taken to the logical next level in this film with Dr. Emma Russel creating the Orca, which communicates with the Titans by mimicking their communication frequencies. Predictably,it works a little too well for humanity's comfort.
  • During the senate hearing, Dr. Graham references the fable of "The Lion and the Mouse" as an example of man living in peace with the Titans. In Kong: Skull Island, the fable is also mentioned, by Cole who was told the story wrong and thought the mouse kills the lion with the thorn.
  • The scene where Ghidorah awakens in Antarctica is filmed very similarly to the male MUTO's awakening in Janjira in the previous film. Both feature a wide shot of fleeing people in the foreground while the monster climbs out of its prison in the background, and both scenes end with a primary human character fading into unconsciousness as the monster takes flight.
  • Just before the final battle:
    Dr Stanton: I love it. A little Serizawa "let them fight" action. I used to love it when he said that.
• Calling the Old Man Out: Madison does this with Emma, after the latter's plan goes horribly wrong but she STILL thinks it will all work out. Combined with an Armor-Piercing Question, this is what finally gets Emma to realize just how far she's fallen.
• The Cameo: Word of God confirms that what looks in the finished film like normal-sized birds flying amid the freshly-blasted ruins of Boston at the film's end are actually the Leafwings from Kong: Skull Island. Kong also makes a cameo in video footage, as do the MUTOs.
• Cathartic Exhalation:
  • Everyone in Castle Bravo's control room heaves a collective relieved sigh when Godzilla backs down instead of attacking. Before the Jump Scare happens.
  • In the novelization, Mark has a close call with a wild wolf that nearly ends in him having to defend himself, and he breathes in relief when the wolf departs without a fight.
• The Cavalry: The main Monarch scientists and Mark Russell get a military Gunship Rescue when they're seconds away from becoming monster chow to Ghidorah, with the rescue's missile barrage of Ghidorah combined with Godzilla re-entering the fray prompting the hydra to withdraw.
• Celebrity Paradox: Downplayed, but according to a dossier on the Monarch Sciences website, and posters seen in Ford Brody's childhood bedroom in the last movie, monster movies are a real film genre in this universe that predates public knowledge of kaiju. Of course Kong and Godzilla, undisputed two of the most influential characters of the genre in real life, actually exist in this universe, so it really makes you wonder what the genre is like in this universe if many of the most iconic monster movies don't exist.
• Censored Child Death:
  • The Russell family's elder child Andrew died during the events of the 2014 film, but despite the movie's opening flashing back to a distressed Mark searching through the rubble for his son, Andrew's death is never depicted nor is a body ever seen (although the novelization makes it very clear that Andrew's body was found offscreen).
  • Downplayed with Madison. At the movie's climax, she's crushed under rubble offscreen, and she's subsequently dug out by her parents, but wakes with a gasp. The novelization outright confirms that she had a Near-Death Experience before waking.
• Central Theme:
  • Bearing grudges can carry long-term effects. Mark Russell has a very personal vendetta against Godzilla after his son's death in the San Francisco battle, and his inability to see the Titans as anything other than bringers of death has driven Emma away by the start of the film. Mark eventually lets it go upon realizing Godzilla is humanity's only hope of standing a chance against King Ghidorah. Serizawa says it best when they go to locate Godzilla:
    Serizawa: Sometimes, in order to heal our wounds, we must make peace with the demons who created them.
  • An old theme makes its return: tragedy bears consequences, and consequences bear tragedy. Emma Russell is stricken with grief at the death of her son Andrew, and she makes a deal with Alan Jonah to wake every dormant Titan on Earth. The consequence? A murderous three-headed monster threatens to decimate all life on Earth, and does not give a damn if humans die. The tragedy that follows consequence? Dr. Serizawa is forced to give his life in a Heroic Sacrifice, and millions of others around the world, eventually including Emma herself, lose their lives to Ghidorah's rampage before it's killed.
• Character as Himself: The credits listed Godzilla, King Ghidorah, Rodan, and Mothra as "him/herself".
• Chekhov's Gun: Godzilla rips off one of Ghidorah's heads during their fight in Mexico, The Stinger reveals that the head was fished out of the water and purchased by Jonah.
• Child Prodigy: According to the promo website, Madison Russell and Sam Coleman were both academically gifted from a young age respectively. The site suggests that Madison (who is twelve years old during the film's main time frame) inherited her academic gifts from her parents, while Sam spent his childhood fixing and re-selling old arcade games in his free time.
• The Chosen One: Godzilla. The film makes clear that he's the rightful Alpha of Earth's Titans, and that Ghidorah only challenges that Alpha status because (as an alien) he stands totally separate from the natural order Godzilla represents.
• Citywide Evacuation:
  • More of an Islandwide Evacuation, but Monarch attempt this at Isla de Mara when they realize Emma is going to likely awaken the local Titan. The evacuation is only completed after Rodan breaks free and razes the island with many people still there.
  • After things go From Bad to Worse, with the whole world turned into a Death World as Ghidorah begins wreaking his Apocalypse How, the US President imposes martial law and the US Army direct a mass exodus of everyone in Boston. Which means the city is fortunately empty except for the main cast once the Final Battle razes it to the ground.
• Climate Change Allegory
  • Monarch are talking to the United States senate about how humanity's current course of action is unsustainable, and for the sake of their own species' survival they must change their ways to coexist with the Titans instead of trying to destroy or dominate them; yet every serious argument they're making for Titan coexistence is clearly just going in one ear and out the other ear in the senate. Political attitude to Global Warming, anyone?
  • Ghidorah, the one Titan who actively threatens to destroy humanity and render the world inhospitable for most other complex life, is not only released from Antarctica as a consequence of the ice fields being destroyed, he also seeks to destroy the world by creating a global Natural Disaster Cascade which includes tsunamis, wildfires and Ghidorah's own spreading storm systems — all of which are Real Life escalating symptoms of manmade climate change which ultimately threaten to make the Earth inhospitable to both humanity and most other existing life. In fact, the novelization specifically states that Ghidorah's apocalypse is essentially the same as the Global Warming process that humanity was already causing but massively sped up.
  • Additionally, the fact that attempts to use technology as a quick fix to stop the outbreak either by controlling nature/Titans (the ORCA) or by simply destroying them (the Oxygen Destroyer) only succeed in making things worse. Hope only comes when the protagonists strengthen Godzilla – Earth's natural defense system.
  • A news article in the Creative Closing Credits mentions there's a minority among the population who remain fimly entrenched in their anti-Titan sentiments despite evidence of the Titans' relationship with the Earth's ecology now being "insurmountable" and refuse to believe it, now being called "Titan-deniers" after public opinion on the Titans has shifted towards the positive; just like Real Life climate change denialists who remain ignorant of the increasingly irrefutable evidence that Global Warming is both real and a serious problem.
• Close on Title: The title appears right before its Creative Closing Credits.
• Colonel Badass: On the human heroes' side, Colonel Diane Foster is a Frontline General who leads the G-Team into various clashes with humans and Titans, she's very handy with a sniper rifle, she's one of the most unforgiving of Emma's crimes, she possesses a little more faith in Monarch than Admiral Stenz does, and she survives the movie. On the human villains' side, the white-haired Dragon-in-Chief Alan Jonah is an ex-colonel with Special Forces training who has long since become the head of an Eco-Terrorist paramilitary group – he's possibly the most competently dangerous human antagonist the MonsterVerse has had to date, and despite being out to kill off humanity at any cost, he treats at least one of his men surprisingly well.
• Color-Coded Elements: The headliner kaiju form a Classical Elements Ensemble explained here, and each is associated with a specific color in the movie's pallet (as well as on some of the posters): Godzilla is blue/water, Ghidorah is gold/air, Rodan is orange/fire, and Mothra is teal/earth.
• Colour-Coded for Your Convenience: All four monsters appear to be associated with certain colors.
  • Godzilla is associated with blue. Thanks in large part of living in the ocean and his atomic breath being blue.
  • Rodan is associated with red. Being a creature of fire and was living in a volcano.
  • Mothra’s varies a bit, but the bioluminescent green seems to define her the most. This color showcases how much of a spectacle she is and gives a very warm presence.
  • King Ghidorah’s main color is golden yellow. But he is also fittingly associated with the darkness/black to suit his status as the dreaded Big Bad.
• Combat Pragmatist: The Titans display this variously: Godzilla jumps Ghidorah while he's distracted going for the Argo and drags him into an underwater fight the larger Titan (a massive flyer) has serious trouble with. Mothra attacks Ghidorah from behind while he's distracted by Godzilla when she's making her big entrance - and Rodan later attacks her this way. And however powerful he may be, Ghidorah has no trouble calling in other Titans for a numbers advantage when he's in trouble. Ghidorah's middle head shows shades of this, using a power generator as an Improvised Weapon to charge up a powerful lightning attack, and it's also implied this trope might be why San didn't attack Godzilla with the other heads in Antarctica.
• Commander Contrarian:
  • Downplayed and sometimes inverted by Mark Russell. He vehemently disagrees with Monarch's approach to handling the Titans (specifically the "not killing them all ASAP" part) due to his personal grudge and cynicism, in contrast to Monarch's sound minds and xenophilia, and Mark takes more than one opportunity to make his opinion clear to the Monarch top brass's faces. But when he's thinking somewhat more clearly, it's Mark who often takes the lead in working out why the Titans are behaving the ways they are and what the most productive course of action would be.
  • Averted by Colonel Foster. When Godzilla aggressively approaches Castle Bravo, Foster heeds Serizawa's insistence on standing down instead of making him an Ignored Expert, despite her strong reservations.
• Composite Character:
  • While Scylla has arachnid like legs resembling Kumonga, her body and head resemble Ebirah — though it's actually a nautilus-like shell with crab-legs.
  • Both Rodan and Methuselah contain traits of the monster Obsidius, a living bipedal volcano, from the game Godzilla Unleashed: Rodan has the "internal system is molten magma with glowing fissures on his body" aspect, while Methuselah has the "living moving mountain" aspect.
• Containment Field: Monarch activate a lazer cage in an attempt to contain the larval Mothra, but it malfunctions due to sabotage, leaving a pissed off larva. The novelization reveals that the other Monarch containment outposts have similar containment fields, but none of them do any good against the Titans inside once they wake up: the creatures just power through the fields long enough to disable their power sources, or they find craftier ways to bypass them.
• Contempt Crossfire: Emma gets it from both sides when she's still hesitating to activate the ORCA, Maddie trying to get her to not kill billions of humans and Alan ripping into her for letting Maddie think it would be a painless process resulting in human-Titan harmony. Both Sides Have a Point.
• Continuity Nod:
  • The first shot of the film is Ford Brody and the other Special Forces descending on San Francisco during the events of Godzilla (2014).
  • Monarch, and the world at large, is very aware of the possibility of Kaijus coming together for more... intimate purposes and this is discussed briefly several times throughout the movie.
  • In Kong: Skull Island, Randa complains that Monarch is ignored and riduculed like "those people trying to prove aliens exist". And they do, in the form of three-headed golden dragons.
  • The female MUTO's decapitated head is seen on display at the Monarch's oceanic base, and in the novelization MUTO Prime's remains have been relocated there as well. In the ending, after Godzilla dethroned King Ghidorah as King of the Monsters, one of the Titans that are seen bowing to him is a MUTO.
  • Houston Brooks' "Hollow Earth" theory is proven true when the Monarch submarine finds an undersea trench that leads deep into the planet which is the route Godzilla used to travel across the globe and avoid human detection.
  • Godzilla once more finishes off his opponent by firing his atomic breath through their throat. Although this time it's going the other direction.
• Continuity Snarl: The prequel comic Godzilla: Aftermath explained at least on why Godzilla's dorsal spines looked different, being heavily damaged by Muto Prime which causes the Big G to overload his radiation levels. It was surmised that his dorsal spines eventurally grew back but with a different shape. The film however ignores this by having Godzilla's dorsal spines already changed in 2014.
• Contrasting Sequel Antagonist:
  • Amongst the Kaiju. The MUTOs and Skullcrawlers of the previous films were prehistoric monsters which evolved on Earth millions of years ago, they have an affinity for the earth and being underground, and they can apparently travel by sea if need be — Ghidorah, by contrast, is an ancient Draconic Abomination who's revealed to be extraterrestrial in origin, and he's a Giant Flyer associated with the air and storms who suffers a Logical Weakness if he's submerged in deep waters mid-battle. Though the MUTOs and Skullcrawlers presented an apocalyptic threat to humanity and nature, they were ultimately just animals operating on a natural life cycle that circumstantially threatened everything else rather than being actively malicious to humanity, with the MUTOs being kaiju Explosive Breeders while the Skullcrawlers were hypervores that would starve if they didn't constantly kill and eat every piece of meat in sight — Ghidorah is explicitly a genuinely malicious creature who's aware of and enjoys the death and carnage that he wreaks, and he actively seeks to engulf the world in global Titan rampages, superstorms and natural disasters until potentially all life on Earth besides himself is dead; either to xenoform the planet to his own liking (the characters' main theory), or simply out of murderous spite at every living thing that isn't him (a brief suggestion by Mark Russell in the novelization).
  • As for the human antagonists:
    • Colonel Packard in Kong: Skull Island was an initially law-abiding war vet tasked with keeping the other humans safe from the monsters, and he developed a personal crusade to kill Kong specifically and justified it as him serving and defending his country against the beast. Alan Jonah in this movie, on the other hand, is a rogue war vet long since turned international paramilitary eco-terrorist, and he's a pro-monster Misanthrope Supreme who seeks to actively set the Titans loose on the Earth with the end-goal of seeing them ravage humanity. Whereas Packard was almost solely focused on killing Kong, to the point of ignoring the greater threat of the Skullcrawlers and to the detriment of the very people he claimed to be defending, Jonah is implicitly more deliberate in his dismissal of the omnicidal threat posed by King Ghidorah to all life once he realizes that Ghidorah will achieve Jonah's end-goals of purging humanity from the Earth even more completely than eco-terrorism ever could have.
    • Emma Russell, in a sense, can be considered a contrasting sequel antagonist to Bill Randa from the aforementioned Kong: Skull Island. Much like the above contrast between Packard and Jonah; Randa manipulated dozens of hired people into danger with the end-goal of convincing the U.S. government to actively wipe the Titans out, because he believed it was necessary to humanity's survival; whereas Emma endangers billions of unaffiliated civilians on a global scale plus her own Monarch colleagues, by setting the Titans loose to cull humanity and rejuvenate the damage mankind has done to the ecosphere because she believes it's the only way that the world will survive, and she's defiant to the U.S. government's growing demands that Monarch allow them exterminate the Titans. Emma also manages to die making a meaningful Heroic Sacrifice, in contrast to Randa's ignominious death by a Skullcrawler.
• Contrasting Sequel Main Character: See here.
• Convection, Schmonvection: Zig-zagged. There's Rodan, whose internal temperature is so extreme he melts rock into lava and is therefore impervious to it. His heat does heavily injure Mothra during their fight, visibly burning her. Then there's Dr. Serizawa, who goes into the massive heat and radiation of Godzilla's home, protected only by a radiation suit of unspecified grade, but doesn't burn up when he removes his gloves or helmet. And then there's Burning Godzilla, whose core temperature is so high he melts buildings, metal scaffolding, and even the pavement from dozens of meters away.
• Cool vs. Awesome: A clash between Godzilla and three other Kaiju, this time all named.
• Cool Plane: Monarch's signature plane and secondary headquarters; Argo, continues the proud Heisei tradition of a Godzilla-centered organization using super-technology to create sci-fi planes. It's a massive flying wing capable of supersonic flight, vertical takeoff/landing, armed to the teeth, and also doubles as an Airborne Aircraft Carrier with other, smaller cool Osprey VTOL planes.
• Cosmic Horror Story: The general premise which, compared to the last movie, is now more prominent than ever. Ancient, impossibly powerful monsters are awakening everywhere, with the living cataclysm King Ghidorah front and center. Humanity is so outclassed that their only recourse is to ally, hopefully, with the benevolent ones. The redacted text in the credits even outright refers to the Titans as "Old Ones" a la the Cthulhu Mythos. In the novelization, Mark speculates that the Titans are either alien in nature or the last remnants of a primordial form of life that evolved during the Hadean period, when Earth was a radiation-rich volcanic wasteland. Then it's revealed Ghidorah is a hostile, actual alien horror with biology that defies science as we know it, seeking to raze the entire planet with an extinction event for his own desires. Underlined at the senate hearing at the start of the movie.
  Senator Williams: So, you'd want to make Godzilla our pet?
  Serizawa: No. We would be his.
• "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot: Brought up early in the film instead of at the end by Dr. Mark Russell, who claims the entire plot could've been avoided if Emma never recreated the ORCA (which he and Emma destroyed several years ago), or if Monarch killed all the Titans whilst they were dormant (which Monarch have been actively avoiding). Ultimately averted, as killing the Titans would be extremely difficult and attempts would likely only wake up and enrage them; and even without Monarch's losing battle to prevent the government taking over and trying to kill the Titans (which has a shitload of Fridge Horror attached), Ghidorah is imprisoned in ice in Antarctica. Which is, you know, already slowly melting precisely because of human activity and the absence of Ice Person Titans. The facts that te Titans would be difficult to kill, and that attempts to kill Ghidorah especially would likely only free it, get explicit attention drawn to them in the novelization.
• Creative Closing Credits: In a similar style to the 2014 film's opening credits.
• Credits Gag: At one point of the main credits, after the newsreel, the four main kaiju are listed as playing themselves.
• Creepy High-Pitched Voice: Ghidorah and Rodan's shrill roars are pretty terrifying.
• Crowd Panic: When Isla de Mara is being evacuated in light of Monarch's estimates that the Titan in the island's volcano is going to wake up, we get a series of shots on the hundreds of locals screaming and running for their lives as they rush to get out of dodge.
• Cryptic Background Reference: Aside from all the information that the movie's Easter Egg reveals about prehistoric humans and Titans' history, and how the advanced ancient acropolis likely ended up abandoned and completely underwater; the city has hieroglyphs depicting Godzilla, Mothra, and a Titan resembling Showa Rodan doing battle with Ghidorah, and a Freeze-Frame Bonus also reveals the skeleton of an Anguirus-like Titan is lying across the city's ruins, and it's strongly hinted that Godzilla makes his lair here because the acropolis' builders worshipped him.
• The Cuckoolander Was Right:
  • Serizawa's preachings back in the 2014 movie that Godzilla is the embodiment of nature's ability to re-balance itself could be pretty hard to take seriously In-Universe as well as out, especially given how esoteric it sounds coming from a scientist; and he hasn't let up at the start of this movie with his arguments that human civilization can coexist with Titans if the right decisions are made. Few people outside of Monarch take Serizawa's pro-Titan arguments seriously, including the government who are just itching for an excuse to try exterminating the Titans, but at the end, Serizawa is proven right: not only does Godzilla end the extinction-level threat of King Ghidorah, he also ensures that the other awakened Titans rejuvenate the world's damaged ecosystems and stay away from humanity's population centers.
  • Dr. Rick Stanton is regarded as a little bit of a loon even among Monarch for openly advocating Dr. Brooks' theory that the Hollow Earth is real, but he's proven right all along when Mothra leads a submarine carrying him, Serizawa, Mark and Chen to a Vile Vortex.
• Cue the Sun:
  • Played With. At the film's Darkest Hour, when it seems Godzilla has died, and with him humanity's only hope against Ghidorah, a small shaft of sunlight pierces the clouds. It grows brighter and brighter, until the glow is revealed to be not the sun, but Mothra...who with a mighty flap of her wings dispels the storm clouds and brings the true rays of the sun shining on our human heroes.
  • After Godzilla finally annihilates King Ghidorah, his hurricane dissipates and the sun finally cuts through as the Titans bow to him and he roars triumphantly.
• Curb-Stomp Battle:
  • At Outpost 32, the military didn't even stand a chance against Alan Jonah and his goons.
  • The U.S. Air Force vs. Rodan and Ghidorah. Rodan knocks his opponents out by rolling around swatting them all with his wings as while Ghidorah launches an electric storm flapping his wings to destroy all Air Force fighters.
  • After Rodan is lured into King Ghidorah by the humans, King Ghidorah quickly overpowers Rodan in battle, making the latter submit to his newfound tyrant and aid him in warding off Mothra.
  • Once Godzilla fully ascends to his atomic form, the final battle is basically already over. His first blast burns off Ghidorah's wings, preventing the space dragon from possibly escaping, he completely and utterly ignores a triple gravity blast to the chest from point-blank range, his second blast vaporises two of Ghidorah's heads, and the final blast disintegrates his body, leaving only his final head, which a cooled-down Godzilla then picks up in his mouth and annihilates with one last blast of atomic breath. Ghidorah had no chance at all against Godzilla and Mothra's full combined power unleashed.
• Curse Cut Short:
  • Hendricks manages an "Oh, shi-" just before Ghidorah's gravity beams reduce him to ashes.
  • When they learn that Ghidorah is homing in on Rodan's location, Mark notes that in nature two solitary predators coming together usually only happens for one of three reasons: "for food, a fight or a f... Something more intimate."
• Cutting the Knot: How Mark deals with a stuck cargo door on the Argo. It won't open, the alternative might not work and there's a shuttle full of civilians that needs to land ASAP. There happens to be a few docked shuttles above the door so Mark simply releases one that tears off the cargo doors.
• The Cynic: Whilst some of the main human heroes think that humans can potentially cohabit the planet with Titans and even flourish for it, others counter with a much more cynical outlook due to the sheer destruction that the Titans cause just by moving.
  • Dr. Stanton, initially the quippy voice of doom throughout the film, starts out thinking the Titans will destroy the world when they rise again, even debating with Dr. Chen whether or not Mothra will turn aggressive after pupating.
  • The official Monarch Sciences website reveals that Lauren Griffin doesn't think humans and Titans can coexist, although she otherwise has a fairly-positive personality.
  • Mark Russell fits the trope to a T. A jaded, sardonic and abrasive jerkass, Mark completely scoffs at the notion Godzilla and the Titans are anything other than all-destroying monsters that will kill everyone, and he loves spending his screentime during the early part of the movie criticizing others and wallowing in his own misery. When he finds out about the ORCA's reconstruction, he automatically assumes (not without some valid evidence as the film's supplementary materials and Creative Closing Credits reveal), that this will invariably go awry, focusing on the trouble it can cause over what it might be worth.
• Cynic–Idealist Duo: Played With. Certified timid Nice Guy Sam Coleman, who has a fairly positive outlook on the chances of humans coexisting with Titans, clearly wants to be friends with the openly cynical, embittered and Titan-hating Mark Russell for some reason. Mark is less than receptive to Coleman's advances until after his character development's turning point and after he starts to admit that humanity needs Godzilla against their common enemies; showing hints of warming up to Coleman which are explicitly confirmed in the novelization.
• Cynicism Catalyst:
  • Part of why Mark Russell is so cynical about the idea humans and Titans can cohabit the planet and why he insists that all Titans (even and especially Godzilla) are omnicidal monsters, is because he was caught up alongside his family in the chaos and destruction wrought in the previous movie and his son was among the collateral casualties. The fallout on the Russell family drove Mark to eventually abandon his remaining family and push away everyone who was willing to help him in favour of hiding from his grief as a wildlife photographer in Colorado – despite this, when his remaining family are threatened, he agrees to help Monarch try to rescue them.
  • The website promoting the film reveals that G-Team Ace Pilot Lauren Griffin has similar doubts to Mark about humans and Titans being able to coexist after she also witnessed the same destruction during the events of 2014.
• Darker and Edgier: The film one-ups the previous film's tone, and maybe even Shin Godzilla and the anime trilogy. Alan Jonah's endgame is to revive King Ghidorah, who is an alpha rival to Godzilla and his literal worst enemy compared to the MUTOs. Plus, there are far more casualties, and Anyone Can Die. Godzilla himself almost dies, and had to be resuscitated in order to save the world.
• Darkest Hour: After the Mexico battle, Godzilla is believed dead, Ghidorah has usurped the title of King of the Monsters and is driving the Titans to rapidly destroy the planet. It's discovered Ghidorah is an alien invader, meaning even the human villains won't be getting the outcome they desired and the most powerful weapons the military has available are completely worthless against King Ghidorah and his army. It isn't until Mothra arrives at Castle Bravo that things begin to turn around.
• Dark Is Evil:
  • In contrast to Mothra's association with light, Ghidorah's presence generates hurricane-sized black stormclouds which spark with yellow lightning. This leads to a particularly-terrifying shot when the cast's aerial carrier is flying through the storm, and Ghidorah is only revealed to be flying right in front of them when lightning flashes reveal the outline of his silhouette in the darkness. Furthermore, it's implied in the movie — and explicitly confirmed in the novelization — that the reason why global weather is so gray and stormy during Ghidorah's reign as King of the Monsters is because Ghidorah's storm generation is spreading all over the planet.
  • The film's human Big Bad Wannabe Alan Jonah, who is fine with Ghidorah destroying the planet if it means humanity is exterminated, wears a pitch-black sweater for most of his scenes, which marks him as a much eviler character than his partner Emma Russell.
  • A MUTO turns up as one of the rampaging monsters under Ghidorah's command, but it quickly bows to Godzilla upon Ghidorah's death, becoming benign.
• David vs. Goliath: Relatively speaking, Godzilla, Mothra, and Rodan are all significantly smaller in size to King Ghidorah, and this especially seems to backfire against Rodan when he engages Ghidorah in aerial combat, with the latter of whom easily overpowering the former.
• Dawn of an Era: At the end of the film, the formerly-hibernating Titans around the world remain awakened but are now being kept in check by Godzilla; they're restoring ecosystems decimated by human activity, and producing new, clean fuels for humans. A fisherman in the post-credits scene says, "It's a brave new world".
• Deadpan Snarker: Mark Russell, Alan Jonah and Rick Stanton all have moments.
• Deadly Escape Mechanism: One scene has a fighter pilot ejecting from his aircraft... straight into the jaws of Rodan.
• Death by Irony: Monarch's operatives suffer this on a large scale as a result of the events of this story. Their fascination and reverence for the Titans are on full display, and many of their staff are opposing the government's demands that the Titans be killed off: when King Ghidorah awakens the Titans all at once and he makes them behave hyper-aggressively, hundreds of Monarch's staff at the Titan-holding outposts are at ground zero as the creatures break their way free and start to Kill All Humans. On a more individual scale, Dr. Graham is specifically chomped and killed by the very same loosed Titan whose containment she was originally in charge of, as revealed in the supplementary materials; and Dr. Serizawa, who was revealed in the previous movie to be a Hiroshima survivor, is forced to break his own stances of opposing the use of nuclear weaponry and the active human intervention in Titan conflicts, when he makes a Heroic Sacrifice manually detonating a nuclear warhead to revive Godzilla because the fate of the world is at stake.
• Death Glare:
  • Ghidorah and Rodan both hand out at least one of these each, and Chen gives Mark Russell a more minor one for making another one of his angry anti-Titan snips which she doesn't have a retort for.
  • Godzilla levels one at the Monarch submarine crew after they nuke his lair to revive him from the Oxygen Destroyer, causing them all to flinch in fear; though he leaves after determining they're not a threat.
  • At the end of the film, Godzilla levels one at the other Titans once they arrive in Boston, as though daring them to challenge his reign. Rodan is initially defiant but bows first, followed by the others.
• Death World:
  • A mild case, but the entire surface of the Earth is effectively turned into one when Ghidorah takes over as Alpha and commands the other Titans to begin destroying all other life on the planet, with Titans rampaging all around the globe and actively unleashing extinction-level natural disasters. The novelization notes that pretty much nowhere on the planet short of a reinforced shelter is truly safe for human habitation at this point, and that the global conditions are forcing Monarch and the military forces to be selective with finding safe places to regroup or refuel. Fortunately, it gets undone once Ghidorah is killed and the Titans submit to Godzilla.
  • Godzilla's temple in an air pocket in the Hollow Earth is so highly radioactive that even protective gear isn't enough to protect one from radiation poisoning, never mind the deathly-high volcanic heat. This poses a problem when Monarch head to the temple looking to revive Godzilla, forcing one of them to make a Heroic Suicide.
• Decomposite Character: Like the original Dr. Serzawa, this one didn't create the Oxygen Destroyer. While both were horrified at this, this Serizawa was sorely horrified by the fact it exists, unlike the original, whose horror came not only from its potential, but the fact that he was the one to create it.
• Decon-Recon Switch: This movie tries to portray the elements of the Toho Godzilla franchise through a realistic lens. Many of the Fridge Horror elements of the Japanese films are addressed and used to show what would happen if giant mythical beasts decided to fight over the fate of the world. That said, it also tries to realistically incorporate the more positive aspects of the Japanese films; to show what giant monsters that aren't automatically Always Chaotic Evil but rather run a gamut of various emotions and dispositions would be like, and humanity's reaction to a fantastic new world beginning to dawn.
  • The Decon
    • In the original Toho films, while the audience did see buildings destroyed, cities leveled, and deaths of innocent bystanders, it is never shown (either through design or simply due to lacking the special effects needed) just how horrific it would be for the humans when giant monsters decide put on their dance shoes and hit the town. The results are terrifying with people being consumed by gale force winds, swallowed up by the earth splitting, and burned alive by nuclear fire.
    • Doesn't matter that Mothra and Godzilla are basically on our side and trying to protect the world, they are still giant monsters and manage to cause mass damage simply by moving, nevermind when they start fighting. Their opponent is also an ancient alien three headed Draconic Abomination that wants to level the Earth, which means that they can't be caught up in limiting the damage by holding back when the entire fate of the world is at stake.
  • The Recon
    • Human weapons can do nothing to most if not all of the Kaiju. While Mothra and Godzilla may be destructive saviors, humans are damn lucky to have them looking out for and protecting the world because if Ghidorah rose unchallenged, humanity would have been wiped out in the space of a month.
    • Just because the Kaiju are giant creatures that humans have never seen before and have the power to wipe out civilization, doesn't mean that they will. It also doesn't mean that they are automatically aggressive or hostile to humans either. Humans are so small to the Kaiju that they may as well be ants and tigers don't go around killing ants for fun. Going further with the tiger analogy, even dangerous beasts won't attack people unless they have a reason to.
• Defiant to the End:
  • In the novelization, Master Sergeant Margaret Nez chooses to go out fighting: cornered at the far end of a canyon with Mokele-Mbembe barreling towards her, she takes out her firearm. But she's saved at the last moment when the ORCA paralyzes Mokele-Mbembe.
  • When Ghidorah has Madison at his mercy and is about to vaporize her, how does Madison respond to staring almost-certain death in the faces? By howling at the top of her lungs at it in defiant rage.
  • Zig-Zagged between Ghidorah's heads. Cornered and about to be blasted by Burning Godzilla, they fire their Gravity Beams at Godzilla. Ni and San/Kevin effectively die fighting when the next blast disintegrates both the side heads (although Kevin is visibly terrified and appears to be following his big brother heads' example when he does this). Ichi, however, becomes visibly terrified for his life once it's his turn to follow them into oblivion.
• Demon/Devil Distinction: Rodan, a bio-magmatic, ancient Terror-dactyl who is prone to violence and destruction, is compared to a demon^note Specifically, he's known as the Fire Demon. Ghidorah, a three-headed, all-murdering hydra-dragon who fell to Earth from the stars, is specifically compared to the Devil. Ghidorah is the Big Bad who's out to usurp the "God" of the setting (Godzilla), he's more genuinely evil than any other Titan, and he can't be tamed, pacified, or redeemed in any sense; whilst Rodan is ultimately capable of cohabiting the world with other species and implicitly even rejuvenating the Earth, but Ghidorah turns Rodan away from the latter purpose and instead makes him Ghidorah's vanguard who aids his destruction of Godzilla's and humanity's world.
• Dénouement: The Bittersweet Ending variety, considering the mass death and destruction that occurs. The movie's final scene is Godzilla killing King Ghidorah and then being hailed by the other monsters as their new alpha, while the remaining human heroes including the reunited surviving Russells reach a safe distance. The Creative Closing Credits (in the form of various news articles) and the post-credits scene tie up most of the remaining plot-threads: both the eco-terrorists' belief that the Titans would renew the environment and the late Serizawa and Graham's belief that humans can share the planet with Titans have been vindicated under Godzilla's kingship, the MonsterVerse's first major hint that Godzilla and Kong will come to blows in the next film is dropped, and finally, Jonah and his men (last seen hiding before the Final Battle) are confirmed to still be at large as they buy Ghidorah's remaining head that was severed and left behind at the film's midway point.
• Derelict Graveyard: The Hollow Earth has one, consisting of various ships dating from various centuries, implied to have gotten there by being sucked into the same vortex that takes Monarch's submarine down there.
• Destructive Savior: Godzilla, as usual - he's quite happy to use the surrounding property to his advantage in battle, smashing Ghidorah through a skyscraper at one point. Then he hits his Fire stage - his mere presence is enough to cause the surrounding city to either melt or explode into fire. By the film's end Boston has been smashed on a scale that makes the last movie's San Francisco battle look small by comparison. However, this is by far preferable to what happens if King Ghidorah isn't stopped.
• Destroy the Product Placement: King Ghidorah lands and knocks over a helpless Dunkin Donuts billboard.
• Detrimental Determination:
  • Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist Alan Jonah is hellbent on seeing the Titans decimate humanity at any cost because he's that pissed off at mankind, justifying it as saving the rest of Earth's species, and he eggs his partner Emma on to stick to their plan whenever she starts having her doubts. He's so obsessed with seeing the Titans level humanity that when Emma warns him one of the Alpha Titans they've unleashed is going to eradicate humanity entirely as well as cause much worse devastation to the biosphere than we ever could, Jonah doesn't care, and he goes out of his way to make sure Emma can't try to stop Ghidorah herself. All that matters to Jonah is Titans killing off as much of humanity as possible (the more the better), and he doesn't seem to care (or in the novelization honestly doesn't realize) that Ghidorah's reign of terror will eventually kill him and his men too.
  • To a lesser extent, Emma Russell, albeit not without encouragement from Jonah. As an indirect result of her son's death five years ago, Emma is obsessed with saving humanity and the world's ecology from a manmade ecological collapse, even if she has to take the fate of the world into her own hands and cause millions of deaths due to Monarch's shortcomings on the issue. Emma goes so far as leaving several of her colleagues, friends, and also her daughter's father to die, while said daughter is helplessly watching beside her, so that she can pursue her goal. Aside from unwittingly setting loose the aforementioned Ghidorah in her recklessness (thereby putting the world under threat of the exact opposite of what she was aiming for); Emma's willingness to sacrifice lives by the thousands or even millions, and her direct refusal of her daughter's impassioned pleas to the contrary, utterly destroy her relationships with everyone who cared about her: her colleagues, her ex-husband, even her child (the only person whose life she really cared enough about to put ahead of her plan).

• Didn't Think This Through:
  • Whilst The Extremist Was Right that releasing the Titans will bring balance to the world and create many more solutions than problems for humanity, the eco-terrorists release Ghidorah who is a Titan that Monarch still knows relatively little about, partly due to it being a new discovery; and they furthermore intend to indiscriminately release all the Titans without first verifying their respective temperaments and which ones might actually be hostile to humans and incapable of coexistence. As a result, they don't count on Ghidorah turning out to be an invasive extraterrestrial with no ties to maintaining Earth's ecosphere and an Omnicidal Maniac who actively seeks to bring much, much worse destruction to the planet than the terrorists intended.
    • Would-be "alpha" animals in many species do fight for dominance. The ORCA controls the Titans by assuming the role of an alpha. It is not a magic switch and doesn't follow that a Titan of the order of Gidorah even absent the malicious intelligence would submit to it. Turns out all it means to him is extreme hatred and he can't be given orders even if Jonah would like to. He isn't an "animal" in intelligence either.
  • The mentally-unstable Emma needlessly drags her daughter Madison into her and Jonah's plan to set Titans loose on the world, without thoroughly indoctrinating Madison to be able to handle either the sheer bloodshed the plan entails nor the murders and mass endangerment of other people whom Madison knows. The result is that Madison is completely shocked and traumatized when the people her mother is helping begin gunning Monarch personnel down in cold blood, Madison almost gets all of them shot out of the sky by Ghidorah in a desperate attempt to save her father and several others from the three-headed dragon's wrath, and she becomes increasingly alienated from Emma and disillusioned with the latter's agenda; while Emma herself has absolutely no idea how to get back into Madison's good graces (when Emma isn't turning a blind eye to the problem of Madison's fraying loyalties, that is). It culminates in Madison decrying Emma as a monster, turning her back on her, and being left with lifelong psychological trauma because of her mother's stupidity. You know you're a bad parent when someone like Jonah can call you out on your parenting and legitimately seem like he has some actual moral highground.
  • The military launch their prototype Oxygen Destroyer in a seemingly rushed and panicked move in an attempt to kill Ghidorah and Rodan, without bothering to first hear from Monarch what precisely is going on or even consult them. As a result, their weapon ends up near-fatally injuring Godzilla while he was in the middle of subduing Ghidorah, and with Godzilla out of the fight, there's nothing on the planet able to stand against Ghidorah, who promptly begins enacting the Apocalypse How. Furthermore, The Stinger seems to indicate the military's untested prototype weapon has caused a lot more ecological damage in Isla de Mara's waters than just a two-mile radius.
  • This hits Madison when she uses the ORCA to disrupt Ghidorah's control over the Titans around the world and lure Ghidorah himself to Boston. Instead of getting the hell out of dodge with an Ax-Crazy, 500-foot Psycho Electro on his way, she actually stays put and looks out for any sign of him approaching, without unplugging the ORCA. As a result, she's trapped in the stadium when Ghidorah comes, hunting for the source of the ORCA signal. This gets some Adaptational Explanation in the novelization.
  • And then when Madison unplugs the ORCA from the stadium's speaker system, but doesn't turn the device itself off, Ghidorah is instantly able to zero in on her exact location and realize what she's done. She's only saved from being obliterated by Godzilla's timely arrival.
• Digital Destruction: Thankfully averted. Warner Bros. learned from their past mistake on the 2014 film’s Blu-ray and gave this film a proper home video released with a bright color pallet and equal level contrast.
• Disappointed by the Motive: Mark Russell and the Monarch operatives all react this way to Emma Russell's Motive Rant, deeming her plan reckless, insane and evil, and the Ranter in question cracks and reveals theirself as someone Not So Stoic under the pressure of Mark's accusations.
• Disney Villain Death: Attempted but ultimately Subverted. During the climatic battle, King Ghidorah uses his heads to lift Godzilla thousands of feet in the air and drop him. He even catches fire from atmospheric re-entry! It would've killed Godzilla too, had a dying Mothra not stepped in to give him a power boost.
• Disproportionate Retribution: It's implied Emma's motive for destroying humanity is to seek revenge for the death of her son. Mark himself outright tells her that destroying the world won't bring their son back.
• Do a Barrel Roll: Rodan wipes out the remnants of Gold Squadron with an aileron roll that demolishes the tight formation of the fighters.
• Doing Research: As King Ghidorah begins leading the Titans towards a global apocalypse, Mark and Ilene are left to do this onboard the Argo on the way back to Castle Bravo. Mark analyzes the ORCA's alpha signal attempting to work out what frequency Emma created it with, whilst Ilene continues consulting myths about Ghidorah for answers and she ends up piecing together that Ghidorah is an alien who acts like an invasive species on Earth.
• Do Not Touch the Funnel Cloud: Ghidorah's hurricane, even after it evolves into a Category 6 and produces offshoot tornadoes and water-spouts, is on its own pretty much harmless to humans on the ground, just hitting them with a lot of rain and only a small wind which batters their hair and clothes, and making some atmospheric fog. Even a Category 1 hurricane should threaten to blow people off their feet and tear buildings apart and send debris flying through the air. Worse, even flying inside the cloud is relatively harmless, to the point that thousands of aircraft can safely fly right under the hurricane with minimal turbulence, and even the crazy-high amounts of lightning in the clouds barely ever strike them.
• Double-Meaning Title: King of the Monsters can be seen as both a Protagonist Title referring to Godzilla (who is the rightful king of the Titans at the end), and an Antagonist Title referring to Ghidorah (who is depicted as The Usurper to Godzilla and succeeds in usurping him as the Titans' leading alpha for a time).
• Doublethink:
  • Alan Jonah believes that humanity is irredeemably despicable and doesn't deserve the Earth, after all our monstrous acts against each-other and after we've negatively altered the environment to the point of risking the first mass extinction since the dinosaurs. His solution is to let an even more wantonly-malicious monster clear us off, even when it becomes apparent that said monster will reshape the global environment in a way that will cause at least as much global extinction as humans are causing but at a far more rapid rate. Jonah's hatred for humanity is just THAT powerful.
  • Emma Russell has a pretty massive case with her plan to try and manipulate the Titans into saving the world. She says she wants to ensure that some good comes out of her son's death in a Titan attack and prevent more of the calamity that killed him, yet she doesn't see the blatant contradiction between this idea, and her execution being to deliberately release many more Titans and no doubt create millions more Andrew's and broken families like her own. It's also implied that Emma believes she's giving Madison and other survivors in the long haul a utopia where humanity isn't at risk of destroying themselves, yet Emma in further self-contradiction is internally motivated to punish the rest of humanity for causing her son's death by unwittingly instigating the MUTOs' emergence.
• Downer Beginning: The first four minutes of the movie's runtime establish: (A) the family whom this movie follows lost their elder child amid the carnage of the previous movie, which in turn led to (B) a Grief-Induced Split; (C) the oceans are suffering mass die-offs; and (D) Monarch are now on trial, with (E) The Government and the public calling for the military to exterminate all Titans (the opening paints the latter in such a way as to imply that this isn't nearly as good an idea as it might seem on paper).
• The Dragon: Rodan is the first Titan to bow to Ghidorah when he seemingly defeats Godzilla, and actively fights at his side against Godzilla and Mothra in the final battle of the film.
• Dragons Are Demonic:
  • Ghidorah, as per usual, is a daikaiju who looks a lot like the modern stereotypical depiction of dragons (even more so in this incarnation, where Ghidorah's wings have a much more natural and bat-like appearance than his original incarnation's sail-like wings), and he's an exceptionally evil and intelligent Light Is Not Good being who acts as the Satanic Archetype. Ghidorah stands apart from the other antagonistic Titans in this movie, in that whereas the other Destroyer Titans can be calmed down by a benevolent alpha like Godzilla, can rejuvenate the Earth's ecosystems alongside their Protector Titan counterparts, and are ultimately animals motivated by animal drives and instincts; Ghidorah is a malevolent competitor Alpha Titan who absolutely won't bow and won't stop until he's either won or he's dead, his mere existence on Earth is an apocalyptic affront to the natural order due to his extraterrestrial origins and fundamental Bizarre Alien Biology making him an Introduced Species Calamity on a cosmic scale, and he's unambiguously aware of what he's doing and he enjoys every moment of it, deliberately attacking humans on sight For the Evulz. Ghidorah's end-goals after usurping Godzilla's kingship are to direct the non-alpha Titans under his command towards actively destroying humanity and the world's natural order, and causing global extinction which could wipe out all multicellular life — the main theory is that Ghidorah's working towards remaking the planet in his own image, although the novelization at one point briefly postulates that Ghidorah's only end-goal is murdering everything that isn't him.
  • To a lesser extent; the Terror-dactyl Rodan, who was originally based on the Greek mythological dragon Ladon in his 60s debut, appears in this movie as a part-magma beast who is compared by Dr. Chen to a demon, and he serves as the aforementioned King Ghidorah's right hand for most of the movie after being defeated by him. Rodan is classified in supplementary materials as a Destroyer Titan, is implied to have devoured human sacrifices when the Titans were worshipped as gods by ancient humans, and he's a vicious Blood Knight when provoked into attacking. Unlike Ghidorah, Rodan is willing to bow to Godzilla after the latter ends Ghidorah's influence over the other Titans, and Rodan subsequently proves capable of regenerating the Earth's ecosystems and coexisting with humans.
• Dragons Are Divine: Discussed. Ilene clarifies the difference between western and eastern dragons, noting that the conception of them being malevolent creatures which a hero must slay (like Ghidorah) is western, whilst the east tends to depict them as divine creatures which bring "wisdom, strength, even redemption" (like Godzilla). Godzilla is a Physical God, and the Kaiju approximation to a Lord of the Ocean who, as fearsome and terrifying as he is, ultimately restores and enforces the world's natural order and will act as humanity's ally against King Ghidorah to that end.
• Dragon Their Feet: Subverted. In the immediate aftermath of King Ghidorah's death, Godzilla looks around to see the other awakened Titans who followed Ghidorah have arrived a little too late to assist their former master as they surround him. Godzilla intimidates them with but a Death Glare, and they all bow to Godzilla as the new King of the Monsters.
• The Dreaded: Ghidorah, naturally. Godzilla somehow senses something going on at the Antarctica site that immediately sends him into an intimidation display even with his nemesis thousands of miles away and not even awake yet. On Monarch's end, Mark's deduction Godzilla's heading to Antarctica immediately reduces the room to dead silence. Later in the film Dr. Chen notes she had trouble finding anything more than vague information on Ghidorah in myths and legends, as if humanity wanted to forget he ever existed.
• Dynamic Entry:
  • In Antarctica, Ghidorah is menacing the human cast on the ground while Godzilla is temporarily down, when airborne missiles suddenly explode in Ghidorah's faces from out of nowhere, diverting his attention. Cue the Gunship Rescue by a squadron of Monarch's aerial fighters, which, combined with Godzilla, is apparently enough to drive Ghidorah off while he gathers his strength since awakening.
  • Godzilla makes himself known in Mexico by erupting from the water and dragging King Ghidorah underwater like a giant crocodile. Then in Boston, the very first sign of his entry is his Atomic Breath blasting into Ghidorah's chest seemingly from out of nowhere, catching the evil hydra off-guard.
  • Mothra enters the Battle of Boston by dive bombing King Ghidorah and gluing his heads to a building with her webbing. Rodan then makes his entrance by divebombing her shortly there after.

E-F

• Eco-Terrorist: Emma, and Jonah and his mercs' mission is forcibly accelerating all the Titans' awakening so that the creatures' Fertile Feet can restore the natural balance which human activity is decimating, and the group are fine with mass slaughtering Monarch personnel who are in their way; to say nothing of the global human collateral that their plan demands to succeed. Emma deems humanity an "infection", declaring that unless the Titans are allowed to renew the ecology, humanity's overpopulation crisis and other ecologically-destructive ways will cause an ecological collapse that will ensure our own extinction within the next century, and she's confident that she can use the ORCA to manipulate the awakened Titans into coexisting with the surviving humans once the dust settles. Jonah, however, really just wants as much of humanity eradicated as possible because he personally considers humanity a far worse scourge on the planet that any of the Titans: this causes him and Emma to come to blows once the latter has realized King Ghidorah is going to completely wipe out humanity (instead of merely culling us) and is destroying the biosphere instead of healing it.
• Eerie Arctic Research Station: Played With. The Monarch outpost that houses the evilest and most destructive known Titan of all is located in the Antarctic wilderness. Not only does the barren, solitary landscape reflect what kind of Titan the dormant creature inside really is comparative to the others, the sheer geographical isolation of the facility certainly doesn't make it easy for the outpost's staff to detect the eco-terrorists' inbound presence in advance nor raise the alarm. But beyond that, there isn't particularly much horror or tension drawn from the outpost's isolated location nor the inhospitable outdoor conditions in and of themselves until after the facility is destroyed.
• Eldritch Ocean Abyss: The film has a sequence in the Underwater Ruins of an ancient, Godzilla-worshiping city within the Hollow Earth. The ruins are infused with radiation from the Earth's core, making it Godzilla's preferred place to rest and heal after a fight.
• Elemental Powers: Rodan, Mothra, and Ghidorah are all cited as having at least one:
  • Rodan is lava-based.
  • Mothra has bioluminescent abilities she can weaponize into beams of deadly energy.
  • King Ghidorah has electrical powers and can generate hurricane force winds with his wings. Combining both powers allows him to generate cataclysmic storms.
• Elite School Means Elite Brain: According to the Monarch Sciences website, pretty much all of Monarch's top specialist thinktanks have Real Life prestigious colleges to their names, mostly research universities. Tsinghua, Harvard, Oxford, Ohio State University, and the Universities of Tokyo, Michigan and California.
• Emerging from the Shadows:
  • Godzilla has a variation during the intimidation display scene (which is Godzilla's first direct appearance in the movie outside of the opening flashback): when Castle Bravo's shields open, there is complete darkness in the water outside, save for the slow, rhythmic flashes of Godzilla's dorsal spines lighting up. As Godzilla slowly draws closer to the facility, more of his features become visible. Slightly downplayed in that he withdraws before becoming fully visible.
  • Rodan's appearance at the Boston battle is marked by Ghidorah's stormclouds glowing red, followed by the fiery streaks from his wings outlining his silhouette a second before he blindsides Mothra and engages her in a duel.
• Enemy Mine: Downplayed, seeing as Godzilla's relationship with humanity isn't quite as hostile in the MonsterVerse as in past continuities. At the film's start, the general public consensus and certainly the close-minded government's consensus is that the military should be exterminating all the Titans indiscriminately, and Monarch are trying to stop them as long as they can (this works two ways as it also creates a Scientist vs. Soldier conflict to go alongside humanity's mixed feelings toward Godzilla). However, once Ghidorah usurps Godzilla's dominance over the other Titans and directs them to start creating an extinction event, it kills Monarch and the military's conflict and it leads to Monarch and all four branches of the U.S. military working together with Godzilla and Mothra to take their planet back from Ghidorah.
• Epic Fail: The military desperately attempt to kill both Ghidorah and Rodan by firing their prototype Oxygen Destroyer at Isla de Mara. The missile hits after Ghidorah has subdued Rodan when Godzilla is in the middle of defeating Ghidorah. It not only fails to have any effect on Ghidorah due to his alien biology, but it cripples Godzilla to the point of near-death; and without Godzilla to keep Ghidorah in check, the latter monster promptly awakens all of the dormant Titans around the world and commands them to begin razing the human race and all other life on the planet into the ground.
• Et Tu, Brute?: Mark Russell and Sam Coleman are both hit particularly hard by a betrayal when they learn Emma has been voluntarily working with Jonah to set the Titans loose. Sam is at first in denial since he practically worshipped Emma, and Mark struggles to get the words out when he confirms to Sam that they saw what happened. The novelization explicitly notes that none of the top brass want to believe that this person really betrayed them like this. Madison is devastated to the point of tears when she realizes just how far Emma has fallen and what she's really capable of, the novel stating she feels horrifically used and betrayed.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Though it's only revealed through the credits, the soldier killed by Colonel Foster in Antarctica is named Asher Jonah. Based on Alan Jonah's reaction, it was likely his son. This may have influenced his speech on "human nature" later in the film, and his acceptance of Ghidorah's plan to destroy the world.
• Everyone Has Standards: Despite their reverence for the Titans and belief that they're essential to the world, all of the Monarch key brass are universally horrified by Emma and Jonah's plan to forcibly awaken all of them and let them decimate humanity.
• Evil Counterpart:
  • King Ghidorah to Godzilla, per the two characters' franchise history: they're even compared to the Devil and God respectively in this film. Ghidorah in this incarnation is a rival Alpha Titan (meaning he stands apart from most Titans by being in the same weight class as Godzilla in his own right and having the potential to corral baseline Titans), he has attempted to usurp Godzilla's dominance several times in the past before their feud resumes in the present, and both monsters have light-emiting, beam-based breath weapons. Unlike Godzilla, Ghidorah is truly murderous towards humans, and he has not just the capacity but the intent to wipe away our world. Whereas Godzilla exists to restore natural balance as Serizawa said, Ghidorah is revealed to be an extraterrestrial interloper who will bring even worse calamity to Earth's natural order than humanity if he wins.
  • Although they don't interact directly, Alan Jonah is a dark mirror-image of Ishirō Serizawa. They're both lean, aged men with a composed demeanor, in charge of organizations that have an active interest in the Titans. However, Serizawa is critical of humanity yet values human life, he's mindful of Godzilla and the Titans' roles in the world, he champions Godzilla, and he calls for non-interventionism; whereas Jonah is a Misanthrope Supreme who wants the Titans to wipe out as much of humanity as possible, doesn't think twice about tampering with nature in the name of his goals^note In the novelization, he declares that "nature isn't always right", champions Ghidorah, and doesn't truly care if Ghidorah wreaks even more destruction on the world's biosphere than humans. The novelization also shows that Jonah, like Serizawa, has a Number Two who dies in Antarctica just like Serizawa's protégé Dr. Graham, but whereas Serizawa shoulders on with saving the world despite his grief, the novel explicitly notes that Jonah's loss destroys his last piece of humanity.
  • Rodan is positioned opposite Mothra as the number two of one of the two contender Alpha Titans. Both Rodan and Mothra are giant flyers, but whereas Mothra is highly benevolent, protective of life, and staunchly loyal to Godzilla; Rodan is volatile, destructive, and exhibits shifting loyalties. Mothra is even compared to an angel and Rodan to a demon, symbolically fitting into how either of their respective kings are portrayed.
• Eviler than Thou:
  • Emma and Jonah awaken King Ghidorah to act as their agent to restore balance to the world. It's only a short time before Ghidorah completely flies Off the Rails and begins his own, far more cataclysmic plans.
  • Jonah proves this to Emma, as while she near instantly has a My God, What Have I Done? upon realizing King Ghidorah is far more destructive and dangerous than she ever expected, Jonah is perfectly fine letting the space dragon kill everyone.
  • King Ghidorah becomes this against Rodan, who is completely unstoppable until Ghidorah defeats him in about one minute.
• Evil Is Bigger: Ghidorah is over 500 feet tall, weighs 141,000 tons and is the largest creature yet seen in the Monsterverse. He's also genuinely malevolent and an alien invader seeking to terraform Earth to his liking.
• Evil Is Not a Toy: Emma Russell and Jonah awaken Ghidorah in hopes that he'll restore balance as part of their plans. Unfortunately, Ghidorah has far bigger and deadlier plans than they had in mind. Played With with Jonah, who is fine to let Ghidorah have his way.
• Evil Versus Evil: This is what Monarch's plan is regarding luring Rodan into the path of Ghidorah in hopes of them just taking each other out. While they do engage in battle, Rodan doesn't die but does submit to Ghidorah as his Alpha.
• Exact Time to Failure: Rick counting down how long before Godzilla explodes like an A-bomb, having been overdosed with radiation.
• Excessive Mourning: Both Mark and Emma Russell, although the latter is better at hiding it, after their son's death five years ago. Both parents come to regret their actions once the child they still have is in mortal danger.
  • Mark divorced Emma and ran away to the Colorado mountains attempting to escape his problems. At the start of the film's main time frame, he acts as if his son's death was no more than five months ago even though half a decade has passed, and he acts as if he's the only one who lost a child even though there were thousands of casualties of the same event that day. Whilst he's not exactly a menace per se, he is an obnoxious piece of work who holds a hatred of all Titans (Godzilla in particular) for his loss, and who frequently directs his anger at his former colleagues regardless of the fact they're only trying to help him. He gets better over the film via Moving Beyond Bereavement, not least with the help of a few words from Serizawa about making peace with the Titan which caused Mark's pain.
  • Emma appears to have overall moved on since her son's death and continued working for Monarch, even if she is still a bit haunted at times. In actuality, this is a Mask of Sanity, as she's experienced significant Sanity Slippage; making a Face–Heel Turn and plotting to indiscriminately release the Titans on the world as part of a Utopia Justifies the Means plan. She's operating under an Insane Troll Logic that engineering global repeats of her son's death will ensure his death wasn't "in vain", and it's implied that whereas Mark blames the Titans for their son's death Emma instead blames humanity for causing the Titans' awakening which led to said death in the first place. Mark, Madison and everyone at Monarch call Emma out on her atrocities, with Mark criticizing her for trying to control the Titans without understanding them and Madison calling her out for thinking Andrew would want what she's done.
• Expy: Dr. Rick Stanton, a snarky alcoholic Monarch scientist, is based on Rick Sanchez.
• The Extremist Was Right: In the ending, Emma's argument that releasing the Titans would restore balance to the planet and repair the ecosystem, and that humans could peaceably coexist with the Titans, was proven right. However, the plan was incompletely correct: Waking Monster Zero was not a good idea, because King Ghidorah isn't one of the Earth's Titans and has no intention of restoring the balance in any way that Earth life can survive.
• Face Death with Dignity:
  • In the novelization, Barnes feels serene and is ready to face a seemingly-certain death when it looks like Ghidorah is about to dig into the Argo and kill everyone onboard, but Godzilla's arrival saves the ship and its occupants before anything can come of that.
  • Cornered by King Ghidorah, as the giant alien dragon charges up power in all three of its necks, Madison screams in sheer defiance at it... only to be echoed by Godzilla's own roar and a blast of Atomic Fire at Ghidorah's body, saving her.
  • Minutes later, faced with a similar situation, her mother Emma lies injured at Ghidorah's mercy and growls her own defiant "Long live the king" instants before Godzilla comes back in his Burning form. We do not see her actual death, but given she was at ground zero of successive nuclear pulses, those became her last words.
• Fantastic Nuke: The Oxygen Destroyer is a military prototype weapon for killing Titans which is designed to exterminate any and all terrestrial life within a two-mile radius. It gets used by the military in a Nuke 'em move.
• Fantastic Racism: The government and the majority of the public want Monarch to kill all the Titans instead of containing them at the start of the film following the events of the first film, and the senators at the start of the film are notably devoid of Admiral Stenz's reasonableness. Mark Russell outright rebuffs the notion the Titans are anything other than rampaging monsters due to blaming them for his son's death.
• Fatal Flaw: For Emma Russell, it's Pride: once she's committed to something and she's gotten it into her head that she's right about it, she can be very unmoving about it. For Mark, it's running away from his problems and letting them fester instead of confronting them head-on and dealing with them in a more healthy manner. For Jonah, it's letting his genocidal hatred of the human race override his forward-thinking and consideration of his own chances of survival in the wake of King Ghidorah's rampage. The film also seems to have cast aside any doubt from the first film that small-mindedness is Admiral Stenz's Fatal Flaw. Even Ghidorah gets some of this trope, as his sadistic need to go out of his way to attack humans with overkill or just draw out their deaths by a few moments thrice enables Godzilla to take him by surprise.
• Fearless Fool:
  • Downplayed with Rodan, when he charges into a fight against Ghidorah after initially banking away in an Oh, Crap!.
  • Played Straight by one of Ghidorah's heads when Ni (the right head) attempts to strike at a charging Godzilla on his own while the other two heads are incapacitated.
  • This is also a serious flaw of Emma Russell who doesn't have the best sense of self-prservation when pursuing a solution she perceives to a problem, something which is explored more in the Godzilla Aftershock prequel graphic novel.
• Final Battle: After Monarch have successfully revived Godzilla so he can take his kingship back from King Ghidorah and end the latter's global apocalypse, Godzilla meets Ghidorah in the evacuated Boston accompanied by the combined military forces of Monarch and what's left of the U.S. Army's four branches, whilst either Alpha Titan's respective vanguards Mothra and Rodan duel each-other.
• Fisher King: In multiple ways, and it's often justified by how the Titans' Physical God powers affect the environment around them.
  • The climate of multiple places around the world reflects on the nature of the current Alpha Titan who, by holding dominance over the other Titans, is essentially king of the planet.
    • Ghidorah is constantly accompanied by a lightning-filled Perpetual Storm that his powers generate, but when King Ghidorah is the ruling Alpha and is actively enacting an Apocalypse How on the planet, almost every location on the planet's surface that's visited is being pelted by mighty storms, which are actually being spread over the planet by Ghidorah. It signifies Ghidorah's fundamental and radical upset of the global natural order and also his purely-destructive nature as an Omnicidal Maniac.
    • Later in the film, Mothra in her imago form disperses Ghidorah's spreading storms from the sky above the Yunnan Rainforest and at Castle Bravo, signifying both her refusal to accept King Ghidorah's rule and her active attempts to restore the natural balance which Ghidorah is trying to obliterate.
    • When Godzilla reclaims his dominance, he and the Titans are surrounded by destruction but the sky is clear and red with a dawning/setting sun, symbolizing Godzilla's nature as a Destructive Saviour who brings both destruction and renewal to the world, and also the Dawn of an Era.
  • Early in the film, the temple where Mothra's egg has waited for millennia is positively teeming with plant and insect life and is furthermore located deep in a rainforest; fitting with how Mothra is both the most benevolent Titan and the one who is most aligned with life.
  • Isla de Mara's sky is a hot reddish-orange when Rodan is about to rise, and Rodan's emergence furthermore triggers a massive volcanic eruption; hinting at Rodan's Hot-Blooded nature, that he's not the most benevolent Titan towards humans, and also how he's easily provoked to wrath.
• Five Rounds Rapid: As expected, small arms fire isn't even felt by the Titans, but it's still the first response of any Monarch soldier that ends up in their path (as opposed to, say, running like hell). The only handheld arm to get a reaction was a high-powered taser against a relatively tiny Titan, and even that only pissed off the Mothra larva rather than have any real effect. However, while Titans do feel missile bombardment, it still annoys them more than actually hurt them in any way.
  • Most noticeable during Ghidorah's awakening, wherein one of his heads ducks down to peer at the soldiers below, allowing dozens of rifles to unload point-blank on his eyes, nose, and mouth with absolutely no reaction besides casual curiosity. One gets the distinct impression that the central head's decision to unleash their Breath Weapon was nothing more than making a point.
• Flashback: The film opens by revisiting the devastation caused to San Francisco by Godzilla's battle with the MUTOs, this time from the perspective of the Russells, as they happened to be there and searched for their son Andrew.
• Flat Character:
  • Dr. Vivienne Graham from the first movie, who still stands by Serizawa's side and shares his pro-Godzilla stance, doesn't get any expansion to mark her as anything more than a Satellite Character like she was in the previous movie before she's abruptly eaten.
  • Of the three heads, Ghidorah's right head (Ni) has the least three-dimensional seeming personality. Where the middle head is a calculating but hyper-sadistic group leader who gets exasperated by idiocy from his subordinate heads; and the left head is a slow, playful Psychopathic Manchild who's hinted to be a Genius Ditz and is somewhat curious about the humans they're destroying, among other quirks; Ni is just a Hot-Blooded Blood Knight who stands out by his perpetual frown and his damaged horn.
  • Dr. Ling, with her very limited screentime as a One-Scene Wonder during Mothra's emergence, doesn't have any personality outside of being a Monarch scientist with the same connection to Mothra as her more rounded twin sister has; existing solely to complete the MonsterVerse's Shobijin set. Even in the novelization, Ling, despite having a little more presence, doesn't exhibit any quirks or personality traits distinct from her twin's.
• Flat-Earth Atheist: The Creative Closing Credits introduce a brand of this amongst the population. After Ghidorah's death and the end of his destruction, a ton of evidence has publically emerged to show that the other newly-awakened Titans are healing decades to centuries' worth of damage to the world's ecosystems, and are actively leaving humanity at large alone per Godzilla's orders. A portion of the public refuse to believe the ecological resurgence is real or relevant, clinging to the earlier public sentiment from the movie's beginning that the Titans are nothing but monsters of pure destruction; although these people – whom are being called "Titan-deniers" – now appear to be in the minority.
• Flipping the Bird: Madison has a moment where she flips off Alan Jonah while they're both in the elevator. He's simply amused by this.
• Foreign Language Title: The Japanese version uses the title's characters as "キング・オブ・モンスターズ" (transliteration of King of the Monsters) instead of "怪獣王" (Monster King) to distance itself from the 1957 release of Godzilla: King of the Monsters! (1956), though both mean the same thing.
• Foreshadowing:
  • The truth about Emma's plan and the fact Madison was already on board when we first meet her is hinted at several times.
    • Madison's emails besides the one from her father are mostly environmental ones pertaining to fears of a mass extinction.
    • When Emma orders the panicked containment team to stop pointing their weapons at Mothra, all she says regarding why they should do so is "You are scaring her", hinting that she cares a lot more about a Titan's welfare than individual human lives.
    • If you look closely at Emma's face when the camera pans over Mothra and the ORCA in the wake of Jonah's massacre, the expression on Emma's face doesn't look particularly scared or shocked at all, simply a little angry if nothing else; hinting that she was expecting Jonah and his crew because she's in league with them.
  • In a more subtle example, the opening logos are stylized to look like ancient stone carvings, and depict the unawakened Titans on either side of them.
  • After the prologue, Mark is first shown taking pictures of wolves eating a carcass. Later, he's the first to notice the Titans are moving "like a pack" in response to an Alpha.
  • Ghidorah's Harmless Freezing isn't just a huge instance of Artistic License – Biology — it hints that this incarnation is actually as much an alien has the original incarnation, with literal Bizarre Alien Biology, and the fact Ghidorah can survive in that frozen state foreshadows the Oxygen Destroyer's complete failure despite its name to have any asphyxiating effect on Ghidorah.
  • Mothra arrives later to the Final Battle despite being last seen around Godzilla's location and being capable of flight. The credits reveal at some point she laid an egg before joining the final battle. This was confirmed by Dougherty on Twitter to be the case.
• Four-Philosophy Ensemble: Alan Jonah and the three Russells arguably form one regarding their stances on the Titans.
  • Mark is the Cynic — he's a Deadpan Snarker who for the first quarter of the film acts hostile to almost everyone around him, but he's quite logical, he puts reason ahead of revenge despite his biased tendencies and attitude towards Godzilla, and he overall proves himself a Jerk with a Heart of Gold. He's also at first in denial of the notion that Titans can coexist with humans and is a Tragic Bigot who rants that they should all be killed because of his own grief.
  • Emma is the Optimist — she's unflappable when she's gotten it into her head that she's on the correct course of action no matter what others tell her, she fails to entirely think through her plan to release all the dormant Titans indiscriminately (leading to her unwittingly unleashing an alien "living extinction event" that if left alone will cause cataclysmically worse destruction than she intended), and she's optimistic about the Titans as creatures which can coexist with humanity whilst healing the world of manmade damage, but she foolishly underestimates and misjudges her Dragon-in-Chief, Jonah. She also is committing her Evil Plan out of grief at her son's death without fully realizing it, and she puts her daughter's welfare ahead of the "bigger picture" she originally committed to. She even attempts a Heroic Sacrifice to save the world at the end.
  • Madison is the Realist. She mediates her parents' positive traits whilst lacking their major flaws, she has a connection to and high opinion of the Titans but is more concerned than her mother about their destructive potential, and she decisively and rebelliously takes the ORCA from Jonah's paramilitary and escapes from them and her mother to help save the world from Ghidorah.
  • Jonah is the Apathetic. Calling him cold would be an understatement, and he's more enigmatic than Emma realizes when he proves (in complete contradiction of his original Eco-Terrorist goal to let the Titans cull humanity for the good of the planet's biodiversity) that he's fine with letting King Ghidorah create an extinction event if as many human lives as possible are eradicated to sate Jonah's extreme misanthropy, and to his credit he also refuses to get involved even when Madison and Emma respectively intervene to try and stop Ghidorah. He's compared to Emma in the novelization, and it's explicitly noted there that Jonah is too far gone and too divorced from humanity to be redeemed.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus:
  • As a film with non-speaking sentient Kaiju, there's a few opportunities to decipher the Titans' thoughts and personalities from their actions and facial expressions. Ghidorah gets special attention for its Multiple Head Case, when two or all three of its heads are in the same shot and are responding differently to the same thing.
  • You'd literally need to hit the 'Pause' button to see it: in the shot where Serizawa falls to his knees on witnessing Graham's death, you can also see Coleman, Griffin and Ilene's reactions to it behind his shoulders.
  • The redacted text of the closing credits tells the story of the ancient civilization that existed in Hollow Earth and their relationship with the Titans.
  • A news article in the closing credits also states that Monarch may be building a "mechanized giant". Between this and the post-credits scene, it implies 2020's Godzilla vs Kong will feature Mecha-King Ghidorah.
  • When Mark is being shown the many Titans the Orca was built using samples of, the last one is of an familiar ape.
• Freudian Excuse:
  • The Eco-Terrorist Emma Russell is motivated to release all the Titans indiscriminately as part of her Utopia Justifies the Means plan because she lost her son in a past Titan battle and wants to ensure his death wasn't in vain. Despite being a genuine Well-Intentioned Extremist about it who believes she's saving the world and despite making some valid points, it doesn't seem to occur to her how bemusingly hypocritical it is to try and make her son's death "matter" by engineering over a dozen repeats of the incident around the world which will no doubt cause millions of innocent families to experience the same loss.
  • Alan Jonah is a Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist driven by an all-consuming desire to make as much of humanity as possible suffer. He reveals to Emma that he became the way he is as a result of seeing the very worst of human nature first-hand over decades of serving his country in one war after another, leading him to believe that human nature invariably gets progressively worse with time. The novelization also reveals that the "tipping point" of his descent into madness was after his daughter was gruesomely murdered while Jonah was away on military service.
• Friendly Rivalry: Ilene Chen and Rick seem to have the optimist-versus-pessimist variety.
• Friend to Bugs: The novelization notes that both Madison and Dr. Mancini have a passion for insects, and Maddie spent her early childhood fascinated by backyard insects. Pretty appropriate, considering that both humans (Madison especially) are associated with Mothra.
• From Bad to Worse: An even graver case than in the first film, which again the U.S. military are directly responsible for instigating. After the incident in Antarctica, Godzilla's Kaiju rival Ghidorah (who turns out in his Establishing Character Moment to be nightmarishly Ax-Crazy and sadistic) is loose, and Jonah and Emma are set on releasing all the dormant Titans one-by-one so they'll inflict Gaia's Vengeance. Surely it can't get any worse? The military drop the Oxygen Destroyer on Godzilla and Ghidorah in an attempt to kill them, but it only cripples Godzilla, while Ghidorah is revealed to be an alien who has no ties to maintaining Earth's biosphere; and with Godzilla inert, Ghidorah promptly forcibly awakens and takes control of all the planet's kaiju and uses them to start inflicting a Class 4-6 Apocalypse How.
• From Cataclysm to Myth: It's hinted that ancient myths and legends of the apocalypse and the fall of civilizations such as Atlantis originate in actual acts of destruction the Titans committed upon ancient and prehistoric civilizations. An Easter Egg reveals that before recorded humanian history, a war broke out when Advanced Ancient Humans attempted to enslave the Titans they'd once worshipped as weapons of war, and the Titans fought back; triggering a war, which caused a global cataclysm that decimated the Titans (with the surviving creatures withdrawing into hibernation due to the cataclysm triggering an ice age), and reduced the advanced ancient humans to scattered remnants around the world. Remnants which forgot their origin over many generations and eventually gave rise to the ancient civilizations of recorded history.
• Frontline General:
  • Among the villains, Alan Jonah is an ex-British Army colonel (a rank that is seldom a field commander in the British Army), who directly accompanies his subordinates on every armed raid, and he carries a gun of his own with which he does some of the killing personally and defends himself when necessary. However, it should be noted that Jonah positions himself at the rear of his assault force, and he keeps Madison and Emma close to him (presumably so he can use them as human shields) during G-Team's assault. Jonah reveals that he turned to the dark side precisely because he saw more first-hand action in his military career than his mind could take.
  • Among the heroes, the Monarch G-Team's leader, Colonel Diane Foster, leads her subordinates directly into battle at Outpost 32. She also directs her team from onboard the USS Argo when they, the Argo included, go into battle with Titans at Washington D.C. and Boston, and she personally extracts her troops and the Russell family from the final battlefield.

G-H

• Gadgeteer Genius: The Monarch Sciences website says that Coleman is Monarch's director of technology, charged with overseeing all proto-tech, and he developed a self-learning computer program when he was just 15; whilst Dr. Rick Stanton, who is handy throughout the film with satellite tracking and communications, has a history of advanced engineering.
• Gaia's Vengeance: Jonah and Emma think they're Gaia's Avenger, seeking to reawaken the Titans using the ORCA so that they can put a stop to humanity's ecologically destructive ways and retake their dominance of the planet as The Old Gods, restoring the natural balance. In practice it's not that simple, as they screw up royally by awakening Ghidorah first - an Alpha Titan not of Earth, whose rule turns out to be a total disruption of the natural balance that Godzilla normally maintains.
• Gentle Giant: Despite humanity's understandable anxieties, not all of the Titans are hostile — the creature are intelligent, and some of them can be outright benevolent toward humans and the natural world. Mothra, though small by Titan standards, is still over 50 feet, and she's the most benevolent of all the monsters by far. Her larger King, Godzilla, refuses to directly attack humans or even allow other Titans under his command to threaten large numbers of humans, but he's utterly merciless when combating serious threats to his world, as King Ghidorah can attest. The Monarch Sciences website reveals that at least a couple of the Titans who fall under Ghidorah's thrall and are driven by him to actively destroy cities are normally gentle creatures: Behemoth is described as "benign", and Methuselah apparently uses his ginormous body to shield humans and relocate them on his back away from disaster areas.
• The Ghost: of the seventeen known Titans on Earth, eight are mentioned but never actually shown onscreen (Leviathan, Baphomet, Abaddon, Typhon, Tiamat, Mokele Mbembe, Sargon, and Bunyip). Mokele-Mbembe and Kraken however both make appearances in the novelization.
• Ghost Town: San Francisco has become this since Godzilla's fight with the MUTOs. Monarch: Legacy of Monsters however shows that there's reconstruction efforts to the city to make it livable again.
• Giant Eye of Doom: During Ghidorah's arrival at Fenway Park, Madison freezes up and slowly turns around to see all three of Ghidorah's heads peering into the press box at her with one eye each, before Ichi's eye gives her a look that screams murder. In the novelization, one of the scientists monitoring Kraken in the Indian Ocean realizes something is wrong when he sees that Kraken's eye, just outside the laboratory's display, has opened.
• Giant Flyer: Other than Godzilla himself, all the other monsters are skyscraper-sized beasts that are somehow able to still soar through the sky.
• Godzilla Threshold: Because it wouldn't be a proper Godzilla film if this didn't get crossed at least once, the film crosses it twice. First with the military's Nuke 'em move, and then with Monarch committing a Nuclear Option. All Trope Namer reference aside, the latter counts as this trope due to the film lampshading the possibility Godzilla might turn on the humans in anger for their actions.
• Gold-Colored Superiority: The brilliantly gold-colored Ghidorah is an exceptionally-powerful monster who is considered Godzilla's Arch-Enemy for good reasons. Meanwhile, the blinding God Rays of Godzilla's symbiotic partner Mothra (the only Titan besides Big G himself who's able to resist Ghidorah's commands) take on a golden hue when she uses them to beat back Ghidorah's planet-engulfing storm-clouds.
• Gone Horribly Right: In Sam Coleman's own words, the plan to jump-start Godzilla's Healing Factor by giving him an exploding nuke to absorb "Worked a little too well." Godzilla's now on a countdown to meltdown, and perhaps only Mothra's Heroic Sacrifice saved him from going the same way as Burning Godzilla in Godzilla vs. Destoroyah.
• Gone Horribly Wrong: Their plan is to bring balance back to the world by forcibly awakening the Titans and letting them essentially knock humanity off the top of the animal kingdom, and to wake the Titans one at a time so the destruction they cause isn't too severe. The problem being, they didn't account for Ghidorah being a hostile extraterrestrial whose goal is destroying the Earth and making it his own, so once Godzilla is taken out of the picture, Ghidorah takes events totally out of the Eco-Terrorists' control by awakening the Titans and begins his own Apocalypse How.
• Good Angel, Bad Angel: Madison and Jonah have this dynamic with Emma Russell when the latter is about to release Rodan. Madison is the Good Angel trying to convince Emma that the latter should reconsider the whole Evil Plan or at the very least give the Isla de Mara villagers more time to flee to safety, whilst Jonah is the Bad Angel egging Emma on to go through with it before they run out of time and trying to undermine Madison's conscientious pleas. Driving it home is how the camerawork focuses on Madison and Jonah respectively from opposite angles, and how Madison is positioned in the scene on Emma's right shoulder and Jonah on Emma's left shoulder. The Bad Angel wins Emma over.
• Good Colors, Evil Colors: Generally, the colors blue and turquoise are associated with Godzilla and Mothra respectively (the two Alpha Titans whom are on the side of humanity and life), and Monarch's bases and vehicles tend to use lighting tinted with this color. By contrast, Ghidorah's presence produces gold and yellow lightning, the base that the eco-terrorists use after releasing Ghidorah has oppressive yellowish lighting, and the sky during the dark-red, yellow-eyed Rodan's awakening takes on reddish and yellow shades. There are exceptions to this rule, such as Mothra's golden-white God Rays and the Oxygen Destroyer's Sickly Green Glow.
• Good Lips, Evil Jaws: Averted in this film unlike in most of the MonsterVerse installments: Godzilla and Ghidorah both have lipped mouths and expressive faces, and Godzilla in this film is the Earth's best hope at salvation whilst Ghidorah is far more genuinely malevolent than any other Titan. Furthermore, one of the Titans under King Ghidorah's control is a MUTO (the Queen MUTO), but once Ghidorah is defeated, she joins Godzilla as a subordinate without a fight despite their species normally being natural enemies.
• The Good, the Bad, and the Evil: Mark Russell and Monarch are the Good, seeking to save humanity from the death and destruction that the Titans awakening will surely cause, and (in Monarch's case) to find ways for humanity and Titans to coexist positively; the eco-terrorist co-leader Emma Russell is the Bad, seeking to bring the aforementioned human-Titan coexistence about by forcibly accelerating the Titans' awakenings herself and deliberately letting the Titans kill millions of people, as well as not considering how she could lose control of the plan; and King Ghidorah is the Evil, seeking to dominate the other Titans and wipe out all multicellular life on Earth, and he takes pleasure in the carnage that he inflicts, with his actions and threat level horrifying Emma herself into siding with the heroes to take him down. Emma's fellow eco-terrorists at first appear to be the Bad by default, but they shift towards the Evil end of the scale when Jonah decides he's willing to let King Ghidorah completely destroy the world, and he goes out of his way to hinder Emma's efforts to help the heroes.
• Good Wings, Evil Wings: Of the flight capable Titans, the benevolent Mothra has pretty and glowing butterfly wings, the highly volatile but not outright evil Rodan has pterosaur-like Hot Wings, and the Omnicidal Maniac Ghidorah has bat-like dragon wings commonly associated with demons.
• The Government: At the start of the film, the U.S. government wants Monarch to be shut down, and all the Titans exterminated in their sleep. The latter, according to the monster experts themselves, isn't nearly as good an idea as it might seem the first time you see it on paper, yet government figures like Senator Williams don't care about what the experts have to say. This instigates the movie's plot, as the eco-terrorists and Emma Russell are acting to intentionally accelerate the Titans' awakenings in an effort to ensure the government won't get their chance to kill the creatures. The government's stance also leads to the military launching the Oxygen Destroyer at the awakened Titans in a panic instead of trusting in Monarch, causing Ghidorah's apocalyptic Near-Villain Victory which takes up the second half of the movie and causes global death and destruction.
• Gray Rain of Depression: Justified. After the Titans awaken globally under King Ghidorah's control, it's raining torrentially wherever the heroes are present, which the novelization confirms is because Ghidorah's hurricane-generating power has now begun to radically affect weather patterns worldwide. At this point in the movie, the heroes are at one of their lowest points: Godzilla is seemingly dead (which dismays Serizawa especially), Ghidorah reigns unopposed and is directing the other awakened Titans to destroy the world as we know it, and Mark is ready to abandon the fight so he can go look for Madison while having no idea where to start looking. Notably, Mothra disperses the rainclouds above Castle Bravo when she arrives there, leaving the sky clear, and her presence alerts the heroes to the fact that Godzilla is still alive and there's still a chance for them all to take their planet back from King Ghidorah.
• Green Aesop: Humanity's relationship with the Titans (sans Ghidorah) is like our Real Life relationship with nature: mankind are attempting to dominate or destroy the Titans to suit themselves, but they and most life on Earth cannot live without these creatures, and it's better if humanity instead seek a balanced coexistence with the Titans (which the ending proves we're very much capable of). Ghidorah on the other hand represents Global Warming: he's released and he gains global power due to human action and hubris, and whilst ostensibly reshaping the planet into a more comfortable form (for himself) he creates storms and global natural disasters which threaten man and nature alike.
• Grey-and-Gray Morality: The film makes clear that Eco-Terrorist Alan Jonah's views of humanity — with all the wars, death, and destruction people bring about — aren't entirely wrong, and that he can earnestly add stupidity (his and Emma's own as much as the military's) to the list of human flaws. In fact, It's his response to it all - letting the Ax-Crazy alien invader Ghidorah use the Titans to flatly obliterate humanity - that is presented as wrong, not the actions of humanity that left him so disillusioned in the first place.
• Grief-Induced Split: After losing their son Andrew as a result of the 2014 San Francisco kaiju attack, Mark and Emma Russell started drifting apart, with Emma moving to China with their surviving daughter Madison while resuming her work as a MONARCH researcher.
• Hair-Contrast Duo:
  • Ex-spouses Emma and Mark Russell at first seem like a straight case: the blonde-haired Emma, though far from angst-free, is a lot more optimistic about the Titans to the point of arrogance, and she's proactive through her grief; whereas the dark-haired Mark is cynical, testy, moody, is much warier of the consequences of meddling with the Titans whilst hating the creatures for emotional reasons, and has pushed everyone away so he can wallow. Except it turns out that despite these contrasts, Emma is much more unstable and heinous than Mark is.
  • Emma and her brunette daughter Madison, on the other hand, are an inversion. Madison wants to please her mother and starts the movie as something of a Wide-Eyed Idealist, to the point where she initially goes along with Emma's plan to set the Titans loose – Madison is also a notorious rule-breaker, and she's horrified when the bodies start dropping, realizing that what she and her mother are doing is wrong. Contrast that against Emma, who has gone so mad over Andrew's death and the knowledge mankind is engineering its own extinction that she's used Andrew's death to turn her back on morality, has a dim view of humanity, has no reservations about causing potentially billions of deaths, and barely displays any guilt for the morality of her actions.
• Halfway Plot Switch: Roughly the first 60 minutes of the film are a cross-continental chase around the world, with Monarch trying (and failing) to stop the eco-terrorists from loosing each of the other Kaiju "Big Four" of Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster one-by-one, whilst Godzilla is trying to fight off the reawakened Ghidorah. At the film's midway point, Ghidorah takes spontaneous control of the other Titans around the world and commands them to attack the planet as his army, causing the eco-terrorists to all but stop mattering as the plot shifts from a Gotta Catch Them All-esque global hunt to an all-out apocalyptic war between good and evil.
• Handshake Refusal: When they first meet, Dr. Sam Coleman offers a handshake to Mark Russell. Mark ignores him, so Sam puts his hand down.
• Happy Ending Override: At the end of Godzilla (2014), the hostile MUTOs have been killed before they could reproduce and devastate humanity, San Francisco has been saved from being obliterated by a nuclear warhead, and Godzilla peacefully returns to the sea whilst being hailed by the survivors of San Francisco's destruction as their savior for his actions. Five years later; more Kaiju with varying moral alignments are discovered to exist in hibernation and are slowly waking up all over the world, public opinion has turned around since Godzilla's departure to demands that the hibernating Kaiju be killed off indiscriminately by the military, manmade efforts to track down Godzilla are causing mass die-offs in the ocean, San Francisco has been abandoned and is in overgrown ruins (implicitly due to Godzilla and the MUTOs' unique radiation), and Monarch is facing major government scrutiny and public backlash for not exterminating the Kaiju they found as was their original purpose.
• Harmless Freezing: King Ghidorah was frozen in Antarctic ice sometime in the past, yet it appears to have done nothing to slow him down once he escapes. Justified, as he has an insane Healing Factor, as well as not needing oxygen to survive, being a space creature.
• Hauled Before a Senate Subcommittee: Coleman and Dr. Serizawa are summoned for a Senate meeting on the issue of the Titans and where the creatures' loyalties lie. The head senator believes Coleman is suggesting that humanity should make Godzilla their pet. However, Serizawa corrects her and says humanity would be Godzilla's pet if such a concept existed in his head.
• Hazmat Suit: In a blink-and-you'll-miss-it, Monarch personnel in full-body hazmat suits can be seen fleeing in the Argo's hangar when Griffin's Osprey makes an unorthodox landing.
• Heartbeat Soundtrack: Played With. The track which plays at Outpost 32 directly before the explosives detonate to free Ghidorah from the ice sound eerily like some vast heartbeat to indicate Monster Zero is waking up inside the glacier. A slower, more ominous one plays a couple minutes later when the ORCA completes Ghidorah's awakening in the pit.
• Heel–Face Turn: Emma Russell and Rodan forsake former ties to the villains in favour of aligning with the heroes by the end of the movie.
  • Emma, after having a Heel Realization about how far she's fallen, about the sheer danger that King Ghidorah poses to all life, and about the immediate threat to Madison's life; abandons Jonah and his men in favour of rejoining with Monarch at the Final Battle; helping them to rescue Madison, and trying to ensure Godzilla's victory over Ghidorah at the cost of her own life.
  • Rodan spends the second half of the movie serving as Ghidorah's vanguard after the latter has become the reigning alpha, helping him kill his enemies and destroy the world, but once Ghidorah is killed by Godzilla, Rodan is (with a little persuasion) the first Titan to call quits on throwing the world into chaos and to acknowledge Godzilla as their new alpha.
• Heel Realization:
  • Emma has this once Ghidorah takes over as the new Alpha, realizing that while humanity has done a lot of damage to the Earth over the years, if Ghidorah remains in charge of the other Titans then it will do far worse to the planet than anything humanity has achieved in its existence.
  • Madison has her own realization when listening to Emma dismiss Mark and Serizawa's arguments with contempt and disdain, and when Emma subsequently awakens Rodan in callous disregard for the lives of the hundreds of fleeing evacuees on Isla de Mara. Although she was aware of her mother's plan and had been manipulated into believing her mother was in the right, it's made clear she did not know the full extent of the eco-terrorists' methods, a fact that Jonah mocks her for. Any uncertainty Madison still has at this point about whether or not she's on the wrong side is put to rest once King Ghidorah usurps dominance of the other Titans and uses them to begin slaughtering the entire planet.
• Held Gaze:
  • Mark appears to almost fall into a trance while looking at Godzilla's eyes during the couple times he sees Godzilla up-close and personal (although it's ambiguous if Godzilla sees Mark specifically and not just the group of humans that Mark is among both times). It reflects Mark's keen awareness of animals' behavior and his feelings of synchronization to animals when he sees and hears them up close, all of which still lurk underneath his feelings of spite towards Godzilla – the novelization even includes an extra segment where Mark briefly locks eyes with a wolf when feeling connected to them before he breaks eye contact in a show of submission to avoid getting mauled (foreshadowing Mark's pragmatism during Godzilla's aggressive approach on Castle Bravo). In fact, the second time Mark stares at Godzilla's eyes and feels synced to him, is when Mark fully lets go of his hatred towards the Titan.
  • The novelization includes an extra scene where Jackson Barnes catches Master Sergeant Hendricks' gaze, while Barnes sternly but sympathetically reminds Hendricks that he understands the latter's feelings about his father's death but they can't have a Military Maverick on the field team.
  • During the Mexican standoff between Mark and Jonah, Mark and Emma are looking each-other dead in the eye when Emma reveals that she was Evil All Along: Mark's gaze is sorrowful, hurt and confused, while Emma's is regretful but resolved before she blows the charges in the glacier and puts Mark's life at risk, reflecting how either of them have felt as people ever since their son's death and their Grief-Induced Split.
  • Jonah has a couple Antagonistic-type staredowns with either of his female captives.
    • Him and Emma are staring each-other down when Emma is desperate to go and save Madison's life and pulls a gun on Jonah: Jonah is wearing a complete poker face that makes him look nonchalant, whereas Emma's gaze is almost pleading as she tells Jonah that she won't lose her daughter. For whatever reason of his own, Jonah is the one who backs down to Emma after hearing her out and momentarily analyzing her.
    • Jonah also has a staredown with Madison in the novelization when he threatens her for snapping at him, unnerving Madison before Emma intercedes.

• Helicopter Flyswatter: During the Final Battle in Boston, several military helicopters and tiltrotors are visible getting knocked out of the sky amid Ghidorah's clash with Godzilla and Rodan's clash with Mothra, before Ghidorah's Beam Spam attack after consuming the city's power supply turns pretty much all the choppers into raining fireballs of dead metal.
• Hellish Copter: Monarch employ Osprey tiltrotors as their primary form of small-scale aerial transport in this movie, and helicopters also turn up among the aircraft aiding Godzilla and Mothra at the Final Battle – more often than not, these rotor aircraft end up going down dramatically around the Titans. The Osprey the Monarch top brass use to reach Antarctica gets permanently grounded thanks to a static surge caused by Ghidorah's gravity beams before they can escape, and then the Osprey gets knocked around and down a crevasse amid Godzilla and Ghidorah's fighting. The tiltrotor that the G-Team are fleeing Isla de Mara in barely stays in the air with a damaged rotor long enough to make what amounts to an emergency crash-landing in the Argo's Osprey bay, which wrecks the Osprey beyond any further use. The Osprey that Mark and the G-Team use to fly into Fenway Park amid a Titan battle, and which was also their ticket out of the immediate area to search elsewhere as quickly as possible, gets crushed by Ghidorah's foot and goes up in a fireball. And the majority of Godzilla's aerial escort which includes helicopters and Ospreys gets annihilated in the final battle; if not by the battling Titans' weight accidentally knocking the choppers out of the sky, then by Ghidorah's Beam Spam lightning attack after feeding on the city's power grid annihilating all but a handful of the aircraft present.
• "Hell, Yes!" Moment:
  • When Godzilla, accompanied by the military, storms into Boston for a Final Battle against King Ghidorah just after Godzilla's long-ranged Atomic Breath stopped Ghidorah disintegrating Madison, Madison directs a smile at Godzilla that just screams "you give him hell".
  • In the novelization, Barnes has two words to say when he sees Godzilla getting back up after Ghidorah almost killed him for good:
    "Fucking A."
• Heroic BSoD:
  • Serizawa seemingly slips into one when Godzilla is seemingly killed. He's scarcely seen directly helping out or contributing much to discussions, save to (justifiably) inform the Monarch-military meeting at Castle Bravo that Godzilla was indeed the Earth's sole line of defence against Ghidorah, until Mothra arrives and Monarch discover that Godzilla is still alive.
  • Madison hits this during the Final Battle with the Titans' battle raging around and threatening to crush or vapourize her, driving her to on unthinking instinct flee to her family's old house in Boston in search of safety.
• Heroic Sacrifice:
  • According to the novelization, the G-Team's Too Dumb to Live move in Antarctica was actually this (see Adaptational Explanation).
  • Dr. Graham's death in Antarctica occurs due to them staying behind briefly to save Mark Russell's life, which made them vulnerable to Ghidorah who ate Dr. Graham alive.
  • On account of the submarine's weapons systems being offline, Dr. Serizawa volunteers to manually detonate a nuclear weapon close to Godzilla in order to speed up his healing process. This decision is especially notable in that Serizawa is a survivor of Little Boy's detonation over Hiroshima, and so is well aware of what he is getting into.
  • As a badly-injured Godzilla lies weakened after being dropped from the sky by Ghidorah, Mothra, herself severely wounded by Rodan, makes one final attempt to defend Godzilla before being vaporized by Ghidorah's gravity beams. However, as she dies, she releases a radioactive cloud that settles upon Godzilla, reviving him and granting him his Fire Form.
  • Emma pulls one off luring Ghidorah away from her family with the Orca which gets her killed.
• Hero with Bad Publicity:
  • Although Godzilla has saved humanity from the MUTOs five years ago and is working to rid the world of King Ghidorah, he is still deemed a threat by the United States. Even Mark Russell, the human protagonist, wants Godzilla dead because his son was collateral damage during Godzilla's fight in San Francisco. Only Serizawa and Monarch appear to be on Godzilla's side. Thankfully by the end of the movie this seems to be going away, as multiple newspapers report about how Godzilla is keeping other Titans away from cities once the Titans accept and revere Godzilla as their king.
  • Monarch themselves are also getting this at the start of the film, due to the majority of the public blaming them for the San Francisco incident and the government subjecting them to intensifying scrutiny because they won't cooperate with their plan to kill every Titan. It's implied the backlash is further influenced by Monarch's refusal to reveal what they know about the Titans or how many more there are; but more than that, the government and most of the public just want to try killing all the Titans indiscriminately, and don't care for Monarch's arguments that that isn't a good idea.
• His Story Repeats Itself: The Russell family's broken state and issues stem from losing Andrew when the family was caught up in San Francisco's destruction, as depicted briefly in the movie's opening flashback. Mark has since pushed everyone away and ran to the mountains to block out his trauma, Emma has become unstable to the point of trying to "honor" Andrew's memory by engineering millions of deaths, and Madison to a lesser extent has become a "Well Done, Daughter!" Girl to a fault. After Mark and Madison spend most of the movie working through or overcoming their respective issues, in the climax they get caught up in another city-leveling Titan battle (in their original home city no less), with Mark desperately searching for Madison before she ends up becoming the next Andrew. Although Madison is saved, she and Mark still lose another member of their family amidst the battle.
• Hollow World: More evidence of Houston Brooks' Hollow Earth theory from Kong: Skull Island comes up. Godzilla uses the extensive network of undersea caves to get places faster than should be possible. And the Monarch submarine follows Godzilla into one of these tunnels to find his nest.
• Homefield Advantage: Godzilla and Ghidorah's second fight takes place underwater and Godzilla has a notable advantage where he ends up curb stomping the dragon, ripping off its left head. Everything goes well until the humans fire the Oxygen Destroyer.
• Hope Bringer: Both Mothra and Godzilla play this role in the movie, respectively. After King Ghidorah has taken control of the other Titans and begun destroying the world, the humans have little hope left that anyone can save humanity from certain destruction at this point. Then Mothra shows up in her imago form, literally beating back the storm, and her calls alert the cast that Godzilla, the one creature on Earth who can defeat Ghidorah and who is on humanity's side so long as humanity are a part of the Earth's natural order, isn't as dead as the cast initially feared, and so they immediately set about helping to heal him.
• Hope Spot:
  • Mark finally gets to Antarctica to rescue his daughter from Alan Jonah and his eco-terrorist group. Madison walks to him...only for Emma to tell her to come back and she obliges.
  • Monarch makes it to Antarctica to stop Alan Jonah from freeing Monster Zero and manage to have him cornered with even Mark holding him up at gunpoint...and then Emma releases Ghidorah to the world, later revealing that she's been working for him all along.
• Horns of Villainy: Ghidorah has ten horns crowning each of his three heads, while Rodan has two horn-like crests curving out the back of his head: the one with more horns of them is an Omnicidal Maniac who's actively malevolent to an extent far beyond any of the previous monsters, while the other with less horns is ferociously territorial and becomes Ghidorah's Dragon, but still isn't as evil as Ghidorah when acting on his own. In the novelization's expansion, Mokele-Mbembe has a single horn curving from his head in addition to his tusks, and once he's bent to Ghidorah's will, he eats a Monarch operative alive whilst annihilating the Monarch outpost around him and looking to rampage in the three-headed monster's name.
• Hostage Situation: Mother and daughter Emma and Madison Russell are kidnapped by a mysterious organization, and it's up to Emma's estranged husband Mark Russell to save them. Subverted on Emma's end, as being caught and brought to Ghidorah's can was part of her and Alan's plan all along.
• Hot-Blooded: Both Rodan and Ghidorah's right head (Ni) really enjoy the carnage of dipping their teeth and claws into a good fight. Among the humans, Mark Russell is quite heated about his hatred for Godzilla and is a Leeroy Jenkins, while Master Sergeant Hendricks is screaming like a maniac when he's (ineffectually) firing a machine gun to get Ghidorah's attention.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters: Runs two ways here.
  • First, according to Dr. Emma Russell, humans are an "infection" who have decimated the Earth's ecosphere and triggered their own extinction event, thus necessitating the reappearance of the Titans which humanity fears in order to set things back into balance and reverse the damage that mankind has done. Emma isn't the only person who's aware that the Titans can potentially restore the world instead of destroying humanity, it's just that most of mankind doesn't care: the government want to take over Monarch's jurisdiction and conduct a campaign of active Titan extermination (which as Emma points out could screw the Earth even more irreversibly if they succeed), and most of the public are justifiably afraid of the Titans or they angrily want their loved ones avenged after all the death and destruction that occurred in 2014.
  • On the other side of the fence, Emma and Alan Jonah manually awaken the Titans, starting with the two most destructive ones on the list. Everything goes downhill from there and Madison rightly blames her mother for it, calling her a monster in doing so. This hits home hard.
  • In a more literal example of the trope, the Titans apparently view mankind collectively as one of their own: it turns out the hidden ORCA acoustic that is able to awaken the Titans is a human voice, to the point that King Ghidorah immediately abandons his fight with Godzilla to destroy the ORCA when it's turned on in the middle of their last battle.
• Humans Are Special: The secret tone used to get the attention of Titans? It's a human voice. The Titans apparently consider humanity as a whole a single alpha predator comparable to themselves to the point that they will accept challenges from the voice.
• Human Pet: Dr. Serizawa states that when this is over, the best fate humanity can hope for is to become Godzilla's pet. The worst fate would be both Godzilla and humankind perishing at the hands of a worse Kaiju.
• Humble Pie: Both of the Russell parents, neither of whom are particularly pleasant people, get forced to self-reflect on their mistakes after suffering a humiliation that disproves their convictions that they were in the right, respectively.
  • Mark, though not entirely wrong, is quite high horsed whenever he lashes out at the Monarch top brass for underestimating the Titans' destructive capabilities, and he insists his vengeful rage against Godzilla over his son being a casualty of Godzilla's last battle to save the world is justified. Mark gets brought down a peg when Godzilla's seeming death by a manmade weapon leaves Mark feeling unsatisfied (and much worse it directly enables King Ghidorah to reign unstopped), and Serizawa tells Mark in front of the other gathered heroes that he's gotten his wish. This pretty much gets Mark off his high horse for the rest of the movie, although the sequel shows that it didn't last.
  • Emma, who displays an extreme degree of hubris in her belief that her invention can manipulate the Titans to humanity's benefit, goes through a full-blown Break the Haughty. The movie criticizes her for taking the fate of the world into her own hands with her plan to restore the natural balance by setting dozens of Titans loose to cause billions of casualties; never mind gaslighting her own preteen daughter into being complicit in crimes against humanity, or knowingly sentencing dozens of her colleagues and her daughter's father to death. At the movie's midway point, Emma's plan blows up in her face spectacularly when one of the Titans she released takes control of the others and starts engineering an even worse disaster than the one Emma was trying to prevent; while at the same time, everyone Emma tried to get killed plus the one person she valued more than her plan have all come to despise her for her voluntary crimes. For extra injury, Emma's own Dragon declares he's fine with letting Ghidorah destroy the world even if she isn't, and refuses to let her do anything to fix the mess she's made, taking away her last remaining illusions of control. At this point in the movie, Emma is truly alone.
• Hypocrite:
  • Dr. Emma Russell claims one of her main motivations is ensuring her son's death didn't occur for nothing, yet she seems completely ignorant of the fact her plan calls for causing millions of families to go through the same pain of losing loved ones as she did instead of preventing it. Adding to this trope, she's not so willing to let someone die when that someone happens to be her child instead of someone else's (in contradiction to her previous claim that things are bigger than her and Madison). In another point, she gets rightfully called out by Jonah for telling him to leave Madison out of their argument when she's already pulled her daughter into an eco-terrorist paramilitary organization's radical plot some time ago.
  • Mark Russell at two points angrily scorns Serizawa for "kidding himself" with the belief Titans are capable of being benevolent, and Emma for putting something before her family and her own wellbeing; in ignorance of the fact he himself as an animal behavior expert is kidding himself with his Tragic Bigotry towards the Titans, and he descended into alcoholism and then distanced himself from his surviving family when they most needed him to be strong before the film.
  • Emma considers Serizawa a hypocrite for daring to chide her over making an extremely dangerous gamble by planning to forcibly awaken all the Titans and manipulate them with the ORCA, retorting that the game she's currently playing with the fate of the world didn't begin with her: it began when the government and the public started putting mounting pressure on Monarch while demanding that the Titans be exterminated in their sleep. It's an issue which Serizawa was reacting much less seriously to during the earlier senate scene, despite how Monarch are clearly losing the legal battle and despite how, as Emma observes, the consequences of the government getting what they want could actually do just as much harm to the world as Serizawa is criticizing Emma for risking.
  • Played With by Alan Jonah. He tries to shoot down Emma's attempt to go rescue Madison by stating humanity doesn't control the laws of nature — which is pretty rich coming from him, considering his mission is all about forcibly manipulating nature to achieve his Eco-Terrorist goals (although he's happy to let Ghidorah do what it wants when it takes things out of the eco-terrorists' control). He also says one human life doesn't matter, but submits to Emma's wishes when she aims a gun at him instead of risking his own life.

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