Headscratchers / Godzilla (2014)

New entries on the bottom.

Why does the EMP's range keep fluctuating?

• When the first MUTO is loose, they apparently lose any way of tracking it by satellite, then on the bridge the radio just flickers despite being right next to it, then we're told the EMP has a 5-mile radius, but the sodiers' tracker works well within that range, and finally, the boat starts up while in that range and only shorts out when the MUTO is right on top of it.
  • Perhaps the EMP is linked to its emotional or metabolic state? The pulse effect might only spike when it's agitated or hungry.
  • They seemed to have two EMPs, a passive short ranged one and a long ranged one activated by slamming the front claw into the ground.
  • There's no evidence of a passive effect, even at short range, and quite a lot to the contrary. The MUTOs aren't setting them off continuously, and electronics keep working until they're hit by a pulse. Sometimes a pulse goes off while a jet is five miles off, sometimes they won't set one off until after they're in the same room.
  • As big as the first MUTO was, tracking it by satellite would still be problematic, as it was flying (and therefore wouldn't leave a trail of destruction that could be followed), they had no knowledge of the exact direction it was going (all they knew was that it was heading east), and they didn't know how fast it could move. In other words, with so little information, satellites would have a lot of ground to cover.
  • EMPs work by causing a power surge through circuits, frying things attached to the circuit, the less complex a device is, the less the damage the EMP will cause, something like a radio, won't get fried that bad, it might need repairs, but it should still function, the bit that get's me is most modern military vehicles are actually tested against EMP, therefor fighter jets falling out of the sky, shouldn't work.

Why the train?

• When they're moving the warheads to San Francisco, they're transporting them on a slow exposed flatbed train carriage and without any coordination or intel whether their route will take them close to the female MUTO for no apparent reason, which especially becomes evident when a Chinook transport arrives in the aftermath and takes the remaining warhead to San Fran in a much shorter time than the train would and not restrained to tracks would be able to avoid the MUTO in the first place.
  • They needed to retrofit the warheads with manual detonators of some sort, which can be done when the warheads are not moving or when they are moving by train, but not so much when they are transported aerially. It is possible that the higher-ups thought it would take less time to transport them by train and retrofit them on the move rather than retrofit them in one place and then use the Chinooks to transport them.
  • Also they can't track the MUTOs because their EMPs will fry anything nearby. They can maybe tell where they are within a few dozen miles by monitoring where cell towers stop working, but that's all they got.
  • One of the Mutos can fly. They may have been worried that putting it on a plane makes it more likely to be destroyed should the plane crash, while a train is already on the ground can limit damage to the warhead.
  • For that matter, why not send multiple nukes from different sites? And since you know that the female Muto started in Nevada and is moving towards San Francisco, shouldn't you arrange for the nuke to be sent along a route that doesn't intersect with the muto's expected path? Send it in from Oregon or something. We've got a few nuclear silos in Oregon, don't we?

What kind of training did Lieutenant Brody get?

• This is a Navy Explosives Ordnance Disposal officer. A low ranking one. Yet, he was put in command of a forward unit that appeared to be Air Force based on rank insignia when they needed to verify if the train tracks were clear. At least the paratrooper training makes sense since it's part of officer EOD training. Though, he may have just gotten out of training since he said he hadn't been home for fourteen months, and the other officer commented about coming home being something they don't train you for. It's possible, he may never have had his hands in a live bomb either.
  • We do not know how much training he had. But considering his behavior in the movie and his remarks towards his superiors, we can presume that he had some experience with live bombs and likely served actively for some time instead of being just out of training. And as for the being put in command thing, it was a very non-standard situation and he seemed to know what he was doing, in situations like that things of this sort might happen even thought it wouldn't be common by any means.
  • It wouldn't happen at all for him to take command of a small team. He was only there because he wormed his way onto the train to get home. They already assembled everyone else for the train, and they had their own people to retrofit the bomb. That forward unit would have been a pre-prepared team that have trained together. Even then, why would Lt. Brody risk his own safety in trying to get home just to volunteer himself into more duties?
  • Maybe he's a dutiful kind? To be honest, he wasn't given much characterization before Mutos showed up. We didn't see him in any ordinary-military situation. This may just part of who he is, always ready to do his duty (even if only he see it as "his" duty). Frankly, it would be something of a Fridge Brilliance. Just ponder it for a moment: Ford's father was an engineer in nuclear plant that malfunctioned, killing Ford's mother. It wouldn't be surprising if he blamed a failure on his father's neglect or omission, so he grew up feeling that he should be taking care of things and watch out for any problems, so he won't repeat old Brody's supposed mistake.
  • EODs are technically special forces. While they're not as badass as SEALs or Rangers, they're expected to deploy with Marines and keep up with them.
  • EOD, SEALs and Rangers are all special operations qualified, but for different tasks. Your average Ranger is going to have a different skill set to Navy EOD, it's not the same training in different uniforms. Also, any special operations force anywhere could keep up with marines, who are just standard troops with an extra week at basic training.
  • Are EODs typically trained to arm/disarm nuclear warheads as well in real life? Or is that just a case of the filmmakers not doing their homework?
    • EOD personnel do not handle nuclear ordnance. Nuclear Ordnance Technicians do that. These techs normally stay on ballistic missile subs if they're Navy, or Minuteman silos or B-52 bases if they're Air Force. This is because unexploded nukes aren't exactly common on the battlefield, and because people who know how a nuclear warhead works are kept far away from anyplace where they might get captured. Ford would know as much about rigging a nuke as he would about brain surgery.

Didn't the Air Force get briefed about the EMPs?

• Throughout the film, multiple EMP blasts are emitted from the MUTOs, shutting down all electronics in a very large radius. The majority of these take place before the battle of San Francisco, where they know the kaiju are meeting up... and yet they keep a bunch of jet fighters buzzing over the bay despite this? Guess what: the battle starts with an EMP blast that knocks them all out of the sky.
  • Out-of-story, it was done so that the situation would appear to be more grave ... yeah, that's a stupid reason even if it did work. So what could be an in-story reason? Maybe they hoped they will be able to get some lucky shot in and do some damage before they got fried. Or maybe it was because they did not have any other ways of getting more fire-power and were getting desperate. And there's always the old "throwing more fire-power seemed to work against other things" sort of reasoning.
  • They were briefed, that's actually mentioned onscreen as the reason why they were transporting the nuke with a train, a no-fly zone around the MUTOs was established. As for why Raptors were deployed in San Fran, think about the movie events. The original plan was to lure the MUTOs miles offshore, but then Godzilla swam faster and got there way ahead of the projections. The military hastily put ut a line of defense, and then things got even more screwed up when the male MUTO also got there quicker than expected and caught everybody by surprise. The Raptors were deployed for Godzilla, not against the MUTOs.
  • The pulses aren't being set off continuously. We saw at least one helicopter engage the drone in Honolulu, so the military thought that trying to attack between pulses was worth the risk, at least at first. They also stopped after the jets crash in San Francisco, so they apparently decided that it wasn't worth the risk with two MUTOs to generate pulses.
  • Fighter aircraft are hardened against EMPs. They probably knew and just broadly assumed that the Raptors wouldn't be affected. The MUTO EMPs were just more powerful than anticipated.

Why no thermobarics?

• Okay, this is probably my biggest problem with this film. The plan they have to kill the kaiju is bonkers. They're well aware that all three kaiju feed on radiation, so their brilliant idea is to lure them in with a juicy nuclear warhead, and then detonate it to kill them. Through the whole meeting on the San Francisco nuke plan I was waiting for someone to raise their hand and say "Why don't we JUST use the nuke to lure them in and THEN smack them with a really powerful non-nuclear bomb, like a MOAB, or a bunker buster?" Honestly, if anything the biggest problem with using a bunker buster against kaiju is that they have TOO MUCH penetrating power right? You'd have to rig up a special timed fuse or the shell would go in one side, out the other, and then blow up after digging a hole a few dozen meters deep.
  • Can they even be retrofitted with manual mechanisms rather than relying on electronics? From what I know, bunker busters that exist nowadays generally do need the electronics. And MOABs might not have been accessible just like that. But yes, I agree, it's weird they didn't try any conventional high-yield explosives.
  • We don't see everything the military does against the MUTO couple, not even close. It's perfectly possibly that such ordnance was used against the monsters with no result. Even a MOAB only has a small fraction of the yield of a modern nuke, don't forget that.
  • Hold it, are you saying this on the assumption that they wanted the radiation to kill the kaiju or are you assuming that it would be better to not use a nuke due to the ecological effects? If it's the latter (and I hope it is) then I must defend the decision on the basis that it is better safe than sorry. Killing them quickly with a more assured weapon before they cause any more death or destruction is far more important than leaving it to chance that less powerful weapons can kill them off. If it is the former case though, you're more bonkers than your accusation because nukes aren't used because they release a ton of radiation, they're used because when they detonate they create an ungodly powerful explosion that tears near everything apart, the fallout radiation is just a side effect. Their plan was to blow up the monsters, not make them choke on radiation.
  • I'm suggesting this on the assumption that the nukes MIGHT only make the kaiju more powerful. Ecological damage is a small concern, we've detonated tons of nukes with manageable damage to the environment, they could easily light off a nuke off the coast to draw the three in and then carpet bomb the area with non-nuclear munitions. They could even drop them from high enough that the MUTOs' EMPs wouldn't knock out their planes.
  • Just like you, Dr. Graham instantly scoffs at the idea of nuking the three kaiju because it would only feed them with radiation. But then the proponent of the plan seems to realize this, because he argues that they're counting on the force of the blast to do the job. Remember: nukes don't kill solely with radiation (that's a secondary effect), they kill with the heat and shockwave first. But even if the overpressure doesn't inflict enough physical trauma to kill them (which we never got to find out), and even if they can absorb thermal radiation just the same as ionizing radiation, there's no guarantee that they can soak up the entire yield of the bomb before their cells reach their limit and start receiving damage. After all, humans drink water and we can still drown, plants can burn from excessive sunlight, etc. (For that matter, we also absorb low-level radiation all the time, and it's only when it surpasses a certain threshold that it starts hurting us.) The Mutos spent 15 years eating away at relatively low-yield radioactive waste and fissile material, which is nowhere near comparable to getting a multi-megaton bomb explode in their face. Since kaiju are completely unknown, and might react in completely unexpected ways to sudden changes in their environment, we can't categorically state what would or wouldn't work, we can only hope that the laws of physics are on our side that day.
  • Someone on the Godzilla forum summed it up best: "The logic used by the military was something like this: If you put a fat man next to a cake, and there is a grenade in the cake, the fat man will die. That he could feed off the sugar of the cake becomes irrelevant."
  • Using the biggest nuke you have on them is really the only sensible plan. If the monster can survive being hit by a multi-megaton nuclear warhead then does it even matter if you've made it stronger? No conventional weapon was going to hurt it anyway. With a thermobaric weapon you're talking about a few thousand degrees. With a hydrogen bomb you're talking about tens of millions. If there were going to be able to kill it with physical force at all, the nuke would do it. If not, you're screwed anyway. The alternative plan- hope that Godzilla kills the MUTOs and then just goes away- really only looks sensible when you're counting on narrative convention.

Why use a timer?

• Ok, this is basically two Headscratchers that are so closely connected I can't really separate them. The first deals with the issue of radiation. Undetonated nukes don't release alot of it (the filmmakers can't plead ignorance or artistic license here, since the soldiers handling the nuke didn't wear radiation suits), so it makes no sense that the MUTOs didn't have to break it open to get at the radiation. The second issue is that, even if we accept that the MUTOs had some way of getting radiation out of an intact nuke, the military had no reason to assume that they would care about keeping the nuke intact, and thus no reason to assume that the detonator would get a chance to go off. If the MUTOs get there a little too early, they could quite likely, even by accident, destroy the detonator. If they get there too late, it goes off without killing them. This bugs me alot, because there's such an obvious solution to it: An approaching kaiju, be it by land, sea, or air, would create massive vibrations. Rig up a detonator to go off when the vibrations are strong enough to indicate a kaiju is walking or flying towards it, and you're all set.
  • The analog timer was the only way to guarantee the explosion going off when they needed it to. As far as I know, the type of analog trigger you are describing doesn't exist, and it would require calibration that they can't do. Jostling the bomb would probably set it off, and it would have to be finely tuned to differentiate seismic activity over several hundred feet.
  • It's mentioned that due to the EMP they had to have a timer.
  • The only way they could be sure it would work is if it is analog, and I'm not sure that something sensitive to vibrations only at the minor seismological event level (that would work in a boat) would be readily available. It was a timer, or somebody pressing the button. And from an out-of-universe perspective, it was there to show just how absolutely screwed mankind was against these forces of nature.

Why San Francisco?

• Why were the Mutos headed there? Was it merely the shortest distance possible to reach each other? Something nuclear there drawing them? Presumably they don't know there's a huge city there. If so, why it and not another?
  • Because it is a scientific fact that no giant monster can avoid attacking the Golden Gate Bridge.
  • It's probably a reference to the first kaiju attack in Pacific Rim. This is a sister film to that one.
  • There aren't any real-life power stations anywhere near San Francisco - the nearest nuclear plant is in Diablo Canyon, closer to Santa Barbara or Los Angeles than it is to San Francisco. Unless the two calling out to each other somehow knew that San Francisco had a nice big bay to fight Godzilla in, there's no real reason. Even if they were tracking the nuke on the train, Femuto doesn't take it, and that opens up a whole other line of questioning on how good their radioactivity-senses are.
  • Femuto Walked through Las Vegas then swung around to head to San Francisco, that weird route, might be explained as it going to the San Onofre Plant (while Decommissioned, still has near 2000 tons of spent fuel in it), to stock up before heading to San Francisco, the Kaiju equivalent to popping into a store for a bag of chips on the way.

Ford's rescue?

• At the end of the briefing prior the HALO jump, a point is specifically made that there would be no extraction available for the team, they were completely on their own. So what's up with that chopper that conveniently found Brody?
  • There's no rescue PLAN, sure, but that doesn't stop impromptu actions based on developing situations. With both MUTO's dead and Godzilla sleeping 50+ stab wounds to the back off, the only threat they have left is the nuke, and they know what the timer is set to and what MSD is. It's not farfetched to say they sent a few choppers, including someone to look at the nuke, realized they had enough time to pull Ford to safety but not disarm the nuke, then hightailed it.
  • Moreover, their original mission parameters assumed two active, EMP producing MUTOs nearby at the end of the op. The circumstances had changed and operational command was just across the bay, close enough to throw a rescue together.

Naming Convention

• So, Serizawa clearly calls the beast, "Gojira", yet later in the movie, the Navy guy says, "Godzilla". Did they talk it over and decide to change the name at some point? It's not like the naming convention of how the movies went in real life. If Gojira is the name in the movie, why did it change to Godzilla other than just because? There is no reason given in the movie and seems like it was just a shout out/homage to the original, but really didn't make sense within the movie itself.
  • The odd thing is that Serizawa himself says Gojira first, then switched to Godzilla, and then back to Gojira.
  • Odd, I heard a "d" with his first utterance of the name. It might just be that one of the soldiers started saying "Godzilla" in the traditional American manner... because it's a much easier to say than Gojira, and the name stuck.
  • The "two names" were caused from Serizawa's Japanese accent?
  • Godzilla had been around for quite some time by the events of the movie. The corruption of Gojira to Godzilla had probably happened back in the fifties, and stuck through inertia.
  • It is inevitable that someone hearing a foreign word for the first time will mispronounce it because they are trying to comprehend it through the pronunciation conventions of their native tongue.
  • He's been studying the creature for a few years, now, and people have been aware of it since the 1950s so there's plenty of time for both names to emerge and be adopted; he probably just uses them interchangeably. It's not like doing so is going to make things hugely complicated, since they sound and are pronounced fairly similarly.

Hiroshima Connection

• So, the watch that Serizawa carries around and shows to the Admiral in an effort to discourage him from using a nuke against the Godzilla and the MUTOs near San Francisco was his father's, and it was stopped as a result of nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Except, since Godzilla is often an allegory for nuclear weapons, as well as clearly being as destructive AS nuclear bombs, why does Serizawa think that this is at all a good idea? "Don't use a nuke in a place chosen to do as little collateral damage as possible, let's invite the Patron Deity of Collateral Damage to have a smackdown in the middle of San Francisco, because Hiroshima!"
  • Godzilla's meaning has shifted. In this film he doesn't represent nuclear weapons but instead nature and its urge to keep the ecosystem balanced. Note that in this film his origins are independent of nukes, and that his arrival is accompanied with a tsunami, which can be destructive but also has significance to the Japanese as a godly rescue. The term "kamikaze" means "Divine Wind" and refers to two storms that saved Japan from Mongol invasion. It's not Godzilla in this film that represents the consequences of nuclear testing, but the Mutos, who feed off of mankind's nuclear machines. Godzilla represents nature setting things right again because he is the Mutos' natural predator, hence why Serizawa wants him to defeat the creatures.
  • Except that the MUTOs also existed before nuclear testing, and Godzilla is just as radiation-dependent as they are. Hell, Godzilla was awoken by a nuclear reactor, whereas the MUTOs' cocoons were unearthed by people looking for radioactive elements. And not only was the tsunami here definitely destructive... nature doesn't have an "urge" towards anything, Agent Smith.
  • The Mutos existed before just like Godzilla did in the first film and does here. But they directly seek out energy from reactors, while Gody is content with drawing energy from the planet's core. The Mutos draw from artificial nuclear radiation, Godzilla from natural, further highlighting their "nature-technology" contrast. And the point with the tsunami is that they can be both destructive and salvation, just like Godzilla. He smashed a ton of stuff in Honolulu, but kept the male Muto from wreaking more damage. Don't be so literal as to have to seek out an exact match-for-match with every single element of a metaphor.
    
    "Urge" was used for lack of a better term, but nature does have mechanisms to restore balance, like wildfires that erupt to burn away dead matter so forest life can keep thriving. That's what is meant by "nature seeks to preserve balance".
  • Wildfires aren't a mechanism for restoring balance, they're disasters that incidentally restore balance. Disasters that humans can have influence over.
  • Semantics again. Like I said, for lack of a better word. And in the case of wildfires, human intervention can turn out worse. The Great Fire of 1910 caused folks to believe that all wildfires, even small ones, should be put out as quickly as possible, only for that to cause build ups in dead plant matter that led to ginormous infernos suddenly springing up instead. Likewise human intervention in trying to stop the Mutos and Godzilla from clashing just created more destruction due to trying to stop something inevitable.
  • OP here. I realize that Godzilla's meaning has shifted, but that doesn't change the point: At this time, in universe, Serizawa knows how much death and destruction Godzilla and the Mutos cause just by fighting each other. Them heading for San Francisco would be at least as destructive. The nuclear option being used is deliberately designed to be as safe and far from other people as possible (...unless the nuke gets moved, which they prolly should have thought of, but Serizawa didn't either). It'd be poignant if the nuke was meant to be used in San Francisco proper, but at this point it just sounds like he's saying "Nuclear weapons are bad, never use them, regardless of context or circumstances".
  • Serizawa may have just been critical of the plan to nuke the three after the luring with the nuke was done, not the luring them from the city itself. Evacuations he's fine with.
  • Well aside from the Hiroshima reason, another reason given was that they've already tried to kill Godzilla with nukes multiple times to no avail. Also, even though he was assured that the nuke they were using was in the Megaton range that would make the ones they used originally "look like a firecracker" and that no creature on Earth could possibly withstand it, if it doesn't work then they would have just given a massive radiation boost to Godzilla and the Muto's and making them even more unstoppable then they are already.
  • There's also another reason provided in the "Godzilla: Awakening" prequel: the Hiroshima bomb woke up Shinomura and set it loose on the world. Not only was it a disaster, there's the potential risk using a nuclear weapon might just wake up or lure out another radiovoir even if it succeeded, and if it killed Godzilla, humanity would be utterly screwed without him to do it.

Serizawa's age

• How old is Serizawa, anyway? If his father was at (and heavily implied to have been killed at) Hiroshima in 1945, Serizawa must have been born before then. But he doesn't look like a 70-year-old, and is played by a 55-year-old actor. Maybe the watch should have belonged to his grandfather instead.
  • Godzilla: Awakening shows Serizawa was just a baby during the Hiroshima bombing, with his father surviving until 1981. But even then, that doesn't add up since the movie is set in 2014.
  • I noticed that the movie actually avoids saying the film is in 2014, as there are date stamps for every time skip except for the last one to the modern day. Maybe it actually takes place earlier than 2014.
  • The Janjira incident was in 1999 and Joe Brody mentions that he's been trying to figure out what happened for 15 years.
  • is avoiding mentioning the current year a Trope in itself? It seems to happen a lot.
  • Maybe despite the implication, Papa Serizawa survived and went on to become a father a decade and a bit later.
    • It should be noted that the moviemakers are careful not to outright state that Serizawa's father was killed at Hiroshima; it's just established that he was there. Exactly what happened to him is left to inference, and since in this case it prevents a plot hole it's perhaps easier to suggest that he survived. One does not have to have a family member actually killed in an atomic bomb attack to develop a dim view of atomic weapons, after all.
    • I believe Serizawa actually does say "Hiroshima took my parents from me". My personal theory is that they didn't die in the blast, but may have been killed by cancer or any number of aftereffects from exposure.
    • Or perhaps they didn't die from Hiroshima, but they became progressively more withdrawn, morbid, and depressed from the trauma and watching other survivors die slow cancer deaths, to the point where they no longer had the wherewithal to raise or show affection to their small son. There's more than one way a person can be "taken from" another person by tragedy, after all, and Serizawa may have inherited his obsessive tendencies from them.

Yucca Mountain

• How the fuck did the military not notice the giant hole in Yucca Mountain or the giant monster that created that hole currently marching across the desert?
  • What about the army guy who couldn't see the MASSIVE MUTO walking around until he looked at it through binoculars? There is no way he wouldn't have been able to see that thing even without the binoculars unless he has terrible, terrible eye sight.
  • For that matter, can you even see Las Vegas from Yucca Mountain, considering it's over 100 miles away.
  • It seemed to have broken out very recently, probably while they were still entering the mountain. It had barely even reached Vegas by the time they found the damage.
  • She rolled really well on her hide and move silently check.
  • All three beasties are pretty silent, when it comes down to it. The male Muto was munching on the sub without a sound until spotted, then made it all the way to the airport without alerting anyone. And Godzilla snuck up on Femuto without her OR Brody hearing even the slightest splash, let alone a tremor.
• Why did they need to send in a team to inspect every vault instead of the facility's own staff checking the vaults? Also considering it's sheer size shouldn't it already be on record what vault the MUTO is in?

Why does the US Navy take over operations for MONARCH on Japanese soil?

• Does the US military really still run Japan in 2014? Shouldn't the JMSDF have been the group to take over after the first MUTO escaped?
  • Monarch is a multinational effort, but we don't know how it is structured or what kind of deals are running in the background. Considering the gravity of the matter at hand, it makes sense that the operational control would be in the hands of the largest, most mobile military force available, and the US military has a huge presence in Japan. Plus, it's canon in the setting that US has been dealing with these creatures for over half a century.
  • Technically, the operation was put under NATO control. Which, happened to consist of a bunch of American Navy in this incident.
  • It's entirely possible that the JMSDF was aware of the events, and simply asked the Americans to take over for them. After all, America is an ally of Japan, and it has a bigger military.
  • There is also the simple fact that the giant monster was leaving Japanese territory, at which point the Japanese have every reason to hand off the problem to the people whose country the giant monster is heading towards. It's not like its a privilege to be the people who have to go out and get eaten by a giant monster; if you can honorably dump that obligation off on someone else, why wouldn't you?

Just stay at Yucca Mountain

• The female muto wants a radiation source to feed its eggs, right? And it wakes up in Yucca Mountain. Why not just stay there, and start laying eggs immediately? She can let the male muto come to her, instead of meeting up with him in San Francisco.
  • The eggs may be unfertilized until she meets with the male.
  • Yucca Mountain is unfortunately lacking in city to destroy spectacularly.
  • Also, considering that the male spend years sucking up radiation at Janjira to facilitate its growth such that Geiger counters no longer registered radiation in the area at all, it's possible that the female had already absorbed most of the radiation at Yucca Mountain to grow and if there was any left, it wouldn't be enough to sustain her eggs. It's also faster for the female to meet the male at a halfway point rather then wait for the male, who incidentally, was calling out to her.
    • Stopping off at nearby plants for a snack on the way? Diablo Canyon and San Onofre are on it's projected route, while San Onofre is decommissioned, it still contains spent fuel it could have a quick munch on.

Long-range weapons

• I need help from a weapons expert: Is there really nothing we can throw at the mutos? I understand that they put out EMPs, and thus all electronics fail in their vicinity. (At least, some of the time.) But is there no non-electronic way of hitting them? Can't we fire a bunch of long-range missiles, set to detonate on impact? Can't we fly some high-altitude bombers over them, and drop some heavy ordinance? Or does every single missile and bomb require an electronic detonator? And even if they do require electronic detonators, can't we shield them from EMP somehow? (And if we have that one clockwork detonator, do we have more of those? You could do some math to figure out when a certain missile will hit the muto, and set the clock so that it detonates just before that moment.)
  • I'm not much of a weapon's expert, but there's two issues. First, unguided rockets (basically what you're describing) have never been remotely accurate at longer distances. Wind alone can blow them way off course, no matter how well you aim them, and these aren't stationary targets. You'd probably hit with a small fraction of the weapons you're firing at them. Granted, a Nuke would probably splash onto them regardless, but it's still a pretty big risk of it going off-course and nuking Fresno or something. Second, it's not about what is possible, but what is possible NOW. Rigging a minuteman nuclear missile (something the US has a lot of) with a clockwork timer they probably had lying around is one thing. Re-engineering, re-calculating, re-testing (because you don't want to miss with the kind of weapons you'd need for this)... it all takes time, and during that time people are dying. It's possible there were people scrambling to come up with other ideas and we just didn't see them, because the Mutos died only a few days after the first one hatched, before any prototypes could be made.
  • What if we stationed some battleships nearby and pounded the female muto with the big guns? It wouldn't be terribly long-range, in that case. Would that work?
  • Unfortunately, battleships went out of style after World War 2. I'm not sure what we have in terms of naval guns anymore. We're mostly focused on carrying aircraft and launching guided missiles. Those guidance systems would fail if they were exposed to EMP, I think. We do have the Advanced Gun System, but I don't think that's actually been deployed yet.
  • I believe the largest guns on any American ship in active service are five-inchers. They're going to have little more effect than the tanks did. Even Godzilla probably would be hurt by an Iowa-class battleship's main guns, but none of those are available on short notice.
  • That's naval guns. On the land side of the equation, a 155mm howitzer can reach out and touch someone up to 11 miles away, which is over twice the MUTO's EMP radius. Those probably aren't enough to hit Godzilla (given the shit the big G tanked, you honestly wonder if 16-inch naval guns would be enough), but might have done something vs. the MUTOs.
  • As for "can you shield the electronics," yes, you can. In fact, we do. You wouldn't want a nuke to be disabled by another nuke going off nearby. But as the main page says, fighter jets are shielded against EMPs as well, and they were falling out of the sky. Therefore, the MUTOs' EMPs are magic, and we all know how hard it is to shield against that.
  • Basic artillery shells would work at that range, but with the speed we see either MUTO move, the risk of missing and causing horrible collateral damage would be too high. High-altitude bombers like the B-2 or B-52 don't typically carry giant bombs, instead carrying of lots of smaller precision weapons. Bunker busters only carry six or seven hundred pounds of high-explosive - certainly nothing to sneeze at, but the electronics in the guidance package would be fried by the EMP. A MOAB is GPS guided, but even if they managed to get the MUTO to sit still long enough to drop one, it has to be delivered by cargo plane rather than a bomber, and even then would take hours or days to bring to San Francisco, and then we're back to the fried guidance and collateral damage angle. Ironically, rigging the warhead up so neatly like Brody did was probably the most miraculous feat of engineering in the film - real-life nuclear warheads have all sorts of safety features that are designed to prevent pretty much exactly what the military does in the film. If anything, nuclear torpedoes might have the best chance of taking out a MUTO while in the water because of how much better the force conducts (it hits harder but attenuates faster), but that would require a captain to have the torpedoes on board, get the codes and orders to fire, find the MUTO, and then land the shot. And that's all assuming that the blast of a nuclear torpedo (which typically have smaller warheads in the low tens of kilotons) would kill one.
  • EMP shielding can be overcome by more powerful EMPs, the MUTOs clearly had very powerful EMPs. As for mechanical triggers or dead-fire, well, we use electronic triggers and guidance today for a reason, namely that mechanical triggers or dead reckoning are woefully inaccurate. Anything that could be dead-fired or rigged to operate on purely mechanical devices would either be too small to hurt the ridiculously-resilient MUTOs, or so damn big it causes unacceptably high levels of collateral damage. Granted, there's a point where the damage caused by letting the MUTOs run around unchecked exceeds the damage that will need to be done to stop them, but there's a trope for that.

Nuclear submarines

• We planned to send a nuke out to San Francisco by train, and then put that nuke on a boat, and then drive that boat into the ocean to lure the mutos away. Right? But it's clear that the mutos are also interested in nuclear submarines. Are you telling me that we don't have any nuclear submarines anyplace between Hawaii and California? Or how about a nice nuclear-powered aircraft carrier? Seems like we ought to have something in the water already that can distract a muto, so why don't we make use of that? Instead, we're apparently content to sit back and watch as the mutos meet up in San Francisco. The nuke doesn't even get there till the mutos have already trashed the place!
  • As soon as the Russian sub got stolen, all the other nuclear subs were probably ordered to GTFO. Besides, the nuke that was used had to be retrofitted with a clockwork timer, so that the timer wouldn't get hit by the EMP. Its doubtful that a nuclear submarine would have such a device on it. And third, they needed to get both Mutos near the bomb, and the female one started out in Nevada, and might not even be able to swim.
  • I understand the issue with the timer, but you could still use a nuclear sub to lure the mutos away from San Francisco while you rig up the clockwork bomb. In fact you could use several subs, getting the mutos to go this way and that way without ever catching anything.
  • Given the male caught and devoured a Russian submarine with apparently very little effort, the MUTOs are fantastic swimmers. Deploying more submarines would just be giving them more food.
  • We see Godzilla cruising at a steady thirty-plus knots when the Saratoga is pacing him, before he pours on the gas and leaves the escort fleet behind. Assuming the MUTO can match that, the only submarine ever put into service that could even stand a chance of outrunning that would be the Alfa class at flank speed, and they were all decommissioned in 1996. Subs aren't designed to be fast, they're designed to be quiet, and against a creature that can apparently sense radiation from hundreds of miles away or farther, that's pointless. Risking a multi-billion dollar ship to buy an uncertain amount of time against an enemy that's already proven capable of taking out a submarine would be a waste.

Time Dissonance

• The bomb is set for an hour and a half and visually begins counting down before being taken by the MUTO. Brody walks in on a briefing for a HALO jump and ends up taking part in it, so afterwards he and the team get up in the air, get their gear together and make the jump, land, find the bomb and climb down to it, and find about 20 minutes are left. And they still have time to get the bomb out of the crater, onto a boat and get attacked by the female MUTO. And Brody still manages- with EMP difficulty- to get the boat out to a safe distance (that really isn't a safe distance for a multi-megaton nuclear bomb, but that's another story). No way any of that adds up- the bomb should have exploded before they even got in the air.

Nearby nuke

• A nuke goes off near San Francisco. How close is it, exactly? Well, we put it on an (ordinary) boat and sent it west with about 5 minutes on the timer. This is a multi-megaton bomb. Wouldn't the city be bathed in nuclear fallout? Shouldn't everybody be running for their lives at the end, instead of hanging around in the open air?
  • Godzilla also feeds on radiation, he likely soaked up whatever radiation made it that far.
  • Radiation is not the primary concern. There's the physical blast, which will break every window in the city and knock that helicopter out of the air, and the heat, which will cause third degree burns on every bit of exposed skin within miles.
  • A boat not specifically designed for high speed will generally have trouble going faster than about 30 knots. That puts the bomb less than three miles offshore.
  • Quite simply. San Francisco should be a radioactive crater.
    • To be entirely fair, it's already a giant-monster crater.
  • So it's a case of No Endor Holocaust, then.
  • I will admit to knowing very little about how nuclear weapons work, but it occurs to me that it's possible the eggs possibly had depleted the radioactive material within the nuke already. The only thing that detonated were the explosives.
  • That might be what the film was going for, but in that case, the film doesn't know how nuclear weapons work either (though admittedly, that's pretty evident from the rest of the film). Its the nuclear material that causes the explosion, and the size of the blast is clearly nuke-level. Watch Terminator 2 for what that would actually do to people, then imagine that any survivors will slowly and painfully die from radiation poisoning.
  • Even if the blast was far enough away that it didn't cause heat or overpressure damage, and assuming that Godzilla absorbed the radiation and all the radioactive by-products that would have contaminated the water, there's still the case of the nuclear tsunami that should have turned San Francisco into a wading pool.

A predator who doesn't eat

• They say that Godzilla is an "apex predator", and the mutos are his prey. But after he goes through all the trouble of killing the mutos, he doesn't bother to eat them. (Ok, he falls unconscious at first. But even after he wakes up, he just goes back to the sea.) What's the point of killing your prey if you're not going to eat it? That's what being a predator is all about.
  • Sometimes pet cats kill mice without eating them. They often present the mouse to their owner instead.
  • Yeah, but a pet cat has plenty of food regardless. Is that true of Godzilla?
  • Maybe Godzilla considers the mutos to be rival predators, rather than prey. Maybe he doesn't eat them because he can't digest them. But he kills them regardless because they feed on the same prey species and he wants to have all the prey to himself. (I assume that this hypothetical prey species was highly radioactive, and is no longer found on the surface. But Godzilla's instincts still kick in.)
  • I agree with this. Given we first find the mutos in a Godzilla corpse they're likely more competition/threat than actual prey. Territorial instincts kicked in once he became aware of them.
  • Serizawa suggested that Godzilla's species now dwells deep underwater and feeds off radiation from the Earth's core. Assuming this is true, he may already have been fully "fed" and charged up before surfacing to fight. As for why he attacks the Mutos without provocation, perhaps the Muto species used to attack Godzilla's to feed off their radioactive corpses. That would make this more of a pre-emptive strike to kill the Mutos before they come for him, or breed enough numbers to be an unbeatable threat.
  • 'Apex predator' does not necessarily mean that a species eats other predators; it can also mean that a species that actively eliminates or drives other predators out of its range. An example would be lions vs. hyenas. Lions don't eat hyenas, but according to this article lions are responsible for up to 60% of the deaths of hyenas in the wild, because the lions don't want the competition.
  • While the drone was buried under a building and therefore difficult to get to, the queen was killed in the water. Godzilla was last seen heading into the water. Simple explanation is that he was going after her corpse for a meal.
  • She's bigger too, and already cooked!
  • Godzilla's actions are those of a competing predator rather than a predator- roaring and aggressive displays, persistent attacking, and, as mentioned, not eating the carcasses. There's little doubt that they're competing.

Why EMPs?

• Perhaps I missed something but why did the MUTOs fire off electromagnetic pulses? it isn't shown to do jack to biological systems such as animals to kill, distract, whatever.
  • The MUTOs used electromagnetism to communicate with each other over long distances. The fact that it could be used as a weapon against human tech was entirely fortuitous for them.
  • The Mutos are part of a long gone ecosystem. Their EMPs may have been a defense measure against some other predator of theirs that is now extinct.
  • It could be that the EMP attack is a byproduct instead of the actual attack. Like the MUTO is actually doing a Shockwave Stomp or blinding attack, and the mechanism for it causes the EMP.
  • There doesn't seem to be any pattern in their EMP discharge. For all we know about their bizarre biology, it could be the equivalent of a MUTO fart or burp as they process the radiation.
  • As it turns out, the EMPs are indeed a defensive measure; they’re capable of disabling the atomic breath. Hence why Godzilla only used it twice; he physically couldn’t!

How does the MUTO life cycle work, anyway?

• The female has already produced a clutch (batch? brood?) of eggs before even meeting up with the male. He doesn't seem to do anything to fertilize them, and they appear to have living embryos already inside. It doesn't seem like she even needs him; what is the male's purpose in the MUTO species? I know, I'm asking a lot, looking for logic in a world faced with giant radiation-eating bugs from another eon, but still...
  • Fertilization probably happened off-screen. She put the eggs down, he...uh...'woke' them up and went off to do whatever. Giant monster sex, even implied, would have pushed the movie rating up.
  • He means how the female already had fertilized eggs when attacking the train carrying the bomb, a day before it even met the male Muto.
  • They may not be actually fertilized. They could be unfertilized eggs, the kind we usually eat for breakfast.
  • But there are clearly fetal creatures inside the eggs, moving around as if live and growing.
  • I think the male's purpose was pretty clear. The female would guard the nest while the male would fly away and look for delicious radioactive material for their kids.
  • Well, they may be fertilized but dormant. Meeting the male who brings food was probably the trigger for their further development. Note that when they met he handed her a nuke, which she promptly pressed against the eggs.

Warner Bros. or Universal

• I don't know the exact details, nor am I an expert when it comes to movie rights and producing, but Legendary Pictures and Warner Bros. made a deal years ago about producing a certain number movies for a certain amount of time. Godzilla is going to be the last movie these two companies produce together, after which Legendary Pictures will start up a new, similar deal with Universal to start producing movies together. It's also been confirmed that not one, but two Godzilla sequels are planned. My question is, since Legendary and Warner Bros. more or less parted ways, will the sequels be produced by Universal and Legendary Pictures? Will Warner Bros. just produce the sequels by themselves? Or will Legendary and Warner Bros. still produce the sequels together?
  • In Hollywood, as in many other areas, almost any issues can be resolved if you're willing to throw enough money at them.

Unprepared Bomb Disposal Team

• Wouldn't it have been wise for the bomb disposal team to bring a crowbar (or some other forcible entry tool) just in case the bomb casing was damaged and had to be forced open (a likely scenario considering how MUTO handled it), and for that matter wouldn't it have been less time consuming to just search the rubble for something straight and metal (e.g. a piece of rebar) and use that to pry open the casing?
  • Additionally, hadn't they just opened the bomb (while it was still hanging from the nest) to check how much time was left on the timer?
  • No, they looked at the timer through a plexiglass window in the hatch cover. The hatch cover itself was jammed shut.
  • What's particularly odd is Brody had something he could have used to pry open the cover - when he was getting the boat moving, he used a big boat hook to push the tug away from the pier. It would have been unwieldy, but entirely possible to wedge open the cover with that.
  • He's been pretty bashed up and is pretty significantly injured, dazed and exhausted by that point, in total fairness; he probably only feels up to the relatively simple mental / physical action of "push boat with hook" than the comparatively more fiddly, intensive and time-consuming activity of using an 'unwieldy' boat hook to lever open a cover that's been pretty well and truly jammed shut by that point.
  • Also, it's a bit blink and you miss it, but when pushing the boat away he staggers and accidentally drops the boat hook into the water. He may have been intending to use the boat hook to try and jimmy open the cover while the boat was moving away, but also wanted to get the boat as far away from land as possible just in case he was unable to succeed in doing so before the timer ran out. Unfortunately, he dropped the hook; there goes that plan.

Why wouldn't it work?

• The Male MUTO was killed by being impaled on a building from Godzilla's tail swipe. Meaning a combination of blunt force trauma and being pierced (maybe through vital spots). However, the blast from the nuke, especially considering that it was far stronger than the ones used on Godzilla, would have put out a blast wave whose kinetic force would literally be incomparably higher than either or both of those. It would never have survived.
  • On a similar note, the Femuto was killed when thermonuclear fire was poured down its gullet. The bomb would have shot that same fire through every crack in its body. It wouldn't have survived either.
    • Not quite; Godzilla's atomic breath is a concentrated jet of thermonuclear fire and energy (and one which, it's not hard to surmise is several orders of magnitude more powerful than even the most powerful nuclear explosion), but the blast from a nuclear explosion would be distributed over a wider area. For comparison's sake, picture being hit with a jet of water from a hose with the "jet" setting on, versus being hit with that same water from a hose with the "cloud / sprinkler" function on. Same water, but the former is concentrated, whereas the latter is dispersed, making the former more painful.
  • Finally, Godzilla was at the very least hurt by the physical blows of the MUTO couple. The shockwave would have been like ten thousand times that force smacking every inch of his body all at the same time. Even if he survived the heat and initial shockwave, he'd definitely have massive internal bleeding. I doubt he'd have woken up.
  • Godzilla and the Mutos were made of similar materials. You can break anything by beating it against itself.
  • To head off a couple arguments ahead of time, the initial nuke used in the backstory was a kilo-ton warhead. The intensity is literally a thousand times greater in a mega-ton warhead. Imagine being slapped. It hurts but you don't die. Now imagine that force multiplied one thousand times. You wouldn't have a head anymore.
  • Except, Castle Bravo wasn't in the kilo-ton range. It was substantially more powerful than that. Something the military strangely did not know. If Godzilla survived that at point blank range, the bomb may have killed the MUTO, but certainly not him.
  • The military not knowing the yield of Castle Bravo was probably because the filmmakers failed to keep their nukes straight. They go from showing scenes implying the Operation Castle test site on the surface of bikini atoll to showing the mushroom cloud generated by the underwater baker test from Operation Crossroads (Which is odd, since archival footage from Operation Castle certainly exists). Together with the dialogue from the military later in the film, the sequence implies the filmmakers confused the 21 kiloton devices used in operation Crossroads in '47 for the 15 megaton device used for the bravo shot in '54.
  • I'm inclined to think that the bomb used on Godzilla really was just in the kiloton range, but the reported yield was falsified so that Monarch could conduct further operations in the area or explain away damage caused by Godzilla beforehand. The DVD extras state that the entire "nuclear test" was a wholly Monarch-run operation.
  • Alternatively, the admiral's dismissal of primitive nukes was both a Genius Bonus and a tie into the film's running theme of man's arrogance, in which he assumed they would still be able to kill the monsters, despite a quick history look revealing that they would have almost certainly survived.
  • It should perhaps be noted that the main proponents of the "it won't work" theory that we see are a Japanese scientist who has a clear personal connection to Hiroshima and the former's protege. That the former might have an instinctive and viscerally negative reaction to the use of nuclear weapons is hardly unlikely, and the latter would naturally be sympathetic to her mentor's views and inclined to support him. The possibility that it could have worked exists, but it would have been hugely destructive and events overtook them anyway.

The Shield Doors in Janjira

• I admit I do not know how real nuclear power plants and their safety regulations work, but I have to say... Is there really only one set of "blast doors," and at the very entrance of the hallway? Shouldn't there be, like, a set of doors every twenty feet or so, just in case there is a reactor failure or meltdown or something? Wouldn't they want as many chances for workers to escape and as much protection against any leaked radiation as possible? Sandra was running like the wind and never even came close to reaching the doors, even if she hadn't tripped. That seems ridiculously, needlessly unsafe.
  • As someone who has worked in a naval nuclear power plant, that whole scene was just painful to watch. Especially the "Outrun the steam explosion" and then somehow just kinda dying outside the door so he could see it. In real life, they would have never made it anyway close to the blast door if they had to run that far, because a steam line rupture can fill a space and kill in seconds. They would have been a set of steam burned corpses long before they reached the door. It seems pretty obvious the idea of researching nuclear power wasn't involved in the production, which is incredibly odd considering how much time they spent with the Navy (who operate quite a few nuclear reactors with a very good safety record) to make it. Not to mention the fact that Wikipedia research on steam explosions/accidents doesn't take very long.

Landing Craft

• The plan was to detonate the nuke off the coast, but they armed while it was floating off the coast of Oakland on a landing craft filled with men, surrounded by many other landing craft with no apparent objective (and which never get mentioned again). Why didn't they wait until they were out to sea before arming? Why were there so many men on the boat, and why would they put it on that craft in the first place? What were all the other landing craft for?
  • Charitable guess: they were essentially panicking and throwing everything they had lying around at Godzilla, whether it would be of any obvious use or not. (see "SWAT team guys in Honolulu trying to take down a skyscraper-sized monster with 9mm ammo"). Ruthless guess: they're guessing that Godzilla, being an animal, cannot tell one ship type from another and are using the landing craft as decoys to try and keep him from killing the battleships first.

The case of the missing tsunami

• How is it that Godzilla exiting the water in Honolulu generated a tsunami but entering the San Francisco bay generated little more than boat wake?
  • As noted on the Fridge page, after Honolulu, Godzilla is shown emerging or entering the water at a much more sedate pace, thus causing a much gentler displacement rate.

Predator vs. Parasite/Rival, and no backup?

• Okay, so, Dr. Serizawa advocates using Godzilla to defeat the Mutos because they are natural enemies. But somehow, the naturalist never stops to consider that these Mutos hatched from eggs found inside the fossilised carcass of another Godzilla? And, thusly, these may well be the parasitic wasps to Godzilla's spider, and so Godzilla's victory is not "naturally" assured? This is made even more egregious because we see how this pays off in the film; if Ford hadn't provided a distraction at a key moment by torching the Muto nest, causing them to separate when they had Godzilla on the ropes, the Mutos would have killed Godzilla. Nature takes no sides, and these creatures were clearly more evenly matched than Serizawa made them sound, thus making his "pro-nature aesop" even more clumsy in execution.
  • They literally have nothing else to throw at it. The MUTOs have taken everything the military could possibly throw at them none the worse for the wear and inflicted massive causalities in return. They're not even 100% sure nukes will work, because we saw Godzilla survive several when they tried to kill it in the 50's without a scratch. They're backing Godzilla because it's the only thing that might work to stop them.
  • Serisawa's guess isn't exactly without merit - Godzilla himself is hunting down the MUTOs. If he was not a predator, he'd not travel half across the pacific the moment he hears them calling to one another. Tarantulas don't set out on journeys to kill Wasps. So Serisawa figures Godzilla knows something, or at least his species is driven to hunt down the MUTOs which would then indicate it's actually capable of doing so. Because otherwise Godzilla would've stayed at the bottom of the ocean.
  • Another factor is we don't know HOW the Mutos ended up inside that carcass. Maybe that Godzilla died of natural causes, maybe the got inside it like many parasites and killed it during their incubation, maybe something else killed it and they were implanted in it, maybe more than two were required to do that. Serisawa just knows they were in the corpse, not HOW they got there. Combined with the fact Godzilla is actively hunting them down, he has every reason to think that Godzilla can kill the two adults. Which to a degree IS true: individually neither MUTO is any match at all for Godzilla and any time he got either of them one on one, he was winning.
  • Did Serizawa ever even claim that the fossilized carcass was that of an adult Godzilla? Could be that MUTOs attacked juveniles when they had the chance to eliminate them, same as many herbivores will stomp baby carnivores into a wet stain in the dirt if they find them unguarded.

Planes, Trains, and MUTO-mobiles

• So, they don't transport the nukes via an aircraft of some kind because it might get taken out by the MUTOs' electromagnetic pulses, and thus they use the train. But then, once the MUTOs steal the nuke and start fighting Godzilla, they send soldiers in to retrieve the nuke... via HALO Jump...
  • The train was to carry the bomb to the nearby base in Oakland. We don't know how they were going to get the bomb from the base into San Francisco proper (the MUTOs having obligingly taken care of that problem themselves), but presumably it wasn't going to be by train. And the reason the bombs were being transported overland across country is because if the MUTO destroys the train, the bombs can be recovered from the wreck; if the MUTO knocks down the plane while its in the air, the bombs will likely not be in useable condition after a 30,000 foot fall in addition to the simple difficulty of finding them again. As for the HALO jump in the movie, they were willing to take the risk at that point because if they do nothing then San Francisco dies in nuclear fire; it is expressly said in-dialogue that the demolitions team is essentially on a suicide mission.
  • But if airplanes can fly high enough to be out of range of the EMPs in order to do a HALO Jump, then why couldn't they just do that to deliver the nukes? They mostly seemed to be worried about the Female MUTO at that point - She was fairly slow and lumbering and on a set path to San Francisco, it's not like they wouldn't have been able to figure out a way around her (and presumably any aircraft that would've been used to deliver the missiles would've been fast enough to beat the Female to the city). It just seems to me they would've been able to deliver the nukes via the air without too much to worry about.
  • Airplanes can fly high enough to be out of range of the EMPs when the MUTO is sitting on the ground, and even then the aircraft has to fly pretty much at the upper end of its range. If the flying MUTO can get so much as 20,000 feet in the air (which it easily can), its EMP range is able to knock down the aircraft even at its maximum cruising altitude. This is a risk you can be willing to take when its only for a short time and you know the MUTO is sitting in its nest. It is not a risk you can take when your aircraft needs hours and hours of safe flight time and yo have no idea where the MUTO is, only that its flying around here somewhere.

Golden Gate Bridge Integrity

• Can the Golden Gate Bridge (or any suspension bridge for that matter) still stand after having one of its main cables severed?
  • Yes actually. This is a case of Reality Is Unrealistic, most big bridges are design to handle that. After all it would be shitty construction done if an entire bridge were to fail just because one cable snap when their are hundreds more holding the weight of the bridge.
  • I was referring to the two larger cables that run the full length of the bridge, not the smaller cables that hang from them. One of them was severed by a missile, but the bridge still held until Godzilla smashed through it.
  • Severing one of the two main cables as was done would cause the deck to pitch immediately and collapse. All sections would lose their support, and the bridge would fall apart almost instantaneously. No one cared about basic physics on that one.

Eggs or Spores?

• At the beginning of the movie the two MUTO spores are found in the fossilized remains of Adam, and it makes sense to put the spores in the corpse of a Godzilla-like monster since there is most likely a lot of radiation stored up for the offspring to eat upon hatching. However, later on we see an nest of dozens, if not hundreds, of MUTO eggs, not spores. This raises a whole host of questions, like where the spores in the beginning came from? Why aren't they eggs like we see later, or vice versa and why aren't the eggs spores? And why were there only two spores in the first place instead of a whole clutch?
  • Some creatures have more than one mode of reproduction and development they use depending on the circumstances. Additionally, some, particularly parasites, go through various radically different phases of development. The MUTO are indicated to be some type of parasite, at least in their early stages, and to have presumably killed a prehistoric godzilla after burrowing into its flesh (explaining why the godzilla species kills the MUTO whenever it can, to prevent future parasite stages from being born). Perhaps their life cycle starts as an egg, which hatches into a parasitic form that finds a host kaiju and after feeding for a while turns into a dormant spore form from which the next stage (the gigantic reproductive form) eventually emerges when conditions are right.
  • That seems to be the implication in the film: the MUTOs need to soak up a lot of radiation to metamorphose from a larval form into an adult form. The Godzilla carcass buried under the Earth for a zillion years didn't have enough radiation in it to complete that process, apparently, so they MUTOs only finished their metamorphosis when the male was left in the Janjira plant and the female was left in a mountain full of radioactive waste.
  • Maybe Serizawa's mastery of English isn't 100%, and he'd been thinking in terms of "pupa" but his imperfect grasp of the language kept tossing out "spore" instead. The MUTOs do resemble insects, after all.

Open Air Containment Facility Whomst?

• Ok so, I rewatched the film and noticed that the Monarch containment facility in Janjira is open to the fucking sky. You can clearly see this when the electrified wires swing out into place. Why? Any idiot on Google Maps could be scrolling across Japan and see the giant eldritch-looking cocoon in the ruins of the nuclear facility. Frankly, I'm surprised Joe Brody didn't try that. And even though the containment facility predates Google Maps by five years, that doesn't excuse Monarch being idiots yet again. What if (as would eventually be true) whatever was in the cocoon could fly? It could escape in an instant, which it did. Why not build a dome over the cocoon, say it's to help contain the nonexistant radiation?
  • Same reason you can't use Google Maps for other kinds of spying. Governments and even private citizens can request areas be blurred out. Monarch was able to quarantine an entire city area for fifteen years without anyone figuring out it wasn't radioactive. Blurring out the reactor, if not the entire quarantine zone, under the guise of discouraging people from trying to explore or such would be easy compared to that. Building a dome of that size strong enough to keep something in would be ridiculously expensive... and the MUTO would have taken maybe an extra second or two to break out of it, like an eggshell. They were counting on killing it before it hatched.

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