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Headscratchers / Godzilla vs. Destoroyah

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  • What is the catalyst behind Godzilla's meltdown? The movie begins, and we see that Birth Island is gone and Godzilla is suddenly glowing red and on the verge of death with no apparent explanation; and why after forty-something odd years after the Oxygen Destroyer was fired did Destoroyah just then decide to wake up and cause havoc?
    • For Godzilla, the movie explains that a volcanic eruption on Birth Island reveals a deposit of uranium. Godzilla absorbs/eats it, causing his body to start to overheat and accidentally vaporize the island. As for Destoroyah, the simple answer is plot convenience, although if you really need to you can fanwank an explanation—perhaps it took forty years for the effects of the Oxygen Destroyer to sink far enough into Earth's crust and awaken the crabs, or perhaps it took forty years for the crabs to go through some sort of evolutionary process and reach the state they're in at the movie's start.
    • Destoroyah was awakened by the work on the Tokyo Bay Aqua-Line, which had been under construction since 1989. Before that, only Dr. Ijuin knew of their existence because he had found living specimens from soil samples he took from Tokyo Bay as per his efforts to synthesize micro-oxygen. However, he found no immediate reason to suspect that they were hostile and decided not to tell anyone. He was wrong. The odds of both that and Godzilla's meltdown happening at the same time are a pretty big coincidence, though, and there's really no explanation for that.
  • In order to get Destroyah and Godzilla to fight each other, the humans decide to have Godzilla Jr. be Destroyah's bait. So let me get this down: you're endangering an offspring of a monster born of nuclear means and has been leveling Japan since the 50's, just to get the offspring's father and another monster to fight? Granted, it all works out in the end and they were desperate, but did they not think of all the things that could go absolutely wrong?
    • That is just the sort of crazy that people have to resort to when the situation has passed the Godzilla Threshold.
    • They were also under the gun because Godzilla was set to meltdown in three days. There really wasn't time to think things through.
  • Godzilla Junior is revived by the radiation the elder Godzilla left behind. This brings up a little problem. The reason the elder Godzilla went critical mass in the first place is because it absorbed too much radiation. Assuming Junior absorbed all of the elder Godzilla's radiation, how on earth did Junior not go critical mass as well?
    • It's likely that the bulk of the energy was used to resurrect Junior into his adult form.
    • There's also the fact in Senior was being bombarded with freezing and cadmium weapons at the time, which may have decreased the amount of radiation being expelled. On top of it, it's kind of a crapshoot whether or not Junior and Senior would even be effected the same way, as the circumstances that made them are completely different. Senior was created as the result of mutating as an adult from a sudden, massive surge of radioactivity, then mutated again by another one. Junior gradually mutated into his current state as he grew if he wasn't born in it. He may simply handle radiation better than his father did from his body being more accumulated to it due to his gradual mutation. This would also explain why the same incident that triggered the meltdown, despite both logically being exposed to the same amount, only mutated Junior into a juvenile, despite being a large enough blast to turn Birth Island into a crater and thus likely several times larger than the nuclear sub that mutated Senior from 80 to 100 meters.
    • There's also the actual reason why Godzilla begins to go through meltdown, which unfortunately, was completely removed from the final version of the movie. Originally, Godzilla was to have stumbled onto some heretofore unknown uranium deposits on Birth Island. The radiation in Godzilla and the raw uranium coming together caused a massive nuclear explosion. The results of this explosion were that 1.) Birth Island was destroyed, 2.) Little Godzilla was mutated into Godzilla Junior, and 3.) Godzilla's body absorbed the energy from the nuclear blast and unable to deal with the overwhelming amount, his system began meltdown (just like a nuclear reactor would). Since Junior didn't absorb a literal nuclear explosion, he should be fine (as long as he stays away from raw uranium).
    • Also, Wordof God clarified that when Destroyah split into several smaller crabs to swarm Godzilla, they absorbed a good chunk of his excess radiation, to the point where his body stops glowing so brightly and his beam temporarily becomes blue again.

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