Editor’s note: Magnificence of Mechagodzilla will be a series of opinion pieces by Falcon News writer Tobias Thompson. All opinions expressed herein are solely of the writer and not that of Falcon News.
Monsterverse Mechagodzilla is such a sight to see for all fans, new and old. A love letter to all other Mechagodzillas of the past, its so wonderful, so interesting, and truly a gift to the Monsterverse. The fandom does not appreciate their gifts, as there’s many posts, many blogs, and many people saying that Godzilla, M.U.T.O Prime, The Iron Giant, and others beat him (all of which he would destroy). All the downplay and the disrespect it faces.
Now, I’m here to tell people about the beauty of Mechagodzilla (MG), starting with:
Part 1: The Power
Let’s start with the obvious, like other eras where MG is one of, if not the strongest in the verse, Mechagodzilla is easily the #1 strongest character in the Monsterverse at base (Monster Zero beats Mechagodzilla but only because of its abilities).
The “Godzilla Vs. Kong” Japanese theater program says Mechagodzilla’s Proton Scream has 14 x 1080 (12^16) [2.79545e+21] joules of power. The same program puts Godzilla’s Atomic Breath at 3.15 x 10^14 (3.15e+14) joules, making the Proton Scream 8,874,444.4̅ times the strength of the Atomic Breath. Using Vs Battles Wiki, that would bump him up to multi-continent level (attack potency of Godzilla’s breath x the difference of power between the proton scream and the atomic breath) and using Character Stats & Profiles Wiki (XSG Adrian), he’d be large planetary (same formula as before, but using a moon level Godzilla instead of a large island level) to dwarf star level (same formula using Gojiraman0123’s planet level Godzilla instead of moon level).
Mechagodzilla also nearly beat Godzilla and Kong while they were half the strength, which would mean he would equal at least one at full strength. However, the CS&P Wiki said that the director and designer said Godzilla is stronger than Mechagodzilla and that Godzilla couldn’t be overpowered by the Proton Scream.
Knowing what I know now, the creators are surprisingly wrong. “But they’re the creators, its confirmed.” Even though the director, Adam Wingard, is very biased against Mechagodzilla and it shows in his interview as he keeps saying “he thinks” that Godzilla would overpower the Proton Scream or be a match for Mechagodzilla, but every time he states this he keeps saying “I think.” This isn’t confirmation. Its his opinion. He even admits that Mechagodzilla is built to be better than Godzilla and that MG is one step ahead.
“We never expressly state that [whether or not Godzilla could win the beam clash], but that was my impression of it and I actually tried to avoid that moment because I didn’t want to give the impression that Mechagodzilla was just so powerful but ultimately that’s where it landed.”
Adam Wingard, Toho Kingdom Interview For “Godzilla Vs Kong”
He admits he didn’t want MG to be strong. All instances where Godzilla is stated to be stronger than or being able to beat Mechagodzilla, vague word choice is used as opposed to when it was said he can beat MUTO Prime or when GVK Godzilla was stated to be able to beat Ghidorah, using words like the aforementioned “I think” or “could” or “in my opinion” (although the person asking the question used “in your opinion”), its almost as if Wingard wants to say Godzilla beats Mechagodzilla, whether it’s true or not.
There’s one thing that he doesn’t know. MG will always prevail over even the highest power and triumph despite being destroyed over and over again, and thanks to the ultimately, Mechagodzilla still holds his title as the #1 in terms of pure power (except for maybe thermonuclear Godzilla).
With that out of the way, there are smaller ones, before the Hollow Earth energy, Mechagodzilla is powered by a Maser Power Core which has over 600 roentgens of radiation inside it (wall level by itself, using a roentgen to joules converter) and had a power output of 2.42 gigawatts (large building all by itself, higher since he effortlessly intercepted Number 10’s charge with one arm before he received his Hollow Earth energy would make his strength small city level without the energy using areas and simple multiplication, although his durability remains largely the same as post Hollow Earth energy so he’d be more of a tank prior).
There’s some more aspects of Mechagodzilla that contributes to power, but they will make more sense later on.
Part 2: The Design
“Tha-that’s Robotgodzilla!”
“No that’s… that’s Mechagodzilla.”
Bernie and Josh’s short exchange when Mechagodzilla was revealed.
I think I’m just mesmerized by modern version of characters, but the Monsterverse Mechagodzilla has one of the best designs of both the character and the Monsterverse in general, but it was that way from the start. Although there was a lot of concept art of him, the first revision is the one that the director and designer liked the most.
Lindsay MacGowan, Jared Krichevsky (who also worked on Ready Player One’s MG before), Darnell Isom, and Simon Weber of Legacy Effects worked on Mechagodzilla’s design, going through both revisions of the model we know now as well as different designs of it, which didn’t go all that well. They largely kept with the design they pretty much knew was the best one.
The design was based on many things: the T-800 from The Terminator movies, the classic and blocky Transformers, Mirror Hand Syndrome, chameleons, and more. But the most important (and the one we care about) is the love letter that is the design aspects coming from the Showa, Heisei, Millenium, and the Anime Trilogy Mechagodzillas.
All the other Mechagodzillas are put in this design in one way or another;
- The X’s on his arms and legs are a reference to the Showa Mechagodzilla’s Cross Attack Beam weapon, which has an X covering it
- The neck is based off of Kiryu’s neck and abdomen designs
- Although not a direct reference to Heisei Mechagodzilla, this one has a set of dorsal plates based on Mecha-King Ghidorah. MKG’s technology was reverse engineered to create the Heisei MG, so there is still a connection
- Keeps the trend among most Mechagodzillas where the dorsal plates are far smaller than Godzilla’s
There are even connections to older MG’s in his behavior and his official media. He is said to be coated in T-1 nanometal skeleton housing and the idea of Mechagodzilla being possessed by Ghidorah isn’t all that new a concept, as the Kodansha manga for GVMG2 shows Mecha-King Ghidorah regaining sentience and going blood lusted after Godzilla, nearly killing him. Similar to how the Monsterverse Mechagodzilla was in the end of GVK.
Part 3: The Secrets
Ever since he was leaked with this image here all the way to today, we are yet to figure out all of Mechagodzilla’s secrets and hidden questions, but for now we have a lot of them answered today, and these will blow your mind.
For one; his weight. Mechagodzilla’s weight is usually a largely known number in the other eras of Godzilla movies, but here, not even the Japanese theater program says anything about his weight. I’m pretty sure I’ve gotten it now.
There is a reoccurring pattern with (most) Mechagodzillas that they are at least 1.5x the weight of the in-verse Godzilla of the time, Showa Mechagodzilla is 2x heavier than 2nd generation Godzilla, the Heisei Mechagodzilla is 2.5x heavier than the Heisei Godzilla, Kiryu is heavier than the in-verse Godzilla, and the anime trilogy’s Mechagodzilla is 3x heavier than the in-verse Godzilla (at the time), so we can narrow it down.
Using all these as well as Godzilla’s weight (99,634 tons) I’ve made high to low end Mechagodzilla weight scales:
- Low end: 149,451 tons (would be the heaviest in the Monsterverse)
- Middle end: 199,268-249,085 tons (would be the heaviest Mechagodzilla ever)
- High end: 298,902 tons (would make him one of the heaviest Kaiju ever, only topped by those similar to SpaceGodzilla’s Flying State)
Now, although Mechagodzilla is slimmer than Godzilla, he is still far larger in other ways (big head, longer limbs, etc.) as well as the possibility of him being more physically dense due to him being made of T-1 Nanometal, which could be as dense as Godzilla is, being a fictional metal that you can’t put weight on to that level.
Knowing his weight, using the high-end of this weight and the fact he is comparable to Godzilla and Kong in speed without boosters, so with boosters, which depending on source, is >28,066 m/s to 80% SoL, Mechagodzilla would produce a force equivalent to 25,524,892 to 1,638,183,506,183,699 tons of TNT (25 megatons to 2 petatons) when he rams into Godzilla during the final fight, which would make it a mountain to continent level feat, possibly higher since he damaged Godzilla with the punch (using either of CS&B’s scaling).
You would not want to be Ren during the first test or at all, as although he experiences euphoria while controlling Mechagodzilla, he gets a bit too connected to Mechagodzilla during this time, as he not just feels euphoria, he does not just control Mechagodzilla, he is Mechagodzilla. However, while it shuts down, Ren feels like he is going to die, as it feels like his heart stops and his lungs cant take any air in, before returning back to normal when he realizes he is once again a small human made of flesh. When he reports to Simmons the only feeling he has that washes over is depression.
He also has some nasty bite, as its listed as having 7,400 pounds of force per square inch, or 51,021 kilopascals, though this may not seem like much, using the reference of Mechagodzilla being 400 feet tall and doing the closest I can do to pixel measurements, Mechagodzilla’s mouth is an estimated 45 feet long and 30 feet wide, making the area of his mouth 1,350 feet squared, making his full bite force around 826 gigapascals, or 119,880,000 pounds/59,940 tons of force. That is more than enough to break Godzilla’s bones, whose tensile strength is only 300 Mpa, or 2.2 times the tensile strength of a human femur. Mechagodzilla could break bones that would be 6,088.46733333 times the tensile strength of Godzilla’s bones. MG biting him would most likely mean endgame for Godzilla.
With that, there are many secret weapons he holds within, such as buzzsaws on his hands, drones, and the Maser Power Core, which i mentioned earlier. With the biggest star of the secret weapon show being the grinder inside of Mechagodzilla’s mouth, which makes his nightmarish bite all the more powerful. The Japanese theater program tells us a lot of things about Mechagodzilla, such as his Maser Power Core, full name of the A-74 Proton Scream, his height, his T-1 Nanometal skeleton housing, and the name of his control panel that operates him: Kuronuma Psionic V1.3, suggesting older versions of his operating system was designed for him.
But the Maser Power Core wasn’t the only way that Mechagodzilla was powered. In earlier scripts of Godzilla Vs Kong, it’s suggested that after Mechagodzilla executes a titan, its soul rises from the body in a sort of “death energy”, in which it is sucked into vents in the ceiling and put inside Mechagodzilla like a ghost battery. It has also been theorized that the rest of the corpse was put into the mecha similar to a military robot that was rumored to eat human/animal bodies, though, similar to the rumor, whether or not Mechagodzilla is powered by titan flesh is simply a theory and will probably stay like that.
Speaking of theories, although some aren’t great, like Matpat’s abomination of a Kong theory or when people used to think Mothra was going to be a villain (which, in fact, has never happened in any other movie), there is one that peaked my interest; Was Mechagodzilla created by alien technology? The theory calls out when Team Godzilla enters the Apex Facility and an announcement calls for a Maglev Shuttle departure heading to Roswell, New Mexico. A real world event took place there, where the Roswell Army Air Field found a crashed ship at that very place in 1947, first describing it as a flying disk before suddenly contradicting it, saying its just a weather balloon (everything is a weather balloon these days) leading people to believe it was a cover up. One of the conspiracy theories that were made because of this, and one was that the government had reverse engineered the alien technology to advance their weapons. I think you know where the theory goes from there, and it’s not too crazy for a person like Walter to try to use that sort of technology to help create projects such as the HEAVs and Mechagodzilla.
For the final secret of this section: The designer of Mechagodzilla has stated that Mechagodzilla cost Apex Cybernetics $3 trillion to build, which led me down a rabbit hole of energy consumption, railroad costs, yearly revenue, and now I can say that Apex is one of the richest companies in fiction in terms of yearly revenue, with their average income being anywhere from 600 billion a year (cost of Mechagodzilla’s construction divided by the 5 year time gap between in-verse 2019 And 2024) to 1 trillion dollars (same formula, but 3 year gap instead of 5 years which is the shortest realistic time) a year for Apex with Mechagodzilla alone, with around 300 million-1 billion extra from the HEAVs and the monorail that goes from Pensacola, Florida to Hong Kong, China. To put that into perspective, the low end is far more the yearly revenue of Iron Man (MCU)’s Stark Industries, Elon Musk’s net worth, Wayne Industries revenue and all of Apple’s cash and investments COMBINED (around $559,300,000,000). The high end could buy Apple 1428 times over ($700 billion) and Walt’s company was founded in 2014, around the same time as the events of the first movie, so the total earnings of the robotics company would be anywhere between 6-10 trillion as of 2024.
Part 4: The Implications (With The Future Of The Monsterverse And Composite Mechagodzilla)
In terms of the general Mechagodzillas, the Monsterverse is one of the most interesting on what he holds for the Monsterverse’s future, and what he holds for the most powerful Mechagodzilla: Composite.
Now For The Monsterverse.
Mechagodzilla’s introduction (and death) shows a new era within his universe, an era not of history, but of advanced technology, at least on Godzilla’s side of the story. But it goes far deeper than that. I can tell you exactly who the next villain of the Godzilla side of the Monsterverse is. The One Who Is Many is one more as of now, the new villain(s) are…
Ren Serizawa and Mechagodzilla 2.
“We have no idea how the energy source will affect the Mecha[godzilla]”
“Get in the goddamn chair”
Walter and Ren in their short argument when Godzilla responds to the axe.
Now, if you’ve watched the movie, you’d know Ren Serizawa is dead and say he can’t be the villain because of being the victim of an unplanned electric chair execution. And you’d be right, as the thing that called itself Ren is gone, but it had arrived, Kevin. In the novelization of Godzilla Vs Kong it states that Ren is dead, but his body is alive and well, with Ghidorah’s left head in control of both him and Mechagodzilla. Once MG is destroyed, Madison Russell runs to the remains of Ren’s control room, only to find “no sign of the pilot.”
But what does this mean, and why does it matter? Well, I think Ren (or more accurately, Ghidorah in the body of Ren) is coming back for another installment of Godzilla’s side of the Monsterverse. And Mechagodzilla may also follow.
Although synopses of the untitled Godzilla Vs Kong sequel does say that it focuses more on the history of the Titans, and on Kong with Godzilla more of a side character, Mechagodzilla, even if not in this, will most likely return for revenge, along with Ren, to fight Godzilla once again. Why would I make such a claim? Because its kind of already happened with Terror Of Mechagodzilla.
In the movie, Mechagodzilla is rebuilt by introduced members of the same aliens that built the original, now called Mechagodzilla 2, and with the help of Titanosaurus, he fought Godzilla again, being more powerful and having more weapons than before.
Mechagodzilla in the Monsterverse already shares many, many, many similarities to his Showa counterpart, as both:
- Were built in secret
- Have strangely made hands [on both arms]
- Emerge from a mountain
- Fight Godzilla and a haired monster
- Get in a beam clash with Godzilla
- Are defeated by getting their head ripped off
- Were used to frame Godzilla as an evil character when established good at the time
As things also connect to a level no other Mechagodzilla is truly at, as his OPERATING SYSTEM is named Kuronuma V1.3, named after the leader of the first Black Hole Planet 3 Alien invasion, Kuronuma. But Kuro is not exactly the leader of the BHP3 Aliens, as shown in his fear of headquarters getting angry over Mechagodzilla being damaged. Now with what I see with the similarities there could be a higher man who is above Walter. But who is above a CEO? Well no one really besides a chairman, but there is something that happens when a CEO dies. I had read into it (pushing all the sappy blah blah funeral stuff because our CEO was going to doom the planet) there’s a couple people who can replace old Walt: His children (dead), and his other family (not known, probably dead because this guy is 61). That’s when I was going to stop at this, no one can seem to succeed Walter, right? What about the headquarters thing?
What if Walt’s “headquarters” is either his chairman or his successor? And that successor will most likely be Ren, as both his and Ghidorah’s fixation with killing Godzilla could help him in building Mechagodzilla 2 and becoming the new CEO of Apex Cybernetics as killing Godzilla seems to be the goal of both him and Walter. It is also possible that is the general intent for Apex as a whole, as seemingly everyone who is not undercover seems to be in on creating Mechagodzilla in some way, shape or form. This is followed by how he doesn’t care about Walter, only about Mechagodzilla (He even sees Walt as a stepping stool, and describes him as a “chattering baboon”, he could see all of Apex as just a way to accomplish his goal),
Now for the biggest thing about this whole thing, the subject that made me want to analyze Monsterverse Mechagodzilla in the first place:
Composite Mechagodzilla
When I said that “There’s one more aspect of Mechagodzilla that contributes to power, but it’ll be more important later on than it is now,” this is now. Composite Mechagodzilla is the most powerful version of Mechagodzilla that will ever be regardless of how high others scale, as it is every other Mechagodzilla merged into one. With Comp MG there are many things that happen with his abilities merging together that make him scale far higher than his strongest versions. Immeasurable speed from Kiryu EVA-01/SRW Mechagodzilla/Robogodzilla + Nanometal from the Anime Trilogy Mechagodzilla/Mechagodzilla City, and other mixes like that, but there are nowhere near as many mixes of different abilities as with the Monsterverse Mechagodzilla, let me simplify two of the most important:
Mechagodzilla City’s AI + Monsterverse’s Learning Algorithims
In the B roll footage for Godzilla Vs Kong, Mechagodzilla is revealed to having learning algorithms, and paired with an already super genius intelligence (inventions/creations of a character need to be universe level or higher to be super genius, Comp MG’s Nanometal would be this by default since they are rescaled to the rest of Comp MG, as well as Mechagodzilla City creating an entire 14 kilometer diameter city with only a fraction of its A.I. active) would create what would be somewhat equivalent of an endless human mind, constantly learning which could put him at nigh-omniscient with this climbing intelligence, as well as being already 1 tier below nigh-omniscience before this climb.
Monster Strike’s Rage Power + Monsterverse’s Hatred And Rage
Two things I found while reading through the “Godzilla Vs Kong” novel was that Ren is a very sad character, and that Mechagodzilla’s rage scales higher than himself. When Ren was entering Mechagodzilla after the Hollow Earth’s energy he felt:
“Something was also entering him, a feedback loop between his own consciousness and the A.I. He felt a million years of rage rising in him, hatred that transcends time and space.”
Describing The Moments Before Ren’s Death In Godzilla Vs Kong.
If you don’t get it, that’s okay. I didn’t either, as being so angry your anger transcends time and space is pretty insane, but it’s simple to understand once you slow down. With the rage power of Monster Strike Mechagodzilla, it’s described as “The angrier Mechagodzilla gets, the stronger he gets,” which would directly add to Mechagodzilla’s feats of transcending space and time (Robogodzilla and SRW Mechagodzilla/Kiryu EVA-01 do this multiple times as well) if the transcendence directly translates from the hatred and anger to the rage power. If it doesn’t, it would multiply Mechagodzilla’s power by multiple infinities anyway.
Epilogue
Well, I did it. I have blessed this wonderful reader with the true beauty of Mechagodzilla, and I had squeezed out all of the information I can give. Maybe I’ll do this with other Mechagodzillas, but since this is one of my favorites I don’t know if it’s possible to make a post this long.
