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by Alyssa Charpentier

“Nothing is so strong as gentleness, nothing so gentle as real strength,” remarked Francis de Sales. This seemingly contradictory adage finds a home not only in the 16th century but also in female movie characters from the Japanese Godzilla series. The Godzilla saga, which celebrates its 70th birthday this year, features numerous inspiring women. Refer to “Gojira,” the 1954 original, for a glimpse at its first, Emiko Yamane (Momoko Kochi). Emiko's tender heart shines in her caregiving for the film's wounded and her convictions that compel scientist Daisuke Serizawa to use his apocalyptic Oxygen Destroyer device against Godzilla. Noriko Oishi (Minami Hamabe) is the franchise's most recent figure of female endurance in “Godzilla Minus One” (2023): she courageously rears a small child—not even her own—following postwar Japan's devastation while living with an emotionally tortured, disgraced young Kamikaze who doesn't intend to marry her (a precarious...

Even before I’d seen a single Godzilla movie, I knew Mechagodzilla was my favorite damn thing in the entire franchise. Because really, how could it not be? Regardless of its incarnation, Mechagodzilla is still a giant robot shaped like a monster. There are few things in entertainment that are quite that perfect, and it seems that pop culture agrees. Mechagodzilla has become something of a series icon, up there with King Ghidorah and Mothra as one of the most recognizable non-Godzilla kaiju in the franchise. Yet all legends have to start somewhere, and for Mechagodzilla, it was in the fourteenth film of the franchise, Jun Fukuda’s aptly titled Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla (1974).

Taking place presumably sometime after the previous year’s Godzilla vs. Megalon (although continuity was never the Showa series’ high point), Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla takes place in a Japan already rocked by monster attacks, with a...