Characters / MonsterVerse - Eco-Terrorists

Main Character IndexKaijuGodzilla | King Ghidorah | King Kong | Mechagodzilla | Mothra | MUTO | Rodan | Skull Island Kaiju & Other Creatures
Humans Families (Russell Family) | Monarch (Dr. Ishirō Serizawa) | U.S. Government & Military | Skull Island Expeditions | Eco-Terrorists | Apex Cybernetics

A skilled international paramilitary team of armed mercenary cells, who follow Alan Jonah in the belief that releasing the dormant Titans is the key to restoring the natural order even at the expense of humanity.

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In General

• All Your Base Are Belong to Us: They directly attack and take over two of Monarch's Titan-containing outposts so they can loose the Titans inside. The first sign of the eco-terrorists' presence at Outpost 61 is when the security system malfunctions and Dr. Mancini suspects sabotage, before the doors to the main lab explode and the mercs gun down everyone in sight whose last name isn't Russell. The group proceed to Outpost 32 to awaken Ghidorah, gunning down all the staff there, before Emma's treachery is revealed and the eco-terrorists blow Ghidorah loose, causing the base to collapse.
• Bald of Evil: With Alan Jonah the trope is downplayed, as he has a balding spot on his head courtesy of being played by Charles Dance and is one of the most evil human characters in the MonsterVerse. A notable bald woman is among Jonah's Mooks who is seen in the background throughout the film, and the Mook who talks in the scene where Jonah's men hack into Outpost 56's systems is shown in other scenes over the film to have a bald scalp underneath the beret if one looks out for him.
• Bomb-Throwing Anarchists: Overlapping with Western Terrorists. They're ultra-radical eco-terrorists who want to commit acts of mass genocide and destruction in order to alleviate the strain that humanity is putting on the environment; releasing the Titans is their plan to achieve this end.
• Crazy-Prepared: They're almost-constantly step ahead of the heroes, marking them as one of the MonsterVerse's more competent and independently-dangerous human threatsby far. Monarch's G-Team have seen through their Yunnan decoy and caught up with them in Antarctica before they've finished freeing Monster Zero? Jonah fluidly gives his men an order to keep them busy before said troops launch a devastating ambush on the G-Team, clearly showing that the eco-terrorists were prepared for the possibility of Monarch catching onto them.
• Eco-Terrorist: Duh. They attack mankind in believing that they are restoring the natural order.
• Evil Is Not a Toy: They're indiscriminate in which Titans they choose to set loose on the world for their plan, not considering the possibility that some of the Titans' awakened presences will be even more destructive for the world than humanity are (just like the MUTOs were). They even go as far as releasing the Alpha Titans first, when the ORCA which they need to control the Titans can't dominate so much as bargain with or piss off the Alphas. The result of this methodology is that the second Titan the eco-terrorists awaken, Ghidorah, is a hostile Alpha who dominates the other Titans for himself and sets about sterilizing the planet instead of healing it. The ensuing catastrophe still isn't enough to convince Jonah or his soldiers that they should help Godzilla, Mothra and the rest of the cast to stop Ghidorah from killing everyone, as they prefer to hunker down in their bunker against the coming apocalypse for as long as possible.
• Evil Versus Oblivion: Defied by all of them sans Emma Russell. Emma is ready to make a Heel–Face Turn once she realizes King Ghidorah isn't just bringing Gaia's Vengeance but is instead liable to wipe the Earth clean of all life as we know it, and she tries to warn Jonah that they've fucked up by awakening Ghidorah. However, Jonah hates humanity so much that he refuses to lift a finger to try and stop Ghidorah, instead hiding himself and his mercs away whilst the apocalypse is escalating. In the novelization, Jonah goes even further out of his way to stop Emma from trying to hinder Ghidorah's rampage. Ultimately, Jonah and his mercenaries are the only human party in the movie who don't come to Godzilla and Mothra's side against Ghidorah and his Titan army at all, staying out of the conflict.
• The Guards Must Be Crazy: Late in the film, Jonah's men who are guarding the ORCA all conveniently take a break all at once, leaving the device unguarded and allowing Madison to easily snatch it and waltz out the front door with nobody to stop her. Better yet, nobody discovers that the device was stolen until Jonah sees a news broadcast about the monsters ceasing their attacks, which alerts him that Madison stole the device and used it. Downplayed in the novelization, which reveals they do leave someone behind to guard the ORCA, but Madison dispatches said guard when she's caught.
• I Have Your Wife: Subverted. Besides kidnapping Emma Russell to seemingly be the group's Reluctant Mad Scientist, Jonah also kidnaps Madison at the same time. Mark observes in the novelization that the logical assumption for why Jonah took Madison too is to use her as leverage to make Emma comply. In reality, Jonah and his group took Madison because both she and Emma were already in on the eco-terrorists' agenda.
• Invincible Minor Minion: When your leader is an Invincible Villain and The Chessmaster, you can expect to be one of the most, if not, the most dangerous mook ever. When Alan Jonah plans ambush attacks on the heroes, these mercenaries take out the latter's army with barely a scratch. When monarch and the military try to search for them, they outsmart them and remain on the run.
• Karma Houdini: After personally slaughtering dozens of people and causing millions more deaths around the world (nevermind their leader's intention to let King Ghidorah destroy the Earth), all of the eco-terrorists barring the late Emma and Asher escape being killed or arrested amid the chaos. The movie ends with the group still at large when Jonah and several of his mercenaries collect Ghidorah's leftover severed head in The Stinger.
• Knight Templar: All their distinguished members are convinced that massacring members of the pro-Titan but less-misanthropic organization Monarch, and allowing potentially billions of people to become collateral damage when they set over a dozen Titans loose on the world is worth saving the world from mankind's fatal mistakes in how we treat the environment. Asher in the novelization has a conversation with Jonah which indicates he genuinely believes the latter's cause is for the greater good; fallen Monarch operative Emma Russell is the most apologetic over the atrocities the terrorists are committing, and she firmly draws the line when she realizes King Ghidorah will eradicate all humans and will exacerbate instead of repair the ecological destruction; while Alan Jonah, who is less genuine in his end-goals' altruism (and all but admits outright in the novelization that he's doing everything just to satisfy himself), insists that literally any sacrifice is worth permanently eradicating humanity's worst evils from the planet's surface. In the novelization, Jonah religiously describes the eco-terrorists' cause as "the one true church".
• Nature Is Not a Toy: They think they can level the global socio-political playing field by forcibly awakening the Titans and trying to manipulate their actions using the ORCA. It's heavily implied in the King of the Monsters Creative Closing Credits that even if they hadn't fucked up by awakening the hostile alien Ghidorah, their plan to control the Titans instead of letting the Titans sort themselves out would have still spiraled out of control, albeit without the same risk of global multicellular extinction that Ghidorah presented.
• Punch-Clock Villain: The novelization portrays the subordinate mercenaries in such a light. During the Osprey ride to Outpost 32, they're chuckling and talking with each-other like ordinary work buddies, until it's time for them to massacre another Monarch outpost, and then they become all-business; something which greatly disturbs Madison. Asher in the novel makes it clear that while he believes in Jonah's cause and will kill as many people as Jonah tells him to, that doesn't mean he'll enjoy it.
• Renegade Splinter Faction: Zig-Zagged. The Godzilla vs. Kong novelization states that Monarch suspect the Titan poachers in Godzilla: Dominion and the novel's prologue, who tried to capture Na Kika before Godzilla destroyed their oil rig, might have been a rogue splinter group from the eco-terrorists — this theory is one of the many things that Mark Russell is sceptical of in the book. The poachers' interest in exploiting the Titan's biological materials for profit in the novel's prologue is similar to how Godzilla: King of the Monsters stated the eco-terrorists fund their operations by trafficking Titan DNA, but unlike Jonah's group, the poachers are entirely self-serving and have no higher end-goals beyond making themselves a good buck.
• Restart the World: The Misanthrope Supreme form. These Bomb-Throwing Anarchists believe that Humans Are the Real Monsters for all the atrocities humans have committed against each-other in war, and for all the abuse humanity is inflicting on the environment which is currently pushing the world towards the worst mass extinction since the end of the dinosaurs. As a result, the eco-terrorists with the help of a rogue Monarch scientist want to set all the accounted-for Titans loose on the planet in one fell swoop so that the creatures can decimate human civilization and usher in a world where humanity isn't the dominant species. The eco-terrorists' leader Jonah doesn't really care whether that new world is a balanced world where the Titans have renewed the environment, or a dead, charred world under King Ghidorah's rule; so long as humanity has been decimated and so long as the eco-terrorists themselves get to sit out the apocalypse in a Monarch bunker for as long as possible.
• Short-Lived Aerial Escape: Narrowly subverted in Antarctica. After they blow the glacier holding Ghidorah, they get back on their stolen Monarch Osprey and start getting the hell out of dodge with Ghidorah waking up. Thanks to Madison rebelling while everyone else is off-guard and trying to save the heroes' lives with the ORCA, Ghidorah almost shoots the eco-terrorists' Osprey out of the sky, but Emma shuts the device down and Ghidorah turns his attention back to the human heroes while the terrorists escape.
• Swiss-Cheese Security: Their bunker outside of the Boston metro area. The security presence is so poor that Madison is able to snatch the ORCA from the control room, exit the bunker, hike all the way to the control room in Fenway Stadium, and set it running before Jonah and Emma even realize it's gone. In the novelization she is caught by one guard, but shocks him into unconsciousness with a stun gun before he can stop her.
• Taught by Experience: They conquer the first two Monarch outposts via bypassing the security protocols with Emma's aid, massacring every Monarch operative in their way, and setting the Titans loose; but after Monarch catch up to them early at the second outpost and almost neutralize them altogether, the eco-terrorists promptly go for a different approach at target number three. Instead of invading the outpost physically (which is what Monarch are initially expecting them to do), the terrorists remotely hack into its containment systems to loose Rodan, whilst bouncing their signal off of multiple satellites so that Monarch can't trace where they're broadcasting from. Monarch are completely taken by surprise, and the hijacking of the outpost is a complete success.
• Villain Ball: For some odd reason, all of them allow Madison unsupervised free reign of their base. Which leads to Madison being able to steal the ORCA — the device they've been using to awaken the Titans — when they leave it in a insecure room.
• Villains Out Shopping: Downplayed in a deleted scene, where Jonah and his Mooks are watching Madison training in kickboxing the way you'd probably watch a small show in the village square if you lived without TV or wi-fi and didn't have much better to do.
• Western Terrorists: A paramilitary eco-terrorist group whom fund their operations by trafficking in the new Titan DNA black market, and are looking to commit mass terrorism and global genocide in the name of stopping humans' unsustainable over-exploitation of the environment at any cost. Jonah even compares them to a church in the novelization. Despite the organization being international/nationless, the members whom we see are predominantly light-skinned, all the ones who speak during the film are either British or American; and furthermore, the end credits list several of the backgrounded members' names and they're all names of distinctly British origin.
• Would Hurt a Child: Their plan to manipulate the Titans calls for the mass endangerment of billions of people around the world, children included. In the novelization, they garner extra points when Jonah gives an order that Madison Russell is to be executed via throat-slitting if Emma steps out of line, and neither the soldier being given the order nor any of Jonah's other subordinates protest.

The Accomplice (*Spoilers*)

Dr. Emma Russell

Portrayed By: Vera Farmiga

Appears In: Godzilla: Aftershock | Godzilla: King of the Monsters

"Humans have been the dominant species for thousands of years and look what's happened. Overpopulation. Pollution. War. The mass extinction we feared has already begun. And we are the cause. We are the infection. But like all organisms, the Earth unleashed a fever to fight this infection. Its original and rightful rulers, the Titans. They are part of the Earth's natural defense system, a way to protect the planet, to maintain its balance. But if governments are allowed to contain them, destroy them, or use them for war, the human infection will only continue to spread, and within our lifetime, our planet will perish...and so will we. Unless we restore balance."

Mark Russell's ex-wife and Andrew and Madison Russell's mother, Monarch's chief paleobiologist and director of Bioacoustic Studies, the discoverer of Mothra, and the co-inventor of the ORCA. Initially appearing to be kidnapped by ecoterrorist Alan Jonah, it is later revealed that she is collaborating with Jonah to forcibly awaken the surviving Titans of the world and re-establish them as the first gods of the planet.

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• Abandonment-Induced Animosity: It's pretty clear during the tail end of her video call to the Argo when she starts arguing with Mark, that she's really bitter that her ex-husband abandoned her and Madison for the last five years, starting when they needed him more than ever while they were grieving Andrew's death to the Titan battle; and she calls him out. Emma also demonstrates that she's willing to (hesitantly) leave Mark to die as a necessary collateral of her plan, in contrast to how she refuses to compromise on her daughter's life when the chips are down. A deleted scene that was shot for the movie, and the novelization's expansion, both take the "Animosity" a little further, confirming that Emma has projected by telling Madison that Mark was a useless drunk in an effort to alienate him from her.
• Abusive Mom: Downplayed, but the negative consequences of her parenting Madison are quite evident as she manipulated her daughter into going along with her insane plan while also turning the young girl against her father.
• Adaptational Mundanity: Her creation of the ORCA and her and Jonah using it to attempt controlling the Kaiju including but not limited to Ghidorah, seems to make the two of them a human adaptation of the Human Aliens such as the Xiliens in earlier Toho continuities, who likewise used technology to control the Kaiju, the core difference being that the ORCA isn't a surefire mind-control switch and Ghidorah is simply unable to be controlled.
• Admiring the Abomination: Not an uncommon attitude among Monarch, and considering how the Titans appear onscreen to a cinema audience it's more than understandable. But she mixes this with a dose of misanthropy when she decides that the human race are acting like an "infection" destroying the planet, whilst the Titans are rising to act like antibodies maintaining the Earth's natural balance, and so she decides the Titans must be freed to reclaim dominance of the planet and force humans to re-attempt co-existence with them.
• Aggressive Categorism: Establishing type. Ironically, just as her ex-husband assumes without much objective evidence that all the various Titan species are all-destroying monsters who should be wiped out, Emma herself applies the opposite attitude to all the Titans, with equal prejudice. She assumes based on little more than Godzilla and the MUTOs' Fertile Feet that all of the Titans awakening will be good for the planet, and she also assumes that she can control every last creature with the ORCA after some hazardous trial and error involving Jinshin-Mushi and Mothra. Boy, she was in for a surprise when she realized one of the Titans she awakened was actually an ecosphere-destroying living extinction event not from our planet who doesn't respond to the ORCA with anything but murderous violence, to say nothing of how another Titan released as an indirect consequence of Emma's plan — Camazotz — caused the extinction of Skull Island.
• A Million Is a Statistic: She believes that the reawakening of the Titans is something that would ultimately benefit the world's ecosystem. Thus, she views the deaths of the millions, if not billions, of humans and the decimation of population centers that would inevitably occur as the Titans awaken as a necessary sacrifice needed to save the world. And then her daughter is one of the people in danger of dying, and she changes her mind and tries to pull the plug.
• And Then What?: Defied. Dr. Stanton poses this question to her when she reveals her plan to release all the Titans so they can inflict Gaia's Vengeance. Emma replies without missing a beat that the Titans won't reduce the planet to a dead wasteland as Stanton believes, but will instead rejuvenate it.
• Anti-Villain: The director calls her "a gray character rather than a mustache-twirling villain." She intends to make the world a better place for humans and Titans alike and prevent humanity from creating their own extinction event, and it's worth noting she does have a mix of Heel Realization and My God, What Have I Done? in addition to genuinely loving her children. But her means of achieving her goal involve recklessly forcing all the Titans to awake before the government can attempt killing them off, and she assumes nothing will go wrong despite not fully understanding the Titans herself; to say nothing of how she knowingly risks sacrificing billions of human lives or is willing to leave many of her co-workers and her daughter's father to die if it means seeing her plan through.
• Armor-Piercing Response: She and Mark exchange two with each other during Emma's Motive Rant: after Emma fires the first one, it renders Mark silent for a moment, and then he responds with the below quote, which renders Emma silent for even longer and visibly fazes a listening Madison.
  "This won't bring him [Andrew] back to us."
• Backstory: Before she met and married Mark, Emma was an environmental activist and sometimes got arrested for participating in protests. In 2009, five years before the events of the original film, Emma and her team followed a bioacoustic signature to the mountains in Yunnan, China, and found the hidden Temple of the Moth, with a cocooned Mothra inside.
• The Bad Guy Wins: Ultimately zig-zagged. By the end of the film Emma's plan brings about the deaths of millions worldwide. But her plan works. The Titans at the end restore the environment. Even though she is ultimately crushed under debris, she dies knowing that she left the world a "better" place for her daughter. However, despite the massive death toll and destruction, human civilization remains largely intact and still capable of producing weapons like the Oxygen Destroyer, making Emma’s dream of utopian coexistence between Titans and humans far from certain.
  • Later averted altogether in following films and novels. The tie-in comic Kingdom Kong reveals the existence of hostile Titans like Camazotz who ultimately destroys Skull Island; proving King Ghidorah’s threat to both the ecosystem and humanity was not an exception merely for his alien status. Further by the time of Godzilla vs Kong, many of the Titans have returned to hibernation upon Godzilla’s command, with humanity returning to its exploitive ways, such as the addition of organizations like Apex Cybernetics coming into power. Thus, despite an initial environmentally positive start, in the long run Emma’s efforts really became All for Nothing.
• Bait the Dog: At first she seems to be an innocent scientist and mother caught up in Alan Jonah's crazy scheme. Except it's actually her crazy scheme, she joined forces with Jonah before the start of the movie and on top of that, she's the one who releases Ghidorah and awakens him with the ORCA.
• The Beastmaster: She and Mark developed the ORCA, a device to communicate with and possibly control monsters through their bioacoustics on a sonar level.
• Being Evil Sucks: Madison catches her at one point crying alone in a cafeteria with regret over what she's done.
• Berserk Button: Bringing up one or both of her children's wellbeing and questioning her sanity in tandem tends to make her crack true to her Not So Stoic, in both Godzilla: Aftershock and Godzilla: King of the Monsters.
• Big Bad Duumvirate: With Alan Jonah, though he's initially the one in charge. They both plan to awaken Ghidorah from his ice prison and use the ORCA to control him, however Ghidorah has his own plans.
• Big Bad Friend: She's this to most if not all of the key Monarch operatives. She recruited most of them and is implied to have been good friends with them before her betrayal is revealed.
• Big Bad Wannabe: Alongside Alan Jonah, she is the one responsible for unsealing King Ghidorah and kickstarting the plot of the film. However, once King Ghidorah is freed, he quickly overshadows Russell and Jonah as the primary threat and, rather than restore balance as she had intended, instead opts to terraform Earth to suit his liking. Even Jonah outclasses her in this regard, being perfectly content with Ghidorah wiping out humanity, and later deciding she's no longer needed.
• Break the Haughty: She suffers a lot of Contempt Crossfire and close-to-home backlash for her hubris over the course of the film. Downplayed in the novelization, where despite her Heel Realization she still believes that Madison will actually forgive her if she tries to make things right.
• Broken Ace: She's seen In-Universe as this by some of her colleagues, such as Dr. Brooks in Godzilla: Aftershock. She's looked up to and considered one of the best in Monarch, despite the death of her son in 2014 which turned her into a Workaholic and clearly still haunts her at the start of King of the Monsters. Then her Face–Heel Turn is revealed.
• Broken Pedestal: She was regarded as one of the best in Monarch, particularly by Sam Coleman, and suffice to say that all of the top brass are shocked and crushed when her Face–Heel Turn to Jonah's cause comes to light. The atrocities she commits over the film eventually alienate even Emma's "Well Done, Daughter!" Girl.
• Contempt Crossfire: 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.
• Contrasting Sequel Antagonist: In a sense, she's a contrasting counterpart to Bill Randa from Kong: Skull Island. Both are elite Monarch operatives, and they're also both ruthless and duplicitous well-intentioned extremists; who manipulate and endanger other people including their allies for their own perceptions of the greater good, play a major role in triggering the conflict of their debut movie, and are ultimately killed by the movie's antagonistic Titan after realizing they were wrong. However, Randa wanted humanity to launch an extermination campaign against the Titans for mankind's own survival, and he primarily endangered military men that he hired out from the U.S. Army — Emma on the other hand wants the Titans to teach us bastard humans a lesson via decimating us and restoring the natural balance which mankind has decimated, in order to ensure the world's survival, and she instead endangers her own Monarch colleagues plus billions of unaffiliated civilians on a vaster scale than Randa ever did. Randa sought to bring proof of Titans' existence back to the U.S. government, and his death was quite ignominous — Emma, who is also more hi-tech than Randa, operates against the law as an eco-terrorist, and she dies committing a Heroic Sacrifice which yields effective results.
• Contrasting Sequel Main Character: To Mason Weaver from Kong: Skull Island. Both are passionate, headstrong, cunning, determined, nature-loving and anti-authority women, whom are firmly opposed to some form of man-made conflict in the world and consider themselves duty-bound to undermine it; both women form a deep admiration for some of the Titans, and both women have deep-rooted emotional issues involving their families underneath the mask. However, Weaver is an anti-Vietnam War photographer and an all-round decent, heroic and philanthropic person who believes that harmony and peace can be achieved without violence, and she befriends most of the Sky Devils, Conrad and the Iwi — Emma on the other hand is a high-profile Monarch scientist turned misanthrope, who resorts to betraying and endangering all her colleagues, her own ex-husband, and billions of people around the world so long as they aren't her daughter via radical eco-terrorism, which alienates everyone from her; and she does this because she believes that the Titans need to be released to cull humanity and reverse the man-made damage to the environment before the government has the chance to try killing the Titans off. Weaver has unresolved daddy issues stemming from a controlling father, while one of Emma's true motivations for setting Titans loose to devastate the world is her unresolved grief and rage over her son's death. Mason's upbringing made her understand that humanity should try to coexist with nature instead of trying to dominate it — Emma, in a darker twist, similarly believed that the preservation of nature was essential to mankind's survival, but she was happy for the Titans to devastate and dominate humanity to that end, and she failed to realize that she herself was no exception to the rule "mankind does not control the laws of nature" in her efforts to manipulate the Titans. Mason is Street Smart, whereas Emma ends up dancing to the far more evil Alan Jonah's tune and is blindsided by King Ghidorah causing her plan to fall apart. Weaver is an Implied Love Interest in her movie whereas Emma is a bitter divorcee in hers.
• Decoy Protagonist: She's introduced as a main protagonist being forced into villainy by Alan Jonah, but she turns out to have been willingly working with him from the beginning and spends the first half or so of the movie as part of a Big Bad Duumvirate with him.
• Defector from Decadence: She deserts her alliance to the eco-terrorists in favor of siding with the heroes again for two specific reasons. (1) She's horrified that Jonah and his mooks are going to happily sit back while letting King Ghidorah exterminate humanity altogether and wreak even more destruction on the Earth's biosphere than we would've, seeing as she just wanted a massive population cull and an ecological utopia for the survivors. And (2) Jonah and his men won't lift a finger to help her once it's her child instead of everybody else's children who's in mortal peril of being killed by a Titan.
• Detrimental Determination: She's willing to go to truly horrifying lengths bordering on sociopathy in pursuit of her plan's success. On top of intending to let the Titans kill millions to billions of people as collateral, Emma helps Jonah to massacre dozens of her colleagues and co-workers so they can free the contained Titans, she leaves her own daughter's father to die amidst Ghidorah's awakening while said daughter is helplessly watching, and she (after some prodding from Jonah) decides to turn down Madison's very-impassioned pleas not to endanger hundreds of civilians when awakening Rodan. Once Emma's plan goes off the rails because of Ghidorah, all she has to show for her actions (until after hers and Ghidorah's deaths) is the annihilation of her relationships with every still-living person who once cared for her, leaving her completely alone. Speaking of Emma's plan going off the rails... the reason that happens is that Emma was set on releasing all the Titans indiscriminately, even the ones that Monarch knew little about and the ones that are powerful enough to challenge Godzilla's dominance, in her efforts to restore balance to the world's ecosphere; which led to Emma unwittingly unleashing a Godzilla-level Omnicidal Maniac who, instead of allowing the Titans to heal the planet, intends to create even more global destruction than humans ever could.
• Didn't See That Coming: She had no clue about King Ghidorah's true nature. Her original plan called to wake the Titans up gradually, to give humanity time to prepare so that some people would survive while they bring balance to the planet. She's thus confused and horrified when King Ghidorah starts waking them all at once so that it's more likely humanity will be exterminated and begins terraforming the planet more to his alien sensibilities.
• Didn't Think This Through:
  • While she's proven right in the end that the Titans have Fertile Feet and the potential to create many ecological solutions for humanity, she (A) is willing to set Titans loose with only limited data on most of them and without any consideration for unknown factors, (B) she doesn't factor in the possibility that some of the Titans really will do more harm than good for both humans and the world's ecosystems if they return to the world, and (C) she doesn't consider how critical the Alpha Titans' influence over the baseline Titans really is in determining how much harm or good they cause the world. One of the Alphas that she releases, Ghidorah, is all three of these potential hiccups rolled into one, being an extraterrestrial Alpha who actively seeks to usurp Godzilla's dominance so he can drive the baseline Titans to globally rampage and wipe out all life as we know it.
  • Emma gave Madison an idealized and sugar-coated sales pitch when indoctrinating Madison into her plan, but beyond that, Emma (possibly due to her own Sanity Slippage) evidently didn't do anything at all to actually desensitize her conscientious, 12-year-old daughter to acts of mass murder before the plan is underway, leading to Madison being thoroughly traumatized, deliberately making herself a liability to the eco-terrorists out of conscience, and eventually rebelling against Emma altogether.
  • Godzilla vs Kong also revealed another major flaw in her plan. For all Emma’s justification of trying to restore the natural balance of the ecosystem, she fails to realize all the Titans are in a naturally hibernating state, and thus forcibly awakening them is interfering with that. Thus by the time of the third film, most of the Titans have simply returned to hibernation after their brief awakening, and the state of the world remains as it was before.
• The Dog Was the Mastermind: She and her daughter are captured by Jonah so they can aid him and his mercenaries in raiding Monarch's outposts and releasing the captive Titans, but then it turns out that rather than being forcibly taken hostage, she's been The Mole in Monarch for some time, and it's actually her master-plan that she and Jonah are enacting (although it's clear that Jonah is the Dragon-in-Chief whenever Emma has second thoughts about going through with something evil).
• Doublethink: Apparent type. She doesn't see the ginormous contradiction of her professed desire to ensure that some good came of Andrew's demise and that she could find a solution to the phenomena which killed him (a Titan attack); contrasted against her plan to all but force-engineer dozens more instances of that phenomena around the world and create millions more casualties just like Andrew. It's also implied (all but confirmed in the novelization) that although Emma professes she genuinely doesn't want humanity to go completely extinct, she also deep down wants humanity to suffer the Titans' wrath at her hand because she knows it was humanity's abuse of the environment which instigated the MUTOs' awakening and led to Andrew's death.
• Draw Aggro: At the movie's end, King Ghidorah is rushing towards Emma's, her family's and the other evacuating humans' position after the Russells have re-activated the ORCA to distract Ghidorah from finishing off Godzilla. Ghidorah's approach prompts Emma to take the ORCA and split away from the evacuating party, driving off with the ORCA in a jeep in an act of self-sacrifice. Ghidorah changes direction to pursue Emma, and he fatally injures her when his Gravity Beams hit the jeep. The novelization explicitly says that if Emma hadn't sacrificed herself, then Ghidorah would have almost-certainly spotted the evacuating humans' Osprey (which included Madison) and shot them out of the sky faster than they could get away, and he likely would have then had enough time to spare to go back to Godzilla and finish killing him before Godzilla had fully recovered.
• Dumb Blonde: Type 2, and downplayed. She's the only blonde major character in King of the Monsters, but rather than her "Dumb" consisting of subtracting intelligence for preference of being around people, Emma's dumbness is a paradoxical mix of being legitimately more intellectually concerned than the rest of the cast are about the bigger picture whilst valuing individual lives far less than the rest of the cast to a disgusting degree. Although she has a couple legitimate points concerning the Titan-related problems that Monarch aren't doing anything about, she gets rightly called out by the movie's more moral, hesitant and practical-minded human heroes (many of whom including Mark happen to be Brainy Brunettes) because of her hubris in believing she can control the Titans and believing her plan is infallible. Indeed, her actions do come around to bite her in the ass. And that's not even going into Emma's thoroughly messed-up feelings toward her respective children, which make the highly-dysfunctional Mark look healthy by comparison.
• Eco-Terrorist: She turns out to be a Western Terrorist of the sort that believes that humanity in and of itself is a problem that needs fixing, with all the damage that they've inflicted on the planet with overpopulation, pollution, and war. To that end, she unleashes the Titans to forcibly "heal" the Earth no matter the scope of the destruction that this causes for innocent people.
• Elite School Means Elite Brain: She's the genius (and we mean that both literally and sarcastically) who rebuilt and worked on perfecting the ORCA, and she's considered one of the best of the best among Monarch. According to her Monarch Sciences bio, she attended the Ohio State University, which is ranked one of the best universities in the United States.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Truly cares for her daughter Madison, and is filled with grief over the loss of her son Andrew.
• Even Evil Has Standards: She hesitates before releasing both Ghidorah and Rodan respectively when she knows her ex-husband or hundreds of islanders will be at the newly-freed Titans' feet. She ultimately has a Heel–Face Turn when she realizes Ghidorah is a threat to all life on Earth instead of healing the planet.
• Evil All Along: At the start of the film, she appears to be a well-meaning Monarch scientist who is forcibly kidnapped by Jonah and forced to serve his goals against her will. Then she picks up the detonator and frees Ghidorah from the ice herself, and from there it's revealed she's been The Mole inside Monarch serving the Eco-Terrorists' ends for some time after she made a Face–Heel Turn.
• Evil Genius: Dr. Russell at first seems like a Reluctant Mad Scientist, until it's revealed that she's actually copasetic with the eco-terrorists' plan, and she single-handedly rebuilt and perfected her and Mark's ORCA prototype with the intention of using it to set the dormant Titans loose on the world and try to control them. Unlike her conspirators, Emma has a genuinely noble end-goal in mind, but she doesn't fully realize just how deep she's gotten herself in by striking up a Big Bad Duumvirate with a man like Jonah until the film's third act.
• Evil Reactionary: Played With. She wants to release all the dormant Titans and allow them to ravage civilization because her years of study have indicated that ancient humans were able to co-exist with the Titans peacefully whilst the Titans maintained natural balance, and she believes that she can use the ORCA on the Titans to force them and humanity to return to this forgotten order after the destruction.
• Excessive Mourning: Zig-Zagged and ultimately Double Subverted. She became a Workaholic in the aftermath of Andrew's death, as shown in Godzilla: Aftershock. By the time of King of the Monsters she seems to have gotten her act together even if she still cries in the morning when remembering Andrew's death. But it turns out the latter is all just a Mask of Sanity to hide the fact that she's suffered Sanity Slippage and made a Face–Heel Turn due to Andrew's death, deciding to unleash all the Titans on the world indiscriminately to prevent humanity from engineering their own manmade extinction event and to punish the human race for causing the MUTOs' awakening which led to Andrew's death in the first place.
• The Extremist Was Right: In the end, she's proven correct that the Titans awakening and retaking their places in the world would heal the planet's biome rather than harm it and that the Titans' reemergence would not lead to the end of humanity. The immediate problem with her plan is she released Ghidorah when so little information on it was known to Monarch, and thus didn't account for it being a hostile extraterrestrial who actively does the opposite of safeguarding the planet's natural order. Numbers wise, her plan was a success.
  • Completely averted after the film, as while despite some Titans being both environmentally beneficial and benign to humanity, other malevolent Titans other than King Ghidorah are revealed to also exist, and thus their awakening causes even more destruction on both the planet and humanity. Finally, by the time of Godzilla vs Kong many of the Titans have returned to hibernation, only briefly solving environmental problems, before humanity carries on as usual. So ultimately despite all the death and destruction she caused, her plan was doomed from the start.
• Face–Heel Turn: She made one at some point between Godzilla: Aftershock (set in 2014, which saw her not yet in alliance with Alan Jonah and actively working to stop the MUTO Prime) and the start of King of the Monsters; becoming a Well-Intentioned Extremist Eco-Terrorist after her research and Sanity Slippage brought her to the conclusion that the Titans had to be allowed to reclaim the Earth for themselves, and becoming The Mole in Monarch.
• "Facing the Bullets" One-Liner: After King Ghidorah has fatally injured her and is looming towards her, she defiantly says, "Long live the King!"
• Fallen Heroine: She was regarded as one of the best of the best in Monarch, but amid the trauma of losing her son during Godzilla and the MUTOs' battle, Emma was dismayed to discover than humanity's ecologically-destructive ways were responsible for triggering the Titans' emergences in the first place. At some point before the main time frame of King of the Monsters, Emma convinced herself that the only way to ensure nothing like Andrew's death ever happened because of mankind's mistakes again was to use her invention to deliberately set the Titans on the world, so that their Fertile Feet could rejuvenate the ecosphere whilst punishing most of the human race for their hubris. To that end, Emma willingly works with Alan Jonah and his paramilitary to kill or endanger her colleagues, her own ex-husband and billions of other people.
• Fatal Flaw: Pride. Once she's thought up a solution that she perceives will rectify whatever problem her mind is set on, she'll plunge head-first into enacting her solution without fully thinking through the ways it could go wrong, and she can be incredibly stubborn and unmoving about following what she perceives as the right way to end a problem no matter how much others around her try to dissuade her. In Godzilla: Aftershock, this gets several people killed when she tests sonic pulses against the MUTO Prime. In King of the Monsters, by which time she's made a Face–Heel Turn, this enables Jonah to manipulate her into helping him mess with the Titans and it leads to her unwittingly unleashing an even worse threat to life on Earth than the one she was trying to neutralize.
• Fearless Fool: Godzilla: Aftershock shows that she doesn't have a good sense of self-preservation when it comes to field work with the MUTO Prime, being more focused on getting to the root of what she wants and ignoring signs of danger indicating she'll die along the way if she doesn't find a way around.
• Foil:
  • To Dr. Serizawa. They're both high-profile Monarch scientists who believe in the fundamental goodness and ecological importance of the Titans, and they consider them the true rulers of the Earth whilst human civilization just lives in a self-made bubble in the Titans' long absence. However, whereas Serizawa still cares about human life (in his own words, he admires all forms of life) and calls out Emma for risking billions of lives, Emma has grown misanthropic and is fine with sacrificing millions to allow the Titans to retake the world. Serizawa advocates humans standing by and allowing Godzilla to restore balance when hostile Titans disrupt it, and believes things will work out in the end according to this philosophy; whereas Emma actively fears humanity euthanizing the sleeping Titans and screwing their planet's chance at regaining harmony, and she responds to this by seeking to actively wake all the Titans up and she assumes nothing will go off-script — Emma and Serizawa actually both call each-other out on their respective reasonings when Emma is explaining her motives. Interestingly, they were also both present at the destruction of a city (Hiroshima for Serizawa, San Francisco for Emma) which showed the full destructive capability of humans and Titans respectively, and which led to their family's estrangement, and it's fair to say that both of them don't hold it against the force which caused the destruction.
  • To Mark Russell, her own ex-husband. They both had a lifelong environmental interest (ecology for Emma, wildlife for Mark), and they even take the same path of working on the ORCA in the hopes humans and Titans can coexist, but they went on polarized routes after their son's deaths. They both at points in the film display an appreciation for the Titans' beauty, but Mark became a Tragic Bigot with a hatred for all Titans because of Andrew's death, while Emma became simultaneously pro-Titan and misanthropic — interestingly, in relation to this, Mark outright hates Godzilla most of all, while Emma doesn't hate him but actively releases Godzilla's Arch-Enemy, Ghidorah. Mark initially responded to Andrew's death with alcoholism, while Emma entered workaholism. They also both don't want to lose Madison the same way they lost their other child, and they respectively drop concern for everything else when she's in mortal danger — but Mark left Madison and Emma, yet regrets not being there for them when the film's main plot kicks off, whereas Emma retains custody of Madison but manipulates her.
  • And to Alan Jonah. Aside from their shared goals and misanthropy, both their respective Starts Of Darkness were triggered by losing a child, and both have a cold exterior. However, Emma doesn't want Ghidorah to destroy the world, and makes a Heel–Face Turn when she realizes she really screwed up by releasing him, whereas Jonah proves he's fine with letting Ghidorah destroy everything if it'll eradicate humanity. The novelization indicates Asher was Jonah's redeeming quality analogous to how Madison proves to be Emma's, and also indicates Jonah became Beyond Redemption after Asher's death, in contrast to how Emma successfully saves her daughter after making a Heel–Face Turn.
• Former Teen Rebel: Whilst she's a top Monarch operative who is regarded by her peers as a paragon, her Monarch Sciences profile notes that she used to be a maverick who was occasionally arrested for environment protest participation in her college days. And it turns out she hasn't really left those days in her past after all – if anything, she's gotten even more extreme.
• For Your Own Good: Exaggerated on a global scale. Unlike Jonah, Emma genuinely doesn't want all of humanity to go extinct. She rationalizes her plan to let the Titans devastate civilization as a necessary evil to prevent mankind from causing our own extinction via global warming, as she's overly confident that the government (whom she points out Monarch can't stop this late into the game, a pointer for which no-one has a real retort) will succeed in exterminating the Titans if they try. Mark directly calls Emma out for thinking that she alone has the right to dictate the fate of the entire human race all on her own.
• Freudian Excuse: The loss of her son Andrew turned her into workaholism, which gradually led to her Sanity Slippage and her horrible actions in Godzilla: King of the Monsters.
• Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse: Mark directly calls her out that she thinks she can dictate the fate of the world by releasing the Titans, telling her that it won't bring back Andrew, whose death still motivates her. Madison also asks her whether Andrew would want his mother doing this.
• Gaia's Vengeance: She and Alan Jonah intend to awaken every Titan on Earth so that they can remedy the global ecological damages that humans have inflicted on the planet. However, that plan starts to go off the rails since the first Titan they unleash is in fact a three-headed alien dragon that wants to exterminate humanity and a challenger to Godzilla's alpha status.
• Grief-Induced Split: Andrew's death ultimately led to her and Mark's marriage falling apart. Emma blames Mark for the split, and it probably further contributed to Emma's descent into darkness. It's implied (particularly in the novelization) that Emma has in turn been trying to alienate Madison from Mark in revenge.
• Hair-Contrast Duo:
  • Subverted between her and Mark. At first, it looks like the two of them will be a straight case with Emma as the light-haired one being the "good": she's a lot more optimistic about the Titans and has a much more positive view of them than Mark does, and she's working with Monarch through her grief in contrast to how Mark just wallows at a mountain cabin. Then we find out that Emma is much, much more amoral and unstable than Mark.
  • Ultimately inverted between her and Madison. She has fair hair in contrast to her brunette daughter, and Emma is firmly the Dark Feminine and the bad one: she has a history as a pro-environmentalist maverick, and at first she seems merely aloof and slightly cold, but then it's revealed that she's using the death of Madison's older brother to justify a plan to cause millions of collateral deaths on a global scale. Unlike her daughter, Emma exhibits very little compassion for the people whom she puts in danger or gets outright killed, which combined with a couple other factors eventually drives Madison away from her.
• Heel–Face Turn: Has a Heel Realization after receiving two Armor-Piercing Responses in direct succession from Madison that really hit home and upon realizing that Ghidorah is doing the opposite of what she expected when he overthrew Godzilla. She subsequently intends to fix her mistake with Ghidorah, but Madison enacts it before she can do it herself, and Emma spends most of the rest of the film looking to get Madison back before enacting a Heroic Sacrifice that aids Godzilla.
• Heel Realization: She hits it when Ghidorah usurps Godzilla as the reigning alpha and, instead of merely culling humanity whilst restoring the natural balance, leads the Titans towards actively exterminating man and nature alike. It helps that Emma received a mouthful from all the Monarch brass plus her ex-husband and eventually even her own daughter for messing with forces she didn't truly understand and letting her grief over Andrew's death drive her to commit such despicable acts in his name, and that it becomes clear once she tries to reason with the Dragon-in-Chief Alan Jonah that Jonah is a Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist and the one who really holds command over their group.
• Held Gaze:
  • She holds Mark's gaze in Antarctica when she moves to free Ghidorah herself, and in doing so reveals that she's copasetic to the eco-terrorists' plans: her eyes are regretful, but resolved, unlike Mark's gaze, reflecting how she's apologetic but dead-set on sacrificing anyone who isn't Madison, including Mark himself, in the name of her plan.
  • Later, when she threatens Jonah's life to be allowed to leave with his Humvee, Emma and Jonah lock gazes before Jonah backs down: whereas Jonah looks unthreatened, Emma's gaze is nakedly afraid for her daughter's life. Jonah backs down to her.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Ends up pulling one off to save Madison, Mark and Monarch by luring Ghidorah away in a truck with the ORCA. She gets killed but helps revive Godzilla.
• Her Own Worst Enemy: She's very arrogant, refuses to acknowledge that she might not be clear-headed due to her grief, and these things ultimately shoot her in the foot. She aims to stop humanity from causing the next mass extinction including our own destruction, she aims to create a better world for her remaining child, and she aims to ensure that some good can come out of Andrew's demise. But by trying to indiscriminately awaken all the Titans, including Godzilla's three-headed rival, Emma ironically puts the world in danger of an even more rapid global apocalypse that will surely wipe out the entire human race; and because she didn't bother to properly indoctrinate Madison into her radicalism (and because Emma seems too lost in her madness to even notice straight away how horrified Madison is), Emma ends up completely alienating her remaining child, who calls out her blatant Insane Troll Logic of believing that Andrew would ever consider a million repeats of the tragedy that killed him being enacted by his own mother to be a good thing.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Played With. By releasing Ghidorah, unaware it's a malevolent extraterrestrial lifeform with its own agenda, she ends up unleashing an Apocalypse How far worse than anything the human race have done so far. She ends up giving her life to put a permanent stop to him.
• Horrible Judge of Character:
  • She believes that all Titans are ultimately beneficial forces of balance when it comes to the Earth's ecosphere, and merely ambivalent at worst when it comes to humanity. Ghidorah's active malevolence and the apocalyptic global carnage which the lesser Titans commit under his control both prove Emma wrong.
  • She also mistakenly believes that her and Jonah's goals align in that they both truly want to avert the world's destruction, but Jonah reveals that he's actually fine with the possibility of King Ghidorah destroying the world's biosphere so long as the Titans exterminate humanity — this is downplayed in the novelization, where Emma is quite aware that her and Jonah don't really have the same end-goals, and it's more her self-assurance than her misjudging him that leads to their Big Bad Duumvirate falling apart.
• How Is That Even Possible?: She quotes the Stock Phrase almost ad verbatim when Mancini informs her the Yunnan outpost's containment systems are failing and their perimeter alarms are going haywire. Subverted, as she actually knows Jonah and his posse are coming, and she's just asking before they launch their physical attack for show.
• Hypocrite:
  • She states that one of her motivations is having her son's death matter. She then callously wakes Rodan before people can evacuate in complete disregard for their lives, to say nothing of how her plan fundamentally calls to create billions of deaths and personal losses like her son's.
  • At one point, she demands Jonah leave Madison "out of this", but he's quick to retort that Emma brought Madison into their terrorist plot, filled her head with nothing but pro-Titan thoughts, and kept her in the dark about the brutality their plot would involve and the possibility it could go wrong in the first place.
  • She's willing to put billions of lives at risk for the alleged "greater good" if it'll see her plans through, but when it's her last remaining child instead of someone else's child that's in mortal danger, she throws away pretense of serving a good that's bigger than individual human lives in favor of saving her daughter.
• I Did What I Had to Do: She betrayed Monarch to a group of ecoterrorists to awaken all the dormant Titans and put billions of human lives at risk in the process, justifying herself in that, if she didn't, the government would eventually kill the Titans and doom the world to human-caused mass extinction and ecological destruction. Of course, she turns out to be right, but still.
• Idiot Ball: Requesting help from the dangerous Alan Jonah and his gang of Eco-Terrorists was one thing but unleashing a titan apocalypse just to avenge her son is without a doubt, her dumbest plan ever.
• Ignored Expert: She becomes a villainous one to her captor (actually her partner-in-crime) Alan Jonah when she realizes and warns him that King Ghidorah is forcing the other Titans to ravage their own planet instead of restoring it, only for Jonah to brush it off with Insane Troll Logic.
• Insane Troll Logic: She says her Utopia Justifies the Means plan is motivated by ensuring Andrew's death wasn't for nothing. And she utterly fails to see anything staggeringly hypocritical in how she finds a "solution" to Andrew's death by engineering over a dozen repeats of the incident that killed him which will cause millions of families to go through the same loss she went through, because in her mind, repeating her son's death a million-fold on everyone else in the present is okay so long as in the future it stops future generations from losing all of their children to a manmade extinction event. It's heavily implied her sanity took a major hit from her son's death, so she's not exactly thinking rationally.
• Inside Job: It's heavily implied she enabled Alan Jonah to gain access to Mothra's temple for the staged kidnapping.
• The Insomniac: Downplayed. The novelization mentions that she rarely gets a full night's sleep due to her mind being restless.
• Insufferable Genius: She's presented as one in Godzilla: Aftershock, which takes place before her complete Face–Heel Turn, when she's still reeling from Andrew's death. Emma is one of Monarch's top minds, working out Jinshin-Mushi's true nature and intervening with the ORCA to stop the creature's strategy from killing Godzilla^note albeit after she performed a catastrophic failed experiment where got several people killed. But Emma is also an overly-driven, irritable, snarky and confrontational woman who can be very difficult to work with; badmouthing Atherton, and lashing out at Tarkan for interfering when he saved her from getting herself killed.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: She was this before her Face–Heel Turn. In Godzilla: Aftershock, Atherton describes her as "singularly arrogant, condescending, and confrontational" but she's extremely committed to preventing the MUTO Prime from killing Godzilla and creating a MUTO-caused extinction event.
• Kick the Morality Pet: She was already emotionally manipulative to Madison before the movie's start, but...
  • The big kicker is during Ghidorah's awakening in Antarctica. How else can you describe a mother sentencing her beloved child's father to death while said child is right next to her and is helplessly pleading for her father's life? For bonus points, when Madison uses the ORCA to distract Ghidorah from approaching Mark and the Monarch top brass, it isn't when Ghidorah is turning his attention on the Osprey carrying Emma, Madison and the eco-terrorists that Emma intervenes: rather, she intervenes at the very second Madison grabs the ORCA out of her hands and takes things out of Emma's perceived control.
  • Later, Madison begs her mother with tears in her eyes not to sacrifice hundreds of islanders, and Emma rejects her plea, although this time Emma at least has enough of a ghost of decency to apologize to Madison while doing so. This is the final straw for Madison, and the latter makes Emma aware of how utterly revolted she is by her actions, which in turn eventually forces Emma to realize how far she's fallen.
• Kidnapped Scientist: Emma, along with Madison, is kidnapped by Alan Jonah and his eco-terrorist organization who want to use the ORCA to control the Titans. Except it turns out that she arranged the whole thing with Jonah, convinced Madison to go along with the plan, and faked their kidnapping.
• Knight Templar:
  • She firmly believes that she is working for a noble cause and doing what is necessary for the preservation of life on Earth, that she is fighting the dangerous plague that she perceives the existence of human civilization to be, and that the billions of people her actions would condemn to death is a necessary sacrifice to be made for the greater good.
  • Later subverted; once her daughter escapes the bunker to expose herself to the Kaiju she helped set loose on the world, Emma immediately has a breakdown and demands Jonah help her rescue her daughter from the situation she herself created, prioritizing her own daughter's life against the greater good she's already killed countless people for. Jonah calls her out on it very quickly and mocks her for her hypocrisy.
• Labcoat of Science and Medicine: Downplayed. She's usually seen in casual clothes throughout the movie, but she dons a greyish-white uniform coat like the rest of the Outpost 61 scientists when she arrives to witness Mothra's awakening.
• Lethally Stupid: Exaggerated. She only intended to get a handful of humanity killed as a consequence of her plan to ultimately renew the world's ecosphere, but by releasing Ghidorah without any consideration for his (or the other Titans') possible hostility and the other unknown factors surrounding them, she's unwittingly unleashed a rival Alpha Titan who will exterminate humanity completely and will cause even more harm to Earth's biosphere than us if Godzilla can't stop him. The graphic novel Kingdom Kong reveals that Emma's miscalculation also led to the hostile Titan Camazotz being awakened by Ghidorah in turn, making Emma indirectly responsible for the extinction of all life on Skull Island except for Kong.
• Lies to Children: If she was truly thinking rationally, Emma must've known all along that releasing the Titans would result in large casualties. Instead of giving Madison the truth, Emma gave her daughter a sugarcoated version that would convince Madison to go along with the plan without question. She also lied to Madison about why Mark left them, claiming that he gave up on them and didn't want to be with them anymore, implying that Emma took her bottled-up issues with Mark and used them to try and turn Madison against her father.
• Light Feminine and Dark Feminine: She's the Dark Feminine to her daughter's Light Feminine, which is ironic considering Emma's light blonde hair comparative to Madison's dark brown hair. Emma has a more aloof and brooding demeanor than her empathic and sensible daughter, and more than that, she places far less value on people's lives than her daughter does. Although Emma clearly considers herself more mature and wise than Madison, the nature of her Sanity Slippage into her Fallen Hero status in contrast to the well-balanced Madison's Heel Realization shows this is yet another area in which Emma overestimated herself.
• Madden Into Misanthropy: When she discovered after Andrew's death that human activity had influenced the Titans' awakening, she decided humanity was an "infection" to the Earth with their war, overpopulation and pollution, and set about releasing the Titans so they could put humanity back in its place and restore natural order. She still draws the line when she realizes that Ghidorah intends to bring extinction instead of natural order.
• Mama Bear: Emma points a gun at an unfazed Alan Jonah when he refuses to let her desert him to save a runaway Madison. In the novelization, after Madison tells Jonah off for talking down to her, Jonah threatens her, for which Emma warns him to think twice about threatening her daughter.
• Manipulative Bitch: She's an emotionally-manipulative parent, having needlessly convinced her preteen daughter to go along with her eco-terrorist plot to get millions of people around the world killed. Subverted, because Emma is terrible at being a Manipulative Bitch in the final lap: she only let Madison in on the most positive and sugar-coated details of her plan, and she didn't bother to properly indoctrinate Madison into her radicalism before she and Jonah's group start causing bodies to drop – the result is Madison being rightly horrified beyond compale, and Emma genuinely has no idea what to do when her daughter is turning on her.
• Mask of Sanity: Though some including Mark were concerned about her initial Workaholic response to Andrew's death, during the film she successfully masks her Sanity Slippage from all her Monarch colleagues. Even Madison was unaware before the film's events just how messed up her mother really is despite remaining in her mother's custody and being recruited into Emma's Eco-Terrorist agenda.
• Misanthrope Supreme: Actually downplayed in her case. She scorns humanity and deems modern civilization a disease upon the Earth for its many environmental shortcomings (because deep down, she blames mankind for instigating the events which led to Andrew's death); to the point where she's willing to awaken the Titans in an effort to have them "save" the Earth. However, Emma explicitly says she doesn't want all of humanity to perish: one of the justifications she's enacting her plan on is the belief that the overall human species will stop over-exploiting the planet's resources and will ultimately flourish in symbiosis with the Titans after the dust has settled, and one of the reasons why Emma says she draws the line at letting King Ghidorah reign is because that will likely spell the complete extinction of humanity.
• Morally Ambiguous Doctorate: She has a doctorate, and although she at first appears to be a Reluctant Mad Scientist, she's actually an Evil Genius who is willingly taking part in a plot to set numerous Kaiju loose around the world and cause potentially billions of collateral deaths, in order to ensure that the onslaught's survivors will actually have a plentiful world to live in.
• Motive Rant: After the heroes realize she is willingly working with Jonah, she contacts them and explains her motives.
• My God, What Have I Done?: When King Ghidorah seems set on forcibly terraforming Earth to his alien liking and completely exterminating humanity, she's horrified. Deconstructed when Alan Jonah mocks her, pointing out that she was committing genocide and that her apocalyptic "salvation" was never going to be clean and pretty.
• Nature Lover: She used to be an environmental activist after all. Turns out to also be her major motivation for turning to evil.
• Never My Fault: At first, Emma refuses to admit she's done anything wrong when King Ghidorah causes her plan to spiral out of her control. It takes her daughter and partner-in-crime to make her even think that the slaughtering of millions if not the very possible extinction of the human race, might be due to her recent actions.
• Nice, Mean, and In-Between: Her somewhat cold exterior around the well-adjusted Madison coupled with Mark's jerkass behavior makes it seem like she's the Inbetween among the three living Russells, but she's actually firmly the Mean: willing to cause millions of innocent people's deaths, ostensibly in pursuit of the greater good, out of rage and grief over her son's death. Needless to say, both Mark and Madison are revolted once they fully comprehend the scope of her crimes.
• Not So Stoic: She clearly tries to be The Unfettered, but the facade cracks when Mark or Madison angrily call her out on responding to Andrew's death by doing what she's done.
• Opposites Attract: Deconstructed. Mark and Emma had an unpleasant Grief-Induced Split after losing a child – which Real Life studies have found usually only occurs if the grieving couple's relationship already had further underlying problems beforehand^note otherwise, it's more likely that the shared suffering will actually strengthen the couple's bonds – and we see a lot of personality contrasts between them in the present.
  • Mark is a brunette with a square-shaped facial structure, whereas Emma is a blonde with a heart-shaped face.
  • Mark thinks that humans should leave nature alone, and that mankind shouldn't be tampering with things they don't understand. Whereas Emma believes that attempting to long-term save the world at large is worth ruthlessly tampering with nature on a massive scale in a hamstrung manner.
  • Mark is, at best, wary and leery of all Titans, including the Big Good, because of their destructive capacities, and he thinks the world is better off without them in it. Whereas Emma believes that humans are ultimately more of a threat to the world than the Titans are, and that restoring balance to the world and ensuring mankind's long-term survival is worth actively setting loose as many Titans as possible to let them reclaim the Earth and cause collateral mass devastation, and she underestimates the possibility that some of the Titans she targets are just as dangerous for the world's balance as the MUTOs and Skullcrawlers were if not more.
  • After Andrew's death, Mark chose to run away from his duties as a Monarch operative and everything that reminded him of the Titan attack. Emma instead felt obligated to stay on and commit herself to finding a long-term "solution" to the disaster and its looming future repeats.
  • Mark is Hot-Blooded, impulsive, self-centered, and prone to throwing pity parties, but he wears his spite, rage and grief over Andrew's death on his sleeve for everyone around him to see. Whereas Emma is a ruthless, cold-blooded schemer who fancies herself a master manipulator; she's been lying to everyone including herself about the true extent of her unresolved grief, to the point where she all but went mad and she's the only one who can't recognize her own instability, and she feels she's working towards the greater good despite her motivations being secretly selfish.
  • Mark is disgusted at the mere thought of people being collateral damage of a Titan's presence. Emma has no such reservations when she forcibly accelerates the Titans' awakenings, knowing full well that hundreds to billions of people will be in the firing line.
  • Mark initially blames all the Titans, especially Godzilla, for Andrew's death in Godzilla and the MUTOs' 2014 conflict. Emma instead blames humanity for causing and continuing to cause the Titans' re-emergences in the first place via our ecologically-unsustainable practices, and our refusal to do anything to address them.
  • Even Emma and Mark's parenting styles after Emma's death are polar opposites, yet both are dysfunctional for their remaining child; who both parents act restrictive, controlling and patronizing towards. Emma is fine with giving Madison a homeschooling and Limited Social Circle within Monarch, and with exposing her to at least one of the Titans she studies. Whereas Mark in the Godzilla vs. Kong novelization wants Madison to have as normal a teenhood as possible whether Madison herself wants that or not, so he enrols her in a public school, ignores any criticism that she's not making friends and is instead a bullied pariah, and he wants to restrict Madison as much as possible from having anything more to do with Monarch or Titans again.
• Outliving One's Offspring: Her elder child Andrew was a casualty of Godzilla and the MUTOs' San Francisco battle, leading to her and Mark's Grief-Induced Split, and the movie's opening shows that she's still depressed five years after the tragedy. Although Emma apparently doesn't hate Godzilla or the Titans generally like Mark does, it's clear once her Face–Heel Turn is revealed that the trauma of losing Andrew has caused her some Sanity Slippage and is the main reason why she's a Fallen Heroine. The novelization hints that where Mark blamed Godzilla for their son's death, Emma blames humanity at large because it was mankind's abuse of the environment that began the Titans' reawakening in the first place, and deep down she wants the Titans to punish the world for her.
• The Paragon Always Rebels: Highly downplayed in the novelization. She was regarded as one of Monarch's very best, with Sam Coleman describing her as a "rock star", before she reveals her Face–Heel Turn. During the Titans' awakening, Emma's broadcasted Motive Rant inspires a minor Monarch operative named Mariko to independently follow Emma's example, sabotaging the kill switch in Outpost 58 to ensure that Monarch can't try to stop Behemoth's emergence.
• Parental Betrayal: She's initially shown to be an innocent kidnap victim alongside Madison, trying to keep them both alive, but's later revealed to not be the case as she orchestrated the whole thing and dragged her daughter into her scheme by feeding her lies.
• Pride: Despite her reverence for the Titans, she's very much guilty of "the arrogance of man" that Serizawa described, for meddling with borderline-Eldritch forces of nature that were simply beyond her ability to control, and expecting them to do what she wanted them to. She's also debatably a bit too certain that the military and government, if they did take over Monarch as she feared, could actually succeed in killing the Titans if they tried, considering how the male MUTO completely shrugged off an attempt by Monarch to kill it.
• Properly Paranoid: Whilst her certainty that the government and military would succeed in killing the dormant Titans if they tried seems like sheer arrogance in light of Monarch's dramatic failure to kill the male MUTO, considering how the military were actually developing the Oxygen Destroyer and the prototype succeeded in bringing Godzilla of all Titans to the brink of death, she might've been more right than one realizes there.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Emma gives out a few but takes a lot more throughout the film:
  • Alan Jonah calls her out for believing that waking up giant monsters was ever going to be the clean and easy job she thought it was going to be, and for being a bad parent by bringing her daughter into a terrorist organization and terrorist plot in the first place.
  • Serizawa and Monarch berate her stupidity in forcibly releasing the Titans without verifying their temperament or letting them awaken on their own. As even somewhat benevolent Titans (Godzilla and Kong) can cause a great deal of unintended death and destruction in their wake.
  • Barnes states that if he had parents like Emma and Mark, he'd run away like Madison.
  • Madison delivers this bombshell: calling her mother out for thinking Andrew would have ever wanted her misguided actions.
    • It's longer and more epic in the novelization:
    Madison: There's always a choice! You know who taught me that? Dad. You said he left us, that he was a drunk who didn't care about us.
    Emma: Because he did leave us. Somebody had to be strong for you, and it sure as hell wasn't him. He gave up on me, gave up on you.
    Madison: No. You're the one who gave up! You gave up on everything. You gave up on humanity. And if Dad's such an asshole, then why'd he come back? Why is he trying to help people while we're trying to kill them?
    Emma: We are helping people, baby—
    Madison: Bullshit! You said you were doing this for Andrew. But do you really think he would've wanted this?
    Emma: I... I don't know
    Madison: Exactly. I'm starting to think you don't know more than you do.
  • Mark berates Emma for recklessly endangering their daughter and throwing in her lot with Jonah, believing she knows what's best for everyone and now has the right to decide the fate of the world. Emma then calls out Mark for running out on her and Madison after Andrew's death instead of staying and being strong for their daughter's sake.
• Rebellious Spirit: Her official profile says that she had a reputation as an academically-talented maverick from an early age, and her participation in environmental protests was enough to get her arrested a few times. In the present, she's suffered Sanity Slippage due to her son's death, going so far as to turn traitor to Monarch and become a Fallen Heroine in the name of pursuing what she considers the path to the greater good.
• Redemption Equals Death: To try and redeem herself, she makes a suicidal effort to lure Ghidorah away from both Godzilla and her ex-husband and daughter with the ORCA. This gives the humans a chance to escape and Godzilla a chance to power up and kill Ghidorah, but she is killed in the process.
• Regretful Traitor: Downplayed. She's apologetic towards Mark and Monarch once she reveals her treachery to them, and she makes it clear she doesn't derive any pleasure from throwing them on the bonfire in the name of the greater good. But the endangerment and deaths of her colleagues and even her daughter's father by her actions isn't nearly enough to make Emma reconsider what she's doing, and she never stops to mourn the people she's gotten killed which include her close family friend Dr. Graham. Even Emma's Heel Realization is based more in realizing that she's alienated her daughter and that she gravely underestimated the threat posed by King Ghidorah than in any real sorrow over betraying and murdering her peers.
• Reluctant Mad Scientist: She becomes more and more reluctant as the film goes on.
• Sanity Slippage: Let's face it. It takes a special kind of madness to lose one's son in the carnage unleashed by battling giant monsters and then decide "The world will be saved if I unleash all the giant monsters to ravage the world as they see fit!". So saying that her sanity has slipped would be an understatement.
• Say My Name: When searching for Madison in the apocalyptic ruins of Boston, she screams her daughter's shortened pet-name in the hopes that she'll answer.
• Secretly Selfish: Whilst she presents herself as a Well-Intentioned Extremist, and she has enough legitimate points and standards to avoid slipping into Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist territory, it's implied (particularly in the novelization) that Emma is really lashing out at humanity in a case of Misplaced Retribution not so different from Mark's, even if she's the only one who doesn't realize it. Whereas Mark blames Godzilla for Andrew's death, Emma instead blames modern human civilization for causing the MUTOs and Godzilla to rise in the first place with their negative over-exploitation of the environment. When Madison becomes disillusioned with Emma and endangers herself trying to fix Emma's mistakes, Emma doesn't hesitate to drop everything in an attempt to save her daughter, further implying that even she didn't truly believe in her plan to save the world to begin with.
• Shut Up, Hannibal!: She receives a lot of this verbally from her Monarch colleagues and her ex-husband during the Motive Rant, as all of them appalled and outraged at her actions. Just look at her "Reason You Suck" Speech entries!
• Shut Up, Kirk!: When Serizawa calls her out for meddling with forces beyond her understanding and gambling with billions of lives, she retorts by calling him out on the fact billions of lives are on the line regardless of which path Monarch takes, and by bringing up the threat of the government trying to off all the Titans.
• So Proud of You: Played With in the novelization: although Emma doesn't get to say it to Madison's face, she feels immensely proud despite her fear for her daughter's life when she realizes what Madison has done (stealing the ORCA, escaping into Boston, and broadcasting its signal around the world to halt the Titan attacks and draw King Ghidorah to an evacuated city, all single-handedly).
• Start X to Stop X: She says she's decided to release all the Titans indiscriminately and allow them to decimate humanity in Gaia's Vengeance whilst regenerating the planet's ecosphere with their biological byproducts, because she wants to ensure Andrew's death was not "in vain", yet she's incredibly oblivious to how hypocritical it is that she's "honoring" Andrew's memory and supposedly preventing the incident from ever happening again by repeating the very same tragedy a hundred-fold upon millions of other families with children. Madison herself eventually calls Emma out on this.
• Strong Family Resemblance: She technically looks like her daughter, Madison Russell. Due to their similar hair shapes. The only difference being that Emma’s hair is blonde.
• Sunk Cost Fallacy: Averted. She at first ignores Monarch's and her own family's warnings that what she's doing will go horribly wrong, but after King Ghidorah takes over, she makes a Heel–Face Turn once she realizes Ghidorah is outright destroying the planet instead of healing its ecology.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork:
  • The King of the Monsters novelization explicitly shows she feels this way about being forced to work with Jonah (actually she approached him following her Face–Heel Turn) and that the longer she's been working with him, the less she's been able to stand him. She's disgusted by his Lack of Empathy and how for him no means is too low to achieve his goals.
  • In the Godzilla: Aftershock graphic novel, both of the people she's working with on defeating the MUTO Prime — a bodyguard and a Reasonable Authority Figure United Nations representative — have their difficulties when working with her due to her stubbornness, tendency to get ahead of herself, and being confrontational.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: Possibly. First she is thrown from her jeep by a bolt of Ghidorah's lightning, and is left at ground zero before Burning Godzilla shows up. Debunked in the novelization, which reveals she died of her wounds just before Burning Godzilla released his thermonuclear pulses.
• Til Murder Do Us Part: Although it was more incidental than intentional, and downplayed in that she merely left Mark for dead rather than try to kill him outright; Emma doesn't hesitate to awaken a 521-foot Alpha Titan of her own volition, while knowing full well that her own ex-husband, who's also the father of her daughter and late son, will be at ground zero. Worse yet, not only does Emma already know damn well from first-hand experience how destructive the Titans' mere movements can be; but Emma tries to stop Madison the very second Madison tries to save her father and the other human heroes, coming just after Emma and Madison witnessed the newly-awakened Ghidorah intentionally exterminating half of the G-Team.
• Too Dumb to Live: In Godzilla: Aftershock, she at one point refuses to evacuate herself from Jinshin-Mushi's subterranean chamber even when the Titan down there becomes active, forcing Tarkan to drag her out before she can get herself crushed. And she doesn't exactly acknowledge Tarkan did the right thing even after the fact.
• Tough Love: Emma tells Mark that she's 'trained' Madison to survive and in a deleted scene, it's revealed that Madison's "training" includes a series of sparring sessions as Jonah and his men stand around in a ring and watch her.
• Two First Names: "Russell" is more commonly used as a given name than a last name.
• The Unfettered: She views herself this way throughout her actions and decisions, but being chewed out by her ex-husband or her daughter reveals she's Not So Stoic.
• Ungrateful Bitch: In Godzilla: Aftershock, she isn't the least bit grateful after Tarkan save her from almost-certain death in a collapsing tunnel with an active Jinshin-Mushi – as soon as they're in the clear, the first thing she does is rant and yell at Tarkan for "interfering with her work" rather than admit he did anything right.
• Utopia Justifies the Means: She believes that if all the Titans are active, the humans who don't die in the collateral of their awakening will be able to coexist with the Titans in natural harmony as Advanced Ancient Humans did, with her using the ORCA to mould and enforce that coexistence. And she's willing to sacrifice millions or even billions of lives including her ex-husband's and her colleagues' in order to reach that goal, convincing herself it's for the greater good; to the disgust of Monarch and her own daughter.
• Viler New Villain: To Bill Randa from Kong: Skull Island to a degree. They're both ruthless and deceitful well-intentioned extremists who ultimately see the error of their initial ways, but whereas Randa only ever endangered several dozen unwitting people in the name of his cause, Emma was willing to endanger billions of civilians on a global scale, plus she also duped and betrayed her own colleagues in Monarch to certain death. Emma is also more heavily implied to be secretly selfish in her "well intentions" at the end of the day than Randa was.
• Villain Ball: Her indoctrination of Madison was half-assed, as is her continuing to drag Madison around with the eco-terrorists despite the girl's presence increasingly proving to be a liability. Emma sold her daughter a sugar-coated version of her plan which completely left out all the nastier bits that they'll both be complicit in, resulting in a traumatized Madison's conscience eventually overruling all loyalty she had to her mother. It isn't until Emma starts to realize that she fucked up by awakening Monster Zero that she seems to seriously understand just how much she's alienated her daughter. Justified, as Emma's mental stability is questionable at best.
• Villain Has a Point: While her plan was amoral and very much flawed, she was entirely accurate about several things; something Serizawa and even Mark acknowledge in the novelization. Lampshaded by a newspaper headline in Godzilla vs. Kong.
  • Although Emma seems to overestimate humanity's capability and underestimate the Titans' Nigh-Invulnerability, the fact The Extremist Was Right shows she was at least right that the world would be a much better place if the Titans were awake and maintaining its balance. Furthermore, the ability of the military's prototype Oxygen Destroyer to severely harm Godzilla indicates she might've been Properly Paranoid about the military's ability to kill the Titans if they tried.
  • She isn't wrong that Monarch is losing the legal battle with the government to prevent the military attempting to kill the Titans before she initiates her plot, with public opinion massively favoring the government's plan.
• Villainous Parental Instinct: Despite Emma's emotionally-manipulative parenting, her surviving child Madison is the only person she truly gives any shits about while pursuing her plan – anyone else, including her own friends and even her child's father, can quickly be left for dead as necessary collateral. When Emma finds out that it's her child and not just the children of every other mother in the world who's in mortal danger of being killed by a Titan, she quickly abandons her (admittedly gone horribly awry) plan entirely so that she can save her kid. At the movie's end, Emma sacrifices herself partly to buy the Osprey that's carrying Madison time to get to a safe distance, with the novelization explicitly noting that Emma calculated Ghidorah would have certainly killed Madison if Emma hadn't diverted his attention.
• Villain Respect: In the novelization, despite her deep resentment of Mark for his failures as a husband and a father after Andrew's death, she can't help being genuinely impressed that he brought himself to stick his neck out and put his life on the line trying to save her and Madison.
• Visionary Villain: She believes the world is doomed to the greatest mass extinction in the planet's history if humans remain the sole dominant species, and fears that humanity will destroy the planet's only chance at recovery if the military succeed in exterminating all the Titans, driving her to Well-Intentioned Extremism with the aim of forcibly awakening all the Titans and using the ORCA to engineer a human-Titan coexistence in the aftermath.
• Walking Spoiler: Emma's role in the movie after about a quarter of the film is a huge spoiler.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: She believes humans and Titans can co-exist, and that their presence will heal the planet from everything that humanity has done to it. As such, she wants to awaken all of them, albeit gradually, to jump-start the process of their rebirth, feeling she has no choice but to do it by force as the government is preparing to kill them. To this end, she betrays Monarch and helps Alan Jonah and his eco-terrorists make strikes against Monarch facilities, murdering many of her co-workers, and is ultimately willing to risk causing billions of deaths by reviving all of the Titans, without having an adequate amount of information on each Titan's nature.
• Went Crazy When They Left: Grief over her son's death gradually drove her to a sanity slippage, deciding that the best way to "honor" his memory is to forcibly save the world whilst creating a million repeats of the incident that killed him. It's also implied, particularly in a deleted scene and the novelization, that Mark's abandonment of Emma and Madison amid their Grief-Induced Split was a contributing factor in Emma's fall from grace, because he proved in Emma's eyes that he couldn't be relied on when Emma and Madison needed him most of all.
• What Is Going On?:
  • At the start of the scene in Mothra's temple, she asks Dr. Mancini, "What the hell happened?" Prompting a quick exposition from Mancini which informs the audience that they've been monitoring something in the temple which is supposed to be slumbering but has abruptly started waking up.
  • A couple minutes later, Emma once again asks Mancini this question when the Containment Field around Mothra fails, at which point Mancini notes that the outpost's security systems are failing as if by sabotage. This time, it's implied that Emma knew precisely what was happening, she just asked to conceal her true colors.
  • When alarms in her and Jonah's makeshift base begin blaring, she enters the control room and asks Jonah what's going on, leading to this reply:
    Jonah: The ORCA. [gestures at the vacant spot where the ORCA was last seen]
    Emma: What?
    Jonah: [pointedly] I wonder who could have done this.
• What the Hell, Hero?: She calls Serizawa a hypocrite for daring to lecture her on how much is at stake when his way of running Monarch for the last five years (doing nothing to circumvent the government's plan except to give lectures to senators whom are clearly deaf to everything they don't want to hear, and otherwise all but acting as if the problem isn't as bad as he should know it is) has allowed the government problem to worsen and reach a tipping point.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: It's implied that she's actually this. Though she uses Utopia Justifies the Means to justify her actions, she's actually undergone some Sanity Slippage and it's implied she's actually (whether she knows it or not) lashing out against humanity over her son's death with her plan to release all the Titans..
• Workaholic: After Andrew's death, she plunged herself into researching why the Titans were awakening and finding a solution, unintentionally becoming somewhat distant from Madison in the intervening years before the film's main time frame and becoming divorced from Mark.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: On both ends of the scale here.
  • Emma believes Monarch and humanity have outlived their usefulness so she openly betrays them and, while she never kills someone personally, her actions have caused the deaths of millions.
  • On the receiving end with Jonah. Emma tries to keep her authority, but given that Ghidorah had effectively made her role in the organization moot, Jonah quickly reminds her he doesn't need her anymore so he will not tolerate her attempts at undermining his authority. In a variation, however, once she makes it clear she just wants to save her daughter, Jonah allows her to leave with a jeep instead of killing her.

Colonel Alan Jonah

"Long live the King."

Portrayed By: Charles Dance

Dubbed By: Philippe Catoire (European French)

Appears In: Godzilla: Aftershock | Godzilla: King of the Monsters

"Listen, while you were sitting comfortably in some laboratory, we've been fighting for decades in one dirty war after another. I've seen human nature firsthand, and I'm here to tell you that it doesn't get any better. It just gets worse. So, I'm sorry that Monster Zero isn't exactly what we were expecting. But we opened Pandora's Box and there's no closing it now."

A former British Army colonel and MI-6 agent turned fanatical anarchist, who leads an international eco-terrorist paramilitary group consisting of highly-skilled mercenaries dealing in Titan DNA trafficking. Deeply troubled and severely disillusioned with mankind by his experiences during his military service, Jonah looks to the Titans including Ghidorah as a means to achieve his ends.

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• Actor Allusion: Wistfully remarks, "Long live the king…" when watching the newly-christened King Ghidorah usurp a seemingly-killed Godzilla and dominate the Titans of the world. Cute.
• Adaptational Mundanity: Jonah and his paramilitary seem like an adaptation of the Xiliens and other Human Aliens from the original Toho movies as a human organization. Like the Toho aliens, Jonah and his goons attempt to remotely control the Kaiju (including King Ghidorah) using technology so they can use them for terrorist goals on a global scale, and Jonah's group are chiefly responsible for instigating Ghidorah's invasion in the present day. Hell, some viewers even think Jonah might be an actual alien in disguise. Unlike the Toho aliens however, true to the MonsterVerse's Aesop change from nuclear weapons allegory to presenting the monsters as embodiments of nature, Jonah and his group's attempt to use Titans as their weapons backfires spectacularly, and they're outright usurped by King Ghidorah as the true threat to Earth at the movie's midway point (not that Jonah minds).
• Adaptational Villainy: Downplayed. The novelization sees Jonah perform several particularly nasty actions which are absent from the movie. He threatens Madison's life twice when she and/or Emma are really pissing him off, and he initially goes more out of his way to ensure Emma doesn't try to stop King Ghidorah's rampage when it becomes apparent the three-headed monster is a lot more dangerous than they thought: casually ordering one of his minions to slit Madison's throat if Emma goes anywhere near the ORCA without permission. In the novel, Jonah also makes a brief rant when arguing with Emma which explicitly casts away any doubt the movie left that Jonah at his heart is truly motivated by nothing better than punishing the rest of his species for the pain and trauma they've caused him, and that he believes against all logic that he's going to be a lucky survivor of Ghidorah's apocalypse.
• All Your Base Are Belong to Us: He successfully and swiftly conquers both Monarch Outposts 61 and 32, slaughtering the security personnel, so he can free the Alpha Titans housed at either outpost and he can kidnap (pick up) the Russells. It's implied that Emma's inside help went a long way to aid Jonah's success at infiltrating these outposts. He also utilizes a disused Monarch bunker as his and his people's safe haven to wait out the apocalypse.
• At Least I Admit It: Downplayed. Whilst he still insists he's saving the planet even when his refusal to do anything about King Ghidorah proves otherwise, he's under no illusions that his plan was going to be anything less than brutal and bloody and was going to require those involved to make horribly ruthless decisions in order to stick to it. He calls out Emma and Madison, chiding the former for not having the guts to firmly decide between her plan and her family and also for feeding Madison nothing but wide-eyed idealism, which has made Madison completely ill-prepared for their plan, which has in turn left them hauling a twelve-year-old liability around the world.
• Backstory: Jonah used to be a colonel in the British Army colonel and a MI6 secret agent. He soon became disillusioned by governments and humanity in general because of all the wars, death, and destruction people bring about so he defected and went rogue. Since then, Jonah has been connected to armed mercenary groups engaged in sociopolitical intrigue as he sought to "level the global playing field" with stolen weapons technology. In 2005, Jonah came to Monarch's attention when he and several mercenary accomplices were caught trying to breach the walls of a subterranean MUTO dig site, and Jonah was locked up in a Pakistani prison.
• Bald of Evil: Downplayed. He has a bald spot courtesy of being played by Charles Dance, and he's an incredibly despicable human.
• Benevolent Boss: He treats his henchmen quite well. The novelization reveals he is quite fond of his Mook Lieutenant Asher, to the point that he's visibly shaken when Asher is killed.
• Big Bad Duumvirate: Jonah and Emma Russell are initially working together to reawaken the Titans: Emma is the brains who provides and operates the necessary technology, whilst Jonah provides the necessary resources and military tactics to pull off their plan and stay one step ahead of Monarch. However, the pair's teamwork is quite strained. Emma opts out after Ghidorah begins to cause more destruction than intended and after she realizes Jonah is fine with this, leaving Jonah as the sole human antagonist from then on (and even so, he doesn't do anything further for the rest of the movie until the post-credits scene).
• Big Bad Ensemble: He's one of the primary antagonists of King of the Monsters alongside Emma Russell and Ghidorah. At first, Jonah and Emma work together under the belief they both want the same thing, and they release Ghidorah under the assumption they can control him with the ORCA. However, Ghidorah goes off on his own to fulfil his own plans (which are later revealed to be far worse than the eco-terrorists'), and he all but removes Jonah and Emma as a threat about halfway through the movie when he takes control of all the Titans and initiates a global apocalypse. Jonah and Emma's duumvirate falls apart when the latter has a Heel Realization and sets out to stop Ghidorah, whilst Jonah is perfectly fine with Ghidorah destroying the Earth and killing humanity.
• Big Bad Wannabe: He and Emma Russell ultimately become this thanks to Ghidorah. Jonah proves to be one of the most intelligent and capable antagonists of the MonsterVerse, constantly keeping himself and his group one step ahead of Monarch's efforts to track them, but as soon as Ghidorah spontaneously takes control of the other Titans, the three-headed hydra completely eclipses Jonah and his goons, to the point that Jonah all but stops mattering as a threat until Ghidorah is defeated. Not that Jonah particularly minds this.
• The Cameo: He's entirely absent from the Godzilla vs. Kong film, with no explanation of how Ghidorah's skull made its way from his possession into Apex Cybernetics' possession. But in the movie's novelization, a prologue scene depicts a globally-wanted unnamed man who's heavily implied to be Jonah meeting with Walter Simmons after having contacted him on the dark web; offering Simmons the skull of San/Kevin's severed head plus a second Ghidorah skull of unknown origin, in exchange for heavy payment.
• The Chessmaster: To Invincible Villain levels. Jonah is a master planner, being both Crazy-Prepared and skilled at Xanatos Speed Chess, to point when he gets what he wants (almost). Even in the sequel, Jonah manages to influence events.
• Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: After managing to evade capture in Godzilla: King of the Monsters, he is completely absent nor is he mentioned even once in Godzilla Vs. Kong, apart from the novelization but not name-dropped. Making it ambiguous if he ever knew about his two Ghidorah skulls being used for the construction of Mechagodzilla or not.
• Colonel Badass: A villainous, older form. Jonah is a former Special Forces colonel, whom supplementary material states has decades of combat experience in the worst combat arenas of the world, and he's one of the cleverer and more competent MonsterVerse humans, especially on the villainous side. Jonah has managed to recruit an entire organization consisting of dozens of armed mercenaries to help him to achieve his goals. He also cares enough about his Mook Lieutenant Asher to be genuinely shaken by his death (the novelization reveals losing Ash outright drives Jonah past the Despair Event Horizon), and he at least cares enough about himself and his other troops to prioritize keeping them hidden when he chooses to let King Ghidorah destroy the Earth (he even expresses a desire to avoid Monarch finding them as the reason why he doesn't let Emma try to stop Ghidorah).
• Contrasting Sequel Antagonist: Compared to Preston Packard of Kong: Skull Island. They're both veteran military men who've been driven insane by their war experiences, both have shades of A Father to His Men, both their descents into villainy are further fueled by the loss of their men (specifically Asher for Jonah), and both are ultimately a selfish Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist. But whereas Packard uses the protection of mankind as an excuse for his single-minded vendetta against Kong whilst seeing the other kaiju as additional targets to destroy, and he has no higher plan than killing Kong; Jonah is instead a Misanthrope Supreme who wants as much of the human race dead as possible and is a pro-Titan Eco-Terrorist to that end, and he's more interested in the bigger picture (as he perceives it) of releasing Titans around the world to cleanse the planet.
• The Corrupter: He displays shades of this towards Emma. Although he apparently wasn't behind Emma's Face–Heel Turn in and of itself (if his words to her about her coming to him when he's trying to all but gaslight her can be believed), it's Jonah who eggs Emma on to do particularly bad things whenever Emma shows any signs of hesitating, and he directly counters Madison's efforts to talk Emma down. Jonah pushes Emma to wake Ghidorah up despite Emma's own ex-husband and beloved colleagues being placed in mortal danger, and when it looks like Emma is on the verge of having a Heel Realization before King Ghidorah's takeover, Jonah instantly intervenes to get Emma back on-track with their plan.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: He and his Mooks bomb and shoot through the security team at Outpost 61 with ease.
  • At Outpost 32, they ambush the G-Team and defeat them with minimal effort.
• Dangerous Deserter: His official profile◊ describes him as defected and gone rogue. Considering what he and his underground paramilitary accomplish in King of the Monsters, coupled with Jonah's history of slipping out of custody and remaining in hiding over the years, his categorization as a "Class 1 eco-terror threat" is well-earned.
• Deadpan Snarker: To wit.
  Asher: [Upon seeing Ghidorah trapped in the ice.] Mother of God…
  Jonah: She had nothing to do with this.
• Demoted to Dragon: When his attempts to control Ghidorah fail, he decides to help Ghidorah continue his rampage as his main human supporter, since his actions still benefited Jonah in some ways.
• Despair Event Horizon: In the novelization, both Madison and Emma observe that the last bit of humanity Jonah had left in him is extinguished after Asher's death.
• Detrimental Determination: His entire motivation is the eradication of as much of humanity as possible, full stop, and he does everything he can to make sure Emma continues helping him to awaken the Titans to that end. When Ghidorah becomes the new King of the Monsters, whilst Emma realizes that Ghidorah is creating an extinction event instead of healing the world, Jonah remains committed to letting Ghidorah and the other Titans rampage (even if it's under Ghidorah's power instead of Jonah's). Whilst Jonah's prioritization of the extinction of humanity above the welfare of Earth's ecosphere is down to the fact he's a proven Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist, he doesn't seem to care – or, in the novelization, he honestly doesn't believe – that he and his men will invariably die if Ghidorah's continued rampage wipes out humanity and renders the Earth inhospitable to life as we know it. And The Stinger of the movie strongly hints that after Godzilla has ended Ghidorah's reign and brought about an ecologically-beneficial cohabitation, Jonah still isn't satisfied with so many humans still in the world.
• Doublethink: Apparent type. He criticizes humanity for being capable of truly horrific acts, and for unsustainably abusing the environment to the point of threatening to cause the first mass extinction since the dinosaurs, and he thinks the Titans deserve the planet more than we do. Yet he champions King Ghidorah as the Earth's new ruler past the point where it becomes clear Ghidorah is considerably more wantonly malicious and even more ecologically-destructive than general humans. It's at this point that Jonah proves he's a Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist who only truly cares about seeing humanity suffer at any cost.
• Dragon-in-Chief: To Emma Russell. Though they were technically in a Big Bad Duumvirate and the plan was Emma's, Jonah is the one who always eggs Emma on to make the evil choice, and it's him who the mercenaries at the pair's disposal answer to. When Emma has a Heel Realization, it becomes clear without a shadow of a doubt that Jonah is the one who's in charge of their whole operation's staff.
• Eco-Terrorist: The most extreme form. An international criminal who heads a paramilitary organization and is labeled a Class 1 eco-terror threat, Jonah regards humanity as the single most monstrous threat to the world. He's under the impression that reawakening the Titans will set things right in the world since humans have mistreated and damaged the planet, and he and his partner feel pressured to act before The Government can take over Monarch and attempt to indiscriminately exterminate the creatures.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: The film implies that he has a soft spot for his Number Two, Asher, which is confirmed by the novelization; the novel adds that Asher was Jonah's last connection to humanity, and after his death, Jonah can barely be called a human being anymore. That same novelization also mentions that Jonah had a daughter, and her being murdered while he was away on duty was the turning point of his descent into darkness.
• Evil Brit: Former British soldier and spy turned omnicidal eco-terrorist, and one of the nastier pieces of work in the MonsterVerse; played by none other than Charles Dance.
• Evil Counterpart: To Dr. Ishirō Serizawa. Both are elderly men, leaders of their own respective Titan-hunting and environmentalist organizations, critical of the human race for our faults, and both view the Titans as the rightful true rulers of the Earth. But Serizawa believes in non-interventionism and "letting them fight", whereas Jonah believes it's up to people like him to make the Titans do what he believes they should do; Serizawa believes nature always has a way of balancing itself, whereas Jonah outright says "evolution isn't always right" in the novelization. Serizawa is truly hopeful that humans and Titans can coexist on the planet peacefully, whereas Jonah doesn't really care about coexistence (if he ever even genuinely believed in it) so much as seeing the Titans decimate the human race at any cost – Jonah even seems to have refused to accept that Titans can live peacefully with the human race Jonah so hates after Serizawa is proven right. Whereas Serizawa says he admires all forms of life, and refuses to put his concerns about the Titans first if it means sacrificing millions of people's lives; Jonah will happily sacrifice millions of people in the pursuit of his goals, and he's consumed by sheer hatred of humanity to the point that he foregoes any intention of preserving the planet's biodiversity so long as he can see the Titans permanently usurp and destroy mankind, not caring that King Ghidorah will ironically create an even worse extinction event than the one Jonah and his goons set out to prevent. Jonah and Serizawa both champion an Alpha Titan: whereas Serizawa reveres Godzilla as the embodiment of natural balance and the rightful King of the Monsters; Jonah releases Ghidorah as part of his plan, and he subsequently goes out of his way to justify letting King Ghidorah do what it wants due to the three-headed hydra's capacity and intent to completely wipe out the human race, even coming back to Ghidorah after the latter's death when he salvages the monster's severed head. Interestingly, both Serizawa and Jonah have a Number Two (Graham and Asher) who they're particularly close to and who is killed right in front of them in Antarctica; but whereas Serizawa shoulders on despite his grief for the sake of averting certain disaster, Jonah (as revealed in the novelization) only acts like he's moving forward, whilst in actuality losing Ash has destroyed his last solid link to humanity.
• Evil Is Bigger: He's the main human antagonist of the film and towers over most other people.
• Eviler than Thou:
  • Mixed in with At Least I Admit It. While Emma is horrified by the realization King Ghidorah is going to outright create an extinction event instead of the population cull and the human-Titan coexistence Emma wanted, Jonah dismisses her horror and views her goal of humanity's salvation as naive.
  • In the Godzilla vs. Kong novelization's prologue, when the man implied to be Jonah meets with Walter Simmons, the two start off on equal footing, then the meeting ends with Simmons all but begging the man to stay after learning what he's selling. Contextually, the scene seems to hint that even Apex Cybernetics' misuse of Ghidorah's telepathic remains (which resulted in Mechagodzilla destroying them, devastating Hong Kong and almost becoming the new reigning Alpha) was pretty much what Jonah expected to happen following this transaction.
• Evil Old Folks: He's a balding, white-haired, rugged-faced old man, and he's a horribly ruthless, murderous and nihilistic Misanthrope Supreme who's plotting to commit global genocide.
• Evil Versus Oblivion: Notably defied. Emma tries to reason with Jonah that they have to try and stop King Ghidorah once it becomes apparent to Emma how dangerous Ghidorah is, noting that Ghidorah's continued reign of terror will likely kill the world to a far worse extent than anything humanity could accomplish instead of bringing the destructive renewal that Jonah's partner Emma herself sought. However, Jonah doesn't care as long as humanity suffers the Titans' wrath, and worse yet he goes out of his way (particularly in the novelization) to try and stop Emma from interfering herself. Him and his mercs are the only humans in the movie who don't come to Godzilla and Mothra's side against the existential threat at all.
• Evil Wears Black: Downplayed and played basically. He always wears dark colors when he can. In King of the Monsters, he wears a pitch-black top after escaping Antarctica, contrasting his more genuinely well-intentioned partner's light clothes to show that Jonah is far less genuine in their "well intentions" and to show how black-hearted and irredeemable he is (especially after his last link to humanity dies in Antarctica).
• Fatal Flaw: Just about the only thing that keeps Jonah from attaining Magnificent Bastard candidacy is his genocidal misanthropy overriding his intelligence, awareness and survival chances. While Jonah is correct in his deduction that King Ghidorah's global chaos will bring the world far closer to Jonah's end-goals of wiping humanity off the board than the eco-terrorists' initial plan for a population cull ever could have; not only does Jonah seem to not quite realize that Ghidorah will also cause far more destruction to the planet than mankind ever could have, but it's also implied in the movie (and outright confirmed in the novelization) that Jonah genuinely fails to consider that he and his men will also surely die sooner or later if Ghidorah is allowed to finish purging the planet of life, no matter how well the eco-terrorists hide themselves away. (This is egregious because avoiding being killed by the rampant Titans or captured by Monarch are among the reasons why Jonah insists on hiding themselves.)
• Faux Affably Evil: In Godzilla Aftershock, he politely "suggests" Emma come with him while he's pointing a gun at her and her comrades, and when he's being arrested, he bids Emma safe travels with a look on his face that's anything but reassuring. Likewise, in the King of the Monsters novelization, Jonah slides a drink towards Emma and politely tells her to enjoy it immediately after he's just cowed her by revealing he'll have her daughter's throat slit if she puts a toe out of line.
• Foil: Besides being an Evil Counterpart to Serizawa (see above), he's a Foil to Emma Russell and Mark Russell respectively.
  • Emma Russell: aside from their shared goals and misanthropy, both their respective Starts Of Darkness were triggered by losing a child, and both have a cold exterior. However, Emma doesn't want Ghidorah to destroy the world, and makes a Heel–Face Turn when she realizes she really screwed up by releasing him, whereas Jonah proves he's fine with letting Ghidorah destroy everything if it'll eradicate humanity. The novelization indicates Asher was Jonah's redeeming quality analogous to how Madison proves to be Emma's, and also indicates Jonah became Beyond Redemption after Asher's death, in contrast to how Emma successfully saves her daughter after making a Heel–Face Turn.
  • Mark Russell, although their only interactions are very brief: they both tragically lost a child, and it ultimately led to them irrationally hating the group/species responsible to the point of wishing said group were all wiped out (Titans for Mark, humanity for Jonah). It also led to them quitting their respective professions in the initial aftermath (Monarch for Mark, the British Army and MI6 for Jonah). They're both sensible enough despite their grievances as to interact non-violently with the group they hate when it's advisable. Mark only becomes part of Monarch again because he's recruited, whereas Jonah took the initiative himself. However, Mark throws his rash hatred out in the open for everyone to see, whereas Jonah thinly masks his true colors as a Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist. At the start of the film, Mark's heart is doused in fire while Jonah's is encased in ice.
• Freudian Excuse: He became the deranged Misanthrope Supreme he now is as a result of decades of witnessing the worst of humanity in war after war during his military career, and (according to the King of the Monsters novelization) the horrific murder of his daughter while he was away at war.
• From Camouflage to Criminal: He's a former MI6 agent who has decades of military service under his belt, and since he snapped and went rogue in his backstory, he's become one of the most cunning, elusive and competent human antagonists in the MonsterVerse. He makes use of militant tactics and limited resources to consistently run circles around Monarch (whom have a far greater wealth of resources and military personnel than him), and to massacre dozens of Monarch's staff; thinking on his feet when he needs to, such as during his failed attempt to hijack a plane on Guam where he creates chaos to avoid being recaptured. This stands in contrast to how the resource-rich, corporate Apex Cybernetics put all their eggs in one basket and consequently find both themselves and their entire motivation nuked the very moment the first thing goes wrong. It says a lot about how dangerous Jonah is that he's the only human antagonist in the MonsterVerse who's a recurring threat despite having limited resources, and it takes nothing short of an extinction-wreaking Draconic Abomination to eclipse him as a threat. Another aspect of this trope Jonah has is that he's extremely cold-blooded and ruthless in the systematic mass murders he commits in pursuit of his goals, and he's severely messed up by his military experiences (which fuels his misanthropic motivations).
• Frontline General: He's a former British Army colonel who makes it clear that he saw a lot of first-hand action during his career; and as the leader of an eco-terrorist paramilitary, he readily accompanies his troops on every raid that they conduct directly on a Monarch outpost, often wielding a gun and doing some of the killing himself. That being said, it's subtly hinted that Jonah prefers to pragmatically minimize his own chances of being killed in action — notice how he's always at the rear of his paramilitary assault force during both their raids, and that he prefers to have a planned ambush keep Monarch's G-Team occupied in Antarctica whilst he keeps himself close to Emma and Madison so he can use them as a human shield.
• Good Angel, Bad Angel: A metaphorical case. The camera-work and positioning portray him as Emma's Bad Angel to Madison's Good Angel when he's arguing that Emma dismiss Madison's conscientious pleas and go through with the Evil Plan — he's even positioned on Emma's left opposite Madison. He at one point turns on Madison instead of Emma during the argument, deriding Madison for believing their Utopia Justifies the Means plan was going to be clean and painless. The Bad Angel wins out.
• Greater-Scope Villain: The Godzilla vs. Kong novelization reveals that Apex got the Ghidorah skull(s) from a highly-wanted international criminal who's all but stated to be Jonah, after he sold the skull(s) to Walter Simmons. This makes Jonah indirectly responsible for the film's entire plot.
• Held Gaze: Antagonistic type.
  • He holds Emma's gaze when she points a gun at him, looking completely unthreatened, in contrast to Emma's terrified gaze as she's fearing for her daughter's life. After Emma vows during the staredown that she won't lose her daughter, Jonah visibly assesses her for a moment before backing down.
  • In the novelization version of Jonah and Madison's standoff over awakening Rodan, Jonah responds to Madison giving him a succinct verbal middle finger by making direct eye contact whilst threateningly gesturing toward his gun holster, unnerving Madison for the moment.
• Hidden Agenda Villain: In the Godzilla vs. Kong novelization, it's unclear why he sold the Ghidorah skulls to Walter Simmons, considering that Simmons' Muggle Power agenda is anathema to Jonah's goals. He may have simply wanted the money and nihilistically rejected whatever consequences ensued from giving his product to a man with long-term goals diametric to his own. He may have figured that the Titans' environmental impact would cancel out any consequence Simmons might inflict, or he may have known that Apex would bring about their own destruction and many human deaths while trying to control Ghidorah, fitting with Jonah's goals.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters: After years in the service of his country, seeing humanity at its worst, and believing that human nature is only getting progressively worse, he feels he has seen the monster humanity can become through their destructive tendencies. He quotes this almost word-for-word in the novelization.
• Hypocrite:
  • "Man does not control the laws of nature. And neither do you." Pretty rich coming from a guy who's spent the entire movie up until King Ghidorah takes over trying to manipulate nature to do what he thinks it should do. One gets the impression he's changed his tune solely because Ghidorah (which Jonah doesn't know is not a part of nature) is making the Titans ravage humanity like Jonah wanted without any need for further interference on Jonah's end.
  • When Emma wants to go looking for her daughter, Alan coldly tells her that the mission is more important than one life. Then she pulls a gun on him… and he decides to let her go rather than risk HIS life. Played with in practice; he seems more vaguely amused by Emma's defiance than anything, and makes clear he's happy for her to leave as his group don't need her anymore.
• Icy Blue Eyes: Comes with being an icy character who's played by Charles Dance.
• Improbable Aiming Skills: Downplayed. He's such a good shot that in Godzilla: Aftershock, he's able to shoot a lantern clean out of Atherton's hand from at least a meter away when he ambushes Atherton, Emma and Tarkan.
• Insane Troll Logic: He turns to this when justifying allowing King Ghidorah to destroy the world in the face of Emma's warnings, showing his true colors. He declares that humanity is so irredeemable and despicable that anything is worth allowing the Titans to throw us off the top of the food chain permanently, even if that means letting the creatures under Ghidorah's command engineer an even worse extinction event than the manmade one Jonah and Emma originally claimed they wanted to prevent.
• Invincible Villain: Of The Chessmaster variety. Jonah is so smart, to the point that there wasn’t any moment where he nor his goons were losing nor were they close to getting arrested. When the monarch guards and G-Team try to go up against him and his goons, the latter team ambushes the heroes and mops the floor with them. When the remaining G-Team tries to chase him and his gang, they manage to stay in hiding and remain at large.
• It's All About Me: He shows signs of this when he responds to Emma's warnings that King Ghidorah is destroying the world's biosphere instead of healing it by first and foremost going off on a brief rant about the things he's seen human beings do (showing how his hatred for mankind based on his own experiences outweighs any actual concern he has for the Earth's ecological welfare), and by only caring about keeping himself and his organization hunkered down amidst Ghidorah's apocalypse whilst letting the Titans do as they will with the outside world. In the novelization, he has a moment when outright threatening Emma which makes it explicitly clear that for all of Jonah's big talk about serving the greater good, he's really just a selfish, evil old man who wants humanity destroyed so that he won't have to look at them anymore.
  "The things I've done. The things I've seen… Humanity is a disease and the fewer of them there are the better it is for me."
• Jerkass Has a Point: Before Rodan's awakening, Jonah vocally derides Madison for blindly falling for Emma Russell's 'grand utopia' pitch and failing to piece together that unleashing gigantic prehistoric monsters on the world via terrorism was going to involve hard choices and a lot of blood. He also rightfully calls out Emma for pulling her own daughter into their eco-terrorist plan and then feeding her nothing but the sugar-coated version of their agenda, which has left Madison only half-indoctrinated and completely ill-prepared for the horrors that the plan entails participating in.
  Emma: Leave her [Madison] out of this!
  Jonah: Why? You're the one who pulled her into it!
• Karma Houdini: At the end of King of the Monsters, he's escaped being killed or arrested and he's gotten his hands on Ghidorah's severed head. Nothing of his fate or whereabouts is mentioned in the Godzilla vs. Kong movie, but the official novelization states that Monarch believe he's still at large.
• Knight Templar: He's disgusted and disappointed with humans and their nature, and will make any sacrifices or extreme decisions (and boy, are they extreme) to restore what he sees as the righteous natural order.
• Lack of Empathy: The guy does not have any second thought about letting billions of people die as a consequence of releasing the Titans to "save the Earth". Even when it's clear that King Ghidorah has no intention of saving the planet but rather wants to create an extinction event that'll ostensibly xenoform the world to his liking, Jonah just shrugs it off and says that maybe it's time for the Titans to take the Earth for their own. Aside from the soldiers under his command, he doesn't give a crap about the rest of humanity at all. Jonah gets extra points in the novelization, where he reveals the turning point of his descent into darkness was the trauma of his young daughter being murdered, shortly before he directly and casually threatens the life of Emma's daughter to keep the latter in line.
• Large and in Charge: At 6'3, he towers over most of the men serving under him.
• Lean and Mean: Jonah has Charles Dance in his naturally thin build and is one of the most evil humans in the monsterverse.
• Madden Into Misanthropy: Lost his faith in humanity altogether after decades of witnessing the horror and desolation of war.
• Misanthrope Supreme: Seeing the very worst of humanity again and again in war after war drove him to become an extreme misanthrope, who now knows nothing but hatred and disgust for his species, and wholly believes that humanity only keeps getting progressively worse with every passing decade and deserves to be wiped out. Ultimately, despite using eco-terrorism as a justification for his actions, Jonah's true motivations are to watch as much of humanity as possible burn – to the point that he's fully willing to let Ghidorah cause even worse destruction to the world than mankind would have, so long as human beings are wiped away.
• Morality Pet: The only two people he ever cared for were his Mook Lieutenant Asher and his daughter.
  • Downplayed with Ash. Jonah cries out his name when Ash is killed in front of him. The novelization's expansion portrays Jonah showing a genuine softer side around Asher, although it doesn't make Jonah any less disillusioned and misanthropic, and Jonah is actually hinted to be a corruptive mentor figure to Ash.
  • Played Straight with Jonah's late daughter Lindy. The novelization reveals Jonah was already highly jaded towards humanity by the time Lindy died, but her presence in his life prevented him from going over the edge and acting out on his disillusionment.
• The Most Wanted: His Monarch Sciences bio and Godzilla: Aftershock say his global activity have gotten him labeled as a "Class 1 eco-terror threat", with an intel sheet of arm's length. If the man who deals with Walter Simmons in the Godzilla vs. Kong novelization is indeed Jonah, then he's wanted by Interpol and at least twenty governments following his crimes against humanity and other atrocities which directly led to King Ghidorah's reign of terror in Godzilla: King of the Monsters.
• Nerves of Steel: Owing to decades of military experience, he isn't visibly fazed at all when Emma pulls a gun on him.
• No Range Like Point-Blank Range: During the assault on Outpost 61, Jonah walks straight up to a Monarch scientist until there's no more than two or three feet between them, then he lifts his gun and pops a cap in the scientist's head.
• Not So Similar: In the novelization, Madison mentally compares Jonah to her parents, noting that Mark and Emma also reacted badly to losing a child and did reprehensible things (especially Emma), but Emma at least wants to try and fix what she's done whereas Jonah is too far gone.
• Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist: Jonah justifies his misanthropic crusade by saying he's restoring the natural order which mankind's civilization is destroying, because humanity at large won't sort out the problems they're knowingly creating by themselves. Once it becomes apparent how destructive Ghidorah really is, Jonah begins to show that what he really wants is removing humanity from the equation altogether, and he's completely willing to let Ghidorah wreak much more havoc on nature than humans ever have if it'll spell the rapid erasure of the human race; proving that Jonah's true motivations are less genuine concern for the preservation of Earth's biodiversity and more all-consuming hatred for humans.
• Obviously Evil: Comparative to the likes of Preston Packard and Walter Simmons, who seem quite ordinary if not outright charming at first glance and can use this to manipulate others; Jonah has a militant/guerrilla-looking wardrobe, and his gruff demeanor says nothing short of "cold-blooded killer".
• One-Steve Limit: Averted. He has the same surname as his Mook Lieutenant, Asher. However, there is no indication that the two are related and the novelization flat-out states that they're not.
• Original Position Fallacy: In the novelization, Jonah genuinely doesn't realize once he decides to let King Ghidorah destroy the world including all of humanity that him and his men will surely die with everything else in that scenario regardless of how well they hide themselves underground. He says that he and his men will live like kings once Ghidorah's apocalypse has finished, and Madison mentally calls out the absurdity of such a notion.
• Outliving One's Offspring: According to the novelization, his turn to villainy was triggered when his daughter was kidnapped and murdered while he was off fighting in a war.
• Pet the Dog:
  • Despite having little reason to do so, when in an elevator next to a frightened Madison, he attempts to calm her down by passing a hand over his face and making a friendly smile. She flips him the bird in response. He seems more amused by this than anything.
  • Played With near the end. He lets Emma go to rescue Madison and take one of his Humvees with her, albeit only after a brief standoff where Emma holds a gun to his face. It's hinted his decision to let her go might be a sign that he still has a shred of empathy left in him for a parent not wanting to outlive their child again (having gone through that himself in his backstory), although it's ultimately ambiguous.
• Psycho for Hire: It's implied he was one during the events of Godzilla Aftershock. He's a trafficker of Titans' DNA, and Tarkan believes Jonah's re-emergence at Guam was a demonstration for his paymasters.
• Put Them All Out of My Misery: Type 4. He despises mankind so much for the things he's seen people are capable of, he's become obsessed with killing off as much of humanity as possible; even saying outright in the novelization that the less people there are in the world the better it makes him feel. Unlike Emma, he prioritizes the extinction of humanity above all else, and he doesn't really care if King Ghidorah wreaks even more destruction on the planet than humans have.
• Restart the World: He's been obsessed with leveling the global socio-political-militant playing field for years, and he considers awakening the Titans with full knowledge of the initial collateral that will occur to be giving the planet "a clean slate" to start over free of mankind's corruption such as Jonah witnessed during his military service. Jonah is so disgusted with humanity that he's fine with Ghidorah leading the Titans toward erasing everything (humanity and nature) so long as the world human beings have made for themselves, which he's seen the ugly underbelly of, is all gone.
• The Revolution Will Not Be Civilized: He invokes this when criticizing Emma Russell for letting Madison think their eco-terrorism plot to release all the Titans wasn't going to involve effectively murdering millions of innocents by proxy.
• Say My Name: It's a slight blink-and-you'll-miss-it, but he yells his right-hand Asher's name in a startlingly high volume just after the latter is shot down in front of him, hinting at their close friendship in the novelization (which was portrayed as one of Jonah's last redeeming qualities).
• Silly Rabbit, Idealism Is for Kids!: He doesn't hesitate to berate Madison for believing that the eco-terrorists' plan to awaken the Titans in order to stop humanity destroying their own world was going to involve anything less than hard choices and horrible bloodshed. He also notably mocks Madison for believing humans and Titans can live together (even though the movie's ending demonstrates they can), an early indicator that Jonah doesn't really have any of Emma's interest in making the world become a better place for both man and monster. The novelization confirms Jonah used to believe during his British Army days that he was making the world a better place before his experiences turned him into the misanthropic shell he is now.
  "Madison, tell me, what exactly did mummy sell you on? Some grand utopia? Man and monster living together in blissful harmony?"
• Slasher Smile: In the novelization, he forms a small, devious smile twice, which only fails to qualify as Psychotic Smirk because the other characters take notice. First when he sees Mothra after raiding her temple, then again at the end when he sees Ghidorah's severed head. A fisherman even compares it to "The Devil's Grin".
• Sleep Deprivation: In the King of the Monsters novelization, Jonah has been awake for a less-than-enviable forty-eight hours when his mercenaries are working to thaw Ghidorah out.
• Slouch of Villainy: He's slouching in his chair when he's dressed in prison-orange overalls and being interrogated in Guam in Godzilla: Aftershock. It's clear from this Jonah has done this routine many times throughout his decades of military and paramilitary experience.
• Smug Snake: He crosses into this territory in the novelization's expansion. Jonah is already presented in both versions of the story as icy and condescending to his partner-in-crime Emma and towards Madison (underestimating the latter is a major reason why he loses the ORCA and why Ghidorah doesn't win the Final Battle), and he assumes once King Ghidorah completely overshadows him that Ghidorah will still technically achieve the same end-goals that Jonah really wants. But in the novel, Jonah also makes it clear that he's genuinely deluded himself into believing him and his mercenaries will not only weather out King Ghidorah's global apocalypse from within their bunker, but also that they'll "live like kings" afterwards (a notion which Madison calls out the sheer absurdity of, given how Ghidorah's actions are clearly rendering the Earth inhospitable to all life as we know it). This dispels any notion that the film version left that Jonah was willing to risk dying amid Ghidorah's apocalypse with the rest of humanity in order to secure his misanthropic endgame, and it proves just how unstable and delusional Jonah was at this point.
• Stalker without a Crush: Before kidnapping Emma and Madison, Jonah previously followed Emma around the world to labs she had in Cairo and Tokyo and attempted to raid them.
• The Stoic: Jonah is always shown to be calm and collected despite whatever chaos happens around him. The only time he shows a genuine burst of emotion is when Asher is killed right in front of him, briefly screaming his name.
• Straw Hypocrite: It becomes clear to Emma that Jonah never truly cared about preserving the natural world as much as he had a personal vendetta against the human race, since he is fully prepared to allow Ghidorah to bring about the The End of the World as We Know It and destroy Nature and the Titans alongside Humanity so long as he can get his own vengeance against mankind and make them suffer.
• Sunk Cost Fallacy: When Emma points out to him that King Ghidorah is destroying the planet's biosphere instead of healing it as was their original goal, Jonah brushes it off because he's happy so long as it makes humanity suffer and so long as they aren't the ruling species anymore, not caring that Ghidorah's actions defeat their original goal of preventing the destruction of the planet's ecosphere.
• Taught by Experience: Jonah at first achieves his plans to release all the Titans on humanity by physically invading and slaughtering the Monarch outposts, setting the Titans loose, and moving on, but after Monarch catch up to him at the Antarctica outpost earlier than he was expecting and his right hand Asher dies in the conflict, Jonah foregoes sending anyone to the next outpost. Instead, Jonah retreats to his and his mercs' hidden refuge, and from there he hacks the next outpost's systems and awakens Rodan remotely, all whilst bouncing his broadcast signal off of various satellites so that Monarch can't pinpoint his location.
• Theory Tunnel Vision: He sticks to his absolute view that Humans Are the Real Monsters and that the Titans deserve the world more than we ever will, even when it becomes increasingly clear that some of the Titans he and Emma have awakened might actually be even worse for the world than we are (a certain three-headed Titan in particular). When Emma tells Jonah that King Ghidorah's reign of terror will do the complete opposite of regenerating the world if it continues, Jonah still insists that the Titans deserve the world more, even though it's looking increasingly likely that Ghidorah will be the only one of the Titans to remain alive once he's finished turning the planet into a hellhole. Jonah furthermore brushes off Emma's efforts to convince him that they can still do something to try and stop Ghidorah sterilizing the planet, because the human race that Jonah so hates will be among the species wiped out. Jonah gets extra points in the novelization version, where he's genuinely convinced that he and his men will somehow weather out Ghidorah's global apocalypse and then "live like kings". His last appearance in The Stinger, collecting San/Kevin's severed head, heavily implies that he's refused to accept the Hope Sprouts Eternal ending where humans and Titans have proven they can coexist together.
• Third Act Stupidity: For the first half of the movie, he's presented as a dangerously intelligent and capable adversary; Crazy-Prepared, able to think on his feet, and constantly remaining one step ahead of Monarch's efforts to stop him despite having comparatively far fewer resources; and he successfully takes down three of Monarch's outposts so that the Titans will bring about his dream of "saving" the Earth from humanity. However, after Ghidorah takes control of the other Titans at the movie's midway point, not only does Jonah decide to stand back and do nothing while Ghidorah directs the Titans to create an even worse extinction event than humanity^note Which forces Madison to fully rebel against her controlling mother in order to initiate the plan that leads to the Final Battle herself, which in turn forces Emma to choose her daughter over any remaining commitment to her plan, and also forces Mark and Emma to going looking in the final battle for Madison while fearing she's died; but Jonah also decides to leave the ORCA^note on which much of the plot including all of Jonah's plans hinged, and which could be the death of him and everyone in his base if misused, unguarded in a non-secure room while he and his men all take a coffee break at the same time, enabling Madison's aforementioned execution of the plan to succeed without her getting caught.
• Two First Names: Alan and Jonah. Some viewers have even gotten it mixed up which one is his first name, and which is the last name.
• Viler New Villain: Preston Packard from the previous MonsterVerse movie, as Ax-Crazy as he was, had no bigger endgame than killing Kong, and the only people he directly put in danger for his goals were the rest of the humans on Skull Island while being ignorant to the greater-scope ramifications of his actions. Jonah however wants to set over a dozen Titans loose on locations around the world, and he's actually counting on the Titans to kill as many billions of people as possible. Worse yet, Jonah is willing to stand back and let King Ghidorah completely wipe out humanity along with most if not all life on Earth, just so that Jonah's hatred of the human race at large will finally be satiated.
• Villain Ball: He allows Madison continued free reign of his base unsupervised, even after its made clear that she isn't all for massacring people in the name of the "greater good". What's more, at one point, Jonah and his men all take a break at the same time and leave the ORCA – the device which has enabled Jonah to accomplish as much as he has with the Titans, a tool which, as Jonah earlier pointed out, could put himself and everyone in their base at risk by attracting Monarch's or one of the globally-rampant Titans' attention, and a tool which Jonah at this point actively doesn't want Emma getting unsupervised access to – unattended in an insecure room. Combined, these two Villain Balls enable Madison to steal the ORCA and be long gone from the base before anyone notices what's happened. The latter Villain Ball is somewhat amended in the novelization, where Jonah does leave one particularly-imposing Mook to guard the ORCA.
• Villain Has a Point: He's not wrong when he says Madison is only involved because Emma got her involved in their plans to awaken the Titans, as the former tries to stop her from awakening Rodan:
  Alan: Did you really think this was going to be easy, painless? Is that what you told her?
  Emma: Leave her out of this!
  Alan: Why? You're the one who pulled her into it!
• War Is Hell: He wholeheartedly agrees, as that was what made him go rogue and start seeking a way to bring back the Titans.
• We Can Rule Together: Has something like this in the novelization. In the film, Jonah is presented as nihilistic and believes humans need to be wiped out, so while he is misguided, he at least genuinely believes in his cause and seems willing to die for it. In the novel, he has a moment of telling Emma that they can live like kings in the aftermath, showing him to be considerably pettier despite his mission.
• When He Smiles: The novelization explicitly says that when Jonah smiles around Asher, it's a very genuine smile, unlike the cold smirks he usually gives.
• Wicked Cultured: Downplayed in the novelization, where he comments upon seeing a twenty-five-year-old Laphroaig that someone had good taste. This is also slightly hinted at in the film, when he's seen by Madison retrieving a bottle alongside a few of his mercenaries in their bunker.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: His sheer evil and all-consuming misanthropy is a result of having fought in the world's worst combat arenas over and over for decades, repeatedly witnessing first-hand how low humanity can really sink. And the novelization furthermore reveals that the tipping point was when Jonah's daughter was gruesomely murdered and her body was found stuffed in a storm drain, while he was away from home on duty.
• Would Hurt a Child: Clearer in the novelization. He threatens Madison after she tells him off for patronizing her, putting his hand on his gun and warning her to be careful what she wishes for. Later, to cement Emma into behaving after the latter has had her Heel Realization, Jonah orders one of his men to slit Madison's throat if Emma goes anywhere near the ORCA without permission.
• Xanatos Gambit: Downplayed. When Emma realizes King Ghidorah is going to outright destroy the world (the whole of humanity included) instead of healing it in any way, Jonah couldn't care less about trying any further to manipulate Ghidorah, since his primary motivation is the eradication of as much of mankind as possible, and Ghidorah will still achieve that end even if it wreaks much more destruction on the world's ecosphere than humans ever have. The movie implies that Jonah was well-aware from the get-go that there was a significant possibility that the Titans wouldn't do what the eco-terrorists expected them to and their plan could end up doing even more harm than good to nature (unlike Emma who never seriously considered that possibility), but Jonah was okay with this because either way, the Titans will cause millions if not billions of people to die.
• Xanatos Speed Chess: Part of what sets Jonah apart from other human villains and makes him so dangerous, is that he doesn't place all his eggs in one basket and is highly adaptable. On top of being Crazy-Prepared, Jonah thinks and moves very effectively when on his toes. In Godzilla: Aftershock, he attempts to get off the island where he was being detained by quietly hijacking Emma's jet with a gun, and when Tarkan arrives and pulls his own gun on Jonah, the latter escapes being re-captured by tackling the gun-wielding Tarkan without getting hurt, and firing his gun in the air outside the jet to create disorientation whilst he flees; and it's later revealed that Jonah still found another way off the island without being recaptured. In King of the Monsters, Jonah is shocked when Ghidorah takes control of the other Titans and commands them to attack the planet spontaneously, but he quickly decides that he's fine with this since his goals of the Titans taking control of the planet and causing massive loss of human life are still achieved; instead prioritizing keeping himself and his mercs safe in their bunker from the apocalypse for as long as possible.

Asher Jonah

Portrayed By: Jonathan Howard

Appears In: Godzilla: King of the Monsters

Jonah's second-in-command.

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• All There in the Manual: Most of what we know about him, including when and how Jonah hired him, comes from the Novelization. His first missions with Jonah were attacking a chemical plant in China, and another assignment involving game hunters in the Congo. The book also confirms he is not related to Jonah, despite him being called "Asher Jonah" in the film credits for some reason.
• Boom, Headshot!: Courtesy of Colonel Foster.
• Evil Brit: Like his boss.
• In-Series Nickname: "Ash" for short.
• Mook Lieutenant: Not quite The Dragon due to getting sniped in his second scene, but he is Jonah's right-hand man and the leader of the other henchmen.
• Morality Pet; Alongside Jonah's deceased daughter, he is one of the only two human beings Jonah had any compassion towards.
• One-Steve Limit: Averted. He has the same last name as his boss. Though as noted they're not related.
• Punch-Clock Villain: In the novelization, he flat out tells Jonah he'll do anything he says, including killing people, but that he still dislikes doing it and he is concerned that it's becoming easier for him to deal with the guilt.
• We Hardly Knew Ye: He's only in two scenes before getting killed, and is, in fact, the only one of Jonah's Mooks who dies in the movie at all. That said, he gets some much-needed backstory and character development in the novelization by Greg Keyes.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Like his boss, he is hellbent on saving the planet by any means necessary.
• What Measure Is a Mook?: Jonah liked him immensely, and is quite upset by his death in the novelization, surprising Madison who didn't think he cared about anything or anyone beyond his and Emma's twisted version of saving the planet. That said because Jonah is very mission-oriented, Asher quickly becomes a Forgotten Fallen Friend. The novelization, however, flat out states what was left of Jonah's humanity died with Ash.

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