Thanks to Camazotz's actions in the graphic novel Kingdom Kong, Skull Island is permanently enveloped in a Perpetual Storm made from the island's own storm barrier and a leftover superstorm of Ghidorah; by the movie's start, it's wiped out all the humans on the island sans Monarch and Jia, every beast big enough to compromise the bio-dome is implicitly gone, and it's likely (outright confirmed in the novelization) that all the remaining plant life and any remaining fauna is condemned to die and fade away slowly amidst the new conditionsnote The island's trees visibly haven't died off yet, even though it's been one to three years since the storm settled over the island. Now let's backtrack to Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019). If Ghidorah hadn't been stopped, then what's happened to Skull Island in this movie could've been the fate of every landmass on Earth, even without the other Titans speeding up the destruction.
Godzilla going on a rampage is the worst-case scenario for humanity. The King of the Monsters has traveled worldwide, leaving ruin in his wake. Now that the MUTOs and King Ghidorah are gone, no other Titan can ever challenge him. Godzilla's rampage in civilian areas (that have not been evacuated) in general is terrifying, a deliberate reminder despite being generally considered a hero for the most part, this Godzilla is a walking natural disaster when provoked just like his villainous (or at the very least antagonistic) Japanese counterparts.
Godzilla is utterly unstoppable against the US Navy battle group escorting Kong. In real life, that'd be enough firepower to end a conflict just by threatening to show up. Here, frigates, Aegis cruisers, an Iowa-class battleship, and F-35 fighters fall in terrifyingly quick succession while missiles, depth charges, and battleship main gun rounds all bounce off him. Only quick thinking on Lind and Andrews' part got him to back off by making him think they weren't a threat anymore. The truly terrifying thing is that all that was an afterthought for Godzilla - he was trying to get Kong, and they were just in the way; after Kong briefly gets the upper hand, in his mind, Kong must be incapacitated, or even killed, and it doesn't matter how many humans are slain for him to achieve his goal. It's no wonder Mark is so scared of Godzilla going rogue.
In their first battle, Godzilla drags Kong underwater, threatening to drown him, and Kong's frantic struggles for breath can drive home a major case of thalassophobia for those with a fear of drowning. It takes depth charges detonated all around for Godzilla to release his grasp.
Even Kong gets his share of nightmarish moments, notably in the aircraft carrier fight where he flings jet fighters at Godzilla as weapons. With people still inside of them, though, fortunately, the pilots manage to bail out before their planes impact Godzilla's body.
It's revealed that APEX has been genetically altering and cloning Titans to use as test subjects for Mechagodzilla. Since humans now have such immeasurable power, what other unnatural monstrosities could arise from such technology?
Ren Serizawa is this in spades. The estranged son of Dr. Serizawa, Monarch's own Godzilla expert, he's joined APEX in protest of his father's ideals and is responsible for the creation of Mechagodzilla, as he believes that all the Titans must be either destroyed or put in chains as mankind deserves to reign the planet uncontested, in a dark juxtaposition of his father's rhetoric of mutual symbiosis with the Titans.
There's something inherently distressing about how Ren is so obsessed with killing someone his father sacrificed his own life to save. It is never fully explained whether it's due to him blaming Godzilla for his father's demise.
The sheer sadistic glee he gets at demonstrating Mechagodzilla's power. Even for a Skullcrawler, it's a little too much: he uses Mecha G's arms to pull the struggling, shrieking Skullcrawler apart as he slowly roasts it alive with Mecha G's atomic breath, all the while ecstatic like a child with a new toy, or pulling off the legs of a bug.
The death of the Skullcrawler in general. It effortlessly gets hoisted up and has its arms pulled tight on opposite ends. The subsequent atomic breath, instead of blasting inside and incinerating the organs like before, proceeds to go a step further by blasting through its mouth's roof until it comes out through the brain. Not done yet, Mechagodzilla proceeds to lower his head while still using the breath, effectively very slowly sawing and pulling the corpse in half. It immediately cuts to the protagonists who saw this first-hand jumping into a nearby bunker, where the windows are immediately splashed with the Skullcrawler's blood and organs. All this carnage happens in just a minute. The kicker? You realize that these tests are only rehearsals for the real target, Godzilla himself. Imagine him suffering that same fate. Yikes.
When Ren first sees Ghidorah's skull, he refers to it as love at first sight. Given how Ghidorah's consciousness still exists inside its remains, who is to say that Ghidorah did not influence Ren's actions while piloting Mechagodzilla?
Walter Simmons himself is a terrifyingly reality-grounded brand of Nightmare Fuel, being an ordinary-seeming man who exhibits the telltale signs of narcissistic and antisocial personality disorder whilst having no apparent Freudian Excuse: he positively thrives off of manipulating other people like pieces on a chessboard, has no empathy for nor remorse over the millions of people whom he intentionally endangers, he knows how to superficially fake compassion as a manipulation tactic (with the dead look in his eyes when manipulating Nathan Lind giving away that it's all an act), and he has no apparent meaningful emotional connections to anyone, not even his daughter. The truly scary thing? There are people just like Walter Simmons in real life, and just like Simmons' rather unassuming appearance, they could be anyone, anywhere, and they can blend in a crowd. We can only take comfort in knowing that not all of them are in major positions of power through which they can change the world for the worse, like Simmons.
You thought Skull Island was bad? Well, it was just a small sample of the nasty things the Hollow Earth has in store, such as Hellhawks (basically the Leafwings but far more bloodthirsty), the Warbats, which are giant cobra-like serpents with hoods big enough to use as wings, and the Skullcrawlers return as well: as big as Ramarak and colored an ominous red (And even then, one such giant Hollow Earth Skullcrawler stands no chance against Mechagodzilla). And this is just what we see on a short trip on one specific path, given how massive the Hollow Earth is, there's no telling what else is living there.
Narm Charm aside, Godzilla giving a Slasher Smile and what sounds like a low, evil cackle as he singes Kong in the back with his Atomic Breath can be a bit unnerving, especially in light of how this is easily the most expression any Godzilla has shown on screen due in part to the emphasis and lack of ambiguity that makes Godzilla look just a bitsadistic.
Godzilla's entire Beam Spam is a horrifying moment. Kong is forced to run to avoid getting burned, and from the look on his face, we can see he's afraid.
Godzilla holds back on Kong for most of the film, merely trying to drive him away so he can track down Ghidorah's signal. But after Kong presses his Berserk Button one too many times and manages to trounce him during the first act of the fight in Hong Kong, Godzilla goes feral, knocks Kong's axe away, gets down on all fours, and lunges and snaps at him with an almost crocodilian ferocity like never before. He utterly throws Kong around like a rag doll and for one brief moment looks like he's about to finish him off...then roars in his face and departs, almost as if to say, "If I wanted it, you'd be dead already."
What makes Godzilla on all fours all the more terrifying is that when you initially look at him, you would think it would be physically impossible. The bear-like ferocity (the Godzilla in the Monsterverse is partly designed after Grizzly bears) and crocodilian speed put that to rest almost immediately.
Scarier than that is that ultimately, for a bit, Godzilla's savage Curb-Stomp Battle in the final round on Kong does briefly KILL the giant ape as the sheer physical trauma that Godzilla caused makes Kong go into cardiac arrest, which would have ended him had he not been resuscitated at the last moment by the detonation of the hovercraft's antigravity core to give him a jolt to restart his heart. Even if Godzilla didn't go in for the kill himself, his sheer strength nearly does Kong in anyways. It's absolutely frightening the damage, even unintentionally, that Big G can do when sufficiently pissed thefuckoff.
For that matter, all Kong can do the entire time is run. It looked like he might have had Godzilla on the ropes until Godzilla bit, threw him off, and dislocated his shoulder. From then on, all Kong could do was run, Godzilla's relentless assault not giving him enough time to get on his feet before leaping onto the ape, clawing up his chest, and pinning him underfoot. Kong stayed defiant and punched Godzilla in the wound left by the axe, which just made him angrier and prompted him to bring his giant foot down a second time.
Godzilla's atomic breath is powerful enough to punch a hole to the Hollow Earth if he powers it up enough. This video estimates that such a feat would require a force at least 1800 times that of the Tsar Bomba (a 58 megaton nuclear bomb - the largest ever detonated). Imagine what it could have done to Kong if Godzilla wasn't as merciful...
And even with such power, Mechagodzilla's atomic breath is still far stronger. It leaves a nasty burn on Godzilla's nigh-impenetrable hide, which is all the more frightening given that not even a point-blank nuke could hurt him.note To be fair to Godzilla, he wasn't in the best condition since he was fresh off from his fight with Kong, where he also used the atomic breath multiple times against him.
In Wikizilla's Kaiju Profile video on Mechagodzilla, it is revealed through a Japanese theater program that Mechagodzilla's Proton Screamnote The official name for his beam attack comes in at a whopping 758 petajoules of energy, and that's the lower calculation!note Other facts and statements do imply this is more likely the most accurate since Word of God states that had Godzilla not been at half-strength from fighting Kong, he would have done better and might have even won against Mechagodzilla; the energy of the Proton Scream comes out to 181 megatons, whilst the Atomic Breath is 104 megatons - not to hard to imagine Godzilla struggling but ultimately overcoming the gap since it's not even a times two difference. Furthermore, he still had energy for the Atomic Breath left to use against Kong after drilling to Hollow Earth, so the Proton Scream may have been matched or even overpowered by Godzilla's full-powered Breath This is mainly because of the wonky way the equations for the beam's energy level are written, without any exponents;note '4.10 x 1080 Joules (12 to the 16th power)' formatting the second equation correctly comes out to 758 petajoules, but the first equation equals out as being around 100 billion times the mass-energy equivalent of the entire observable universe. For some comparisons, the Tsar Bomba's energy yield was a mere 210 petajoules, while the third explosion during the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 is estimated to have been in the range of 840 petajoules. That's right, Mechagodzilla's Proton Scream is so powerful that it utterly dwarfs any other weapon humans have created and isn't far off from ranking among the strongest energy releases the Earth has ever produced!
Mechagodzilla finally returns to his villainous roots in this film, and what's worse is that the mecha is possessed by the dreaded King Ghidorah. He is an unstoppable engine of mass destruction armed with plasma arm cannons, an entire armory's worth of missile launchers all over him, a semi-autonomous drill tail disturbingly reminiscent of that of Shin Godzilla, and a red atomic breath far more powerful than Godzilla's own. His design is also quite disturbing, with a skull-like face reminiscent of the Terminator, glowing red eyes, and long, gangly arms that make him look uncannily human-like. Most unsettling, however, is the fact that his cockpit was fashioned out of Ghidorah's skull; and at times, Mechagodzilla makes some eerily Ghidorah-like sounds, giving a sinister implication of whose mind is really in command when Mechagodzilla goes rogue...
Mechagodzilla's awakening is pretty disturbing, with him motionless in the APEX hangar, and then suddenly, he short-circuits a bit, and to everyone's horror, he slowly begins to move on his own as Ghidorah's brain takes control...and he slowly sneaks behind the APEX command center, where the organization's leader, Simmons, fails to notice until it's too late. Ren Serizawa is also electrocuted to death in the Ghidorah skull cockpit, as the camera zeroes in on Mechagodzilla's eyes flickering blue and red, signifying the return of who else...
Ren's death is even worse in the novelization: rather than being electrocuted, Ghidorah's consciousness essentially devours his entire mind and being.
Crossing into tearjerker territory, Ren's last thought before Ghidorah's consciousness devours his mind is a vision of his father, whom he refers to as Daddy.
One especially harrowing scene is Mecha G pinning Godzilla down to the ground after throwing him around, and for the first time in the series, Godzilla is visibly afraid. He helplessly gazes up at the machine with Mechagodzilla's visage reflected in his eye, and then Mechagodzilla grabs his head, pries his jaws open, and seems fully prepared to finish Godzilla off with his very own Kiss of Death...
The worst part is how utterly sadistic he is. He has every bit of the ounce of strength needed to finish Godzilla quickly, but instead, he takes his time beating him senselessly and taking him apart, clearly relishing in his newfound dominance compared to before. While it does, like last time, result in his demise due to Godzilla still being alive to help Kong kill him, it makes you wonder: if the least intelligent of Ghidorah's heads were capable of this kind of sadism, how bad would Godzilla have had it if it was Ni, or worse, Ichi, who was in control?
Given Ghidorah's decentralized nervous system that can recreate the minds and personalities of lost and severed heads...what if this indeed is Ichi's mind, remembering everything Godzilla did to him?
Or perhaps just as bad: what if Kevin was the most evil of the three heads, only restrained by Ichi's dominance, and now that he has free reins to his own body, he can finally run rampant with nobody to hold him back?
According to Word of God and the novelization, it's actually more nightmarish. It's not a specific head in control. According to Adam Wingard, Mechagodzilla's consciousness is a completely new personality formed when what's left of Ghidorah combined with the original AI. The novelization makes it clear that Mechagodzilla doesn't know who or what it is, and implies that just coming into existence drove it insane, describing it as "full of rage and the black joy of finally being".
Mechagodzilla again starts to brutalize Godzilla even if he's teamed up with Kong. Kong spots his axe in the rubble and uses it on the Mecha, from that moment onward, it seems like Kong is starting to gain the upper hand. After landing one sweep blow that floors Mechagodzilla, Kong raises his weapon for another attack, but Mechagodzilla instantly interrupts him with a rapid swipe of his tail and punts him into a building. His tail arcs behind himself and launches the tip of it, but Kong grabs it in time... only for it to start rotating like a drill, and it slowly starts to inch closer and closer to Kong's cheek as he has a panicked expression glued on his face. The next shot is another close-up of Mechagodzilla's face, with a disturbing gaze of murderous intent as his eyes are vividly glowing. What's even more frightening is that it's Kevin displaying his level of sadism lurking inside of the literal killing machine. The last time he was this vicious was when he excitedly started biting Godzilla's neck by slurping the radiation out of him like a kaiju vampire.
Consider everything from Ghidorah's perspective: Having been reawakened from your icy tomb after centuries of slumber, you reengage your hated enemy and come close to destroying him forever, only for in your hubris, suffering a definitive and humiliating defeat. Then you are resurrected, but not by your own doing, not with your mind, and not in your form - by creatures so small they barely register as ants to you, to use you as a puppet to fight their meaningless battles and, to top it off, in a form that mimics the very thing that destroyed you. No one deserves a Fate Worse than Death more than Ghidorah, but seeing all that, it's understandable why he's even more bloodthirsty than usual.
On that topic, there's the fact it immediately goes for Simmons when Ghidorah takes over. Given it's been previously established Ghidorah was smart enough to recognize and go after individual humans (Madison in the last film), it's possible it knows Simmons is the one responsible for its new form - and given all that's mentioned above, it isn't happy about that. The novelization confirms this line of thinking, focusing on the "one that believed they controlled it" immediately after its new consciousness emerges.
One frightening factor: both times Godzilla's drawn to attack, Mechagodzilla's eye is flickering actively in the same way with the same sound, completely independent of Apex. The second time, it's after Ren has powered down Mechagodzilla and is just talking to Walter...It's very possible Ghidorah was already awake and biding his time, waiting for Mechagodzilla to be completed.
Mechagodzilla's entrance into Hong Kong. He blasts out of Apex's facility, sending chunks of rock into buildings. Once he emerges, he promptly blasts rows of buildings to dust simply because he can.
Made worse is when he lets loose the Proton Scream on the ground below, you hear people screaming. And it seems Mecha G is specifically aiming for them.
After laying waste to Hong Kong, Mechagodzilla jerks its head towards Godzilla before emitting three deep, reverberating tones. An Evil Laugh? Or is Mecha-G directly calling out Godzilla by name, one syllable at a time? Either way, both scenarios bring up many implications that are downright chilling to comprehend.
Something about this shot is much worse. Mechagodzilla is not staring at Godzilla. He's staring at YOU!
One more frightening aspect is that Ghidorah's had his body completely incinerated, and all that remains of him is a skull and some neurons... and he's still not dead and able to become a threat again. It gives the feeling that Godzilla didn't go to such extreme overkill last time just because he was angry, but because nothing less than complete obliteration can kill King Ghidorah period.
One Fridge Logic raised by fans was why Ghidorah's severed middle head was still alive and needed Godzilla "smoking the dragon blunt" to destroy him for good, but the head recovered from Isla del Mara seemed dead. Given this movie, it becomes that Ghidorah's remaining head was not completely dead — it was just unconscious or at most undead all along, and with enough energy, Ghidorah's consciousness comes back from the dead, even after the severed head has been further reduced to just an upper skull.
And at the end of the movie, Mechagodzilla is destroyed by the combined efforts of Godzilla and Kong: but Ghidorah's skull, in APEX's hangar and not in the machine, is still alive and intact. Could it hint at a potential return, especially given his extreme regenerative capacity?
The novel further supports the notion that Mechagodzilla is just as capable of taking command and ordering the Titans as Ghidorah, and had he killed Kong and Godzilla, he would've resumed exactly where King Ghidorah left off... only this time, with both Godzilla and Kong dead there would be absolutely nothing capable of stopping him again.
While some have complained that Mechagodzilla's design is somewhat lacking in this film, we can all agree that this version feels more robotic than previous versions. The way it slowly starts up, the artificial, mechanized sounds it makes when it moves, and even how its 'voice' sounds so unnatural and machine-like. Despite Ghidorah's skull controlling it, it's clear this thing is truly soulless. A heartless killing machine built to do only one thing and designed to do it very well.
There's also the real likelihood that if Ghidorah is still kicking even after this crushing defeat, Kong will soon be in serious trouble. Because if what's left of Ghidorah remembers Godzilla killing him the first time around to the point that he really lets him have it when they reunite, then it's extremely likely that Kong himself is now sharing a special spot on Ghidorah's shitlist, right next to the big G himself, for being the one to put him down the second time. And if the above possibility of him fully regenerating back to his former glory is correct, then Kong will be in for one hell of an uphill fight.
In the novelization, both Mark Russell and head honcho Director Guillerman respond to Mechagodzilla's mass-murdering emergence and the realization that Apex was responsible for Godzilla's rampage all along by wondering aloud whether they should be rooting for Godzilla or Mechagodzilla (this comes after Mechagodzilla has not only confirmed with its mere existence that Mark and Guillerman were right to suspect Apex of being the bad guys but also after the Mecha has established it's far worse and much more like Ghidorah than Godzilla has ever been by blasting several city blocks for no other reason than because it could). How scary is knowing that the organization in charge of monitoring the Kaiju and helping mankind to balance the world's fate effectively is being run by these two dunderheads?
For bonus points, this film establishes that Mark's Break the Haughty in Godzilla: King of the Monsters didn't last and that he didn't internalize much of anything from the previous film, so it seems unlikely that he's going to learn anything following the events of this film either in the future.
When the Skullcrawler appears within the hangar, Josh and Bernie immediately run for safety; Madison initially freezes before running. The novelization reveals Mark had Madison see a therapist who diagnosed her with PTSD from her traumatic experiences with Jonah and Ghidorah in King of the Monsters. Madison wants to run, but something in her brain isn't letting her; she thinks the Skullcrawler won't chase a moving target. She even flashbacks to when Ghidorah hunted her in Fenway Park. It takes Bernie shouting at Madison to snap her back to her senses.
estimates that such a feat would require a force at least 1800 times that of the Tsar Bomba (a 58 megaton nuclear bomb - the largest ever detonated). Imagine what it could have done to Kong if Godzilla wasn't as merciful...