Monsterverse

Godzilla (2014)
Legendary Pictures
Director: Gareth Edwards
Also discussed: Kong: Skull Island (2017), Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019), Godzilla vs Kong (2021), Monarch: Legacy of Monsters (2023-present), Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (2024).

Reminder: This blog contains plot spoilers. Read on at your own risk!

As early as 2003, Banno Yoshimitsu had asked Toho to license him to make a short Godzilla film for IMAX 3-D exhibition. Yes, the Banno Yoshimitsu who’d directed Godzilla vs Hedorah (1971), the man who’d been banned from ever directing a Godzilla movie again by Toho producer Tanaka Tomoyuki. But Tanaka had died in 1997, and Banno wasn’t asking to direct a full cinematic feature, just a short visual spectacle. Admittedly, the first couple of Toho’s Millennium series Godzilla movies had underperformed at the box office – perhaps an experiment in the flashy medium of IMAX 3-D cinema would drum up some interest? And Banno’s audio-visual work for the 1970 World’s Fair, which had brought him to Toho’s attention in the first place, might still justify giving him this gig.

Banno’s IMAX film never did get made, but in the process of touting for financial backing, Banno’s colleagues in America made contact with Legendary Pictures in 2009. Legendary instead decided to get the English-language film rights to Godzilla from Toho and make a full-length feature themselves. Although Banno died in 2017, Legendary continue to credit him as an executive producer on their Godzilla film and TV projects, in recognition of the part he played in making it all possible.

When discussing their Godzilla (G2014) in the years between its first announcement and its release, representatives of Legendary and those working on the film explicitly contrasted it with the 1998 Tri-Star movie. This production would take Godzilla back to his roots as a personified force of nature rather than just a big animal; he would fight other monsters and not merely be a problem for the military to mop up; the design, although realised through CGI, would be closer to that of the original costume (and motion capture would add to the sensation of watching an actor’s performance). The script went through a succession of hands, each writer aiming to find some contemporary thematic resonance for Godzilla. (They eventually settled on that perennial favourite, humanity vs nature.) The US Army were also consulted to help shore up the film’s verisimilitude, although this came at a price: no allusion could be made to the 1945 atomic bombings of Japan. Godzilla’s origins were rethought accordingly – now he would be a pre-existing, ancient creature and America’s nuclear weapons tests in the Pacific during the 1950s, far from creating the modern menace and reminding everyone of America’s wartime aggression, would be presented as a noble but failed attempt to destroy the creature for the good of humanity.

Gareth Edwards was brought on board as the director. Like Guillermo del Toro, who was working on Pacific Rim (2013) at the same time for the same production company, Edwards was a self-confessed fan of Godzilla. He’d achieved fame and won awards for his debut, writing and directing Monsters (2010), a low-key Cloverfield (2008)-inflected film with a surprisingly low budget that featured a combination of home office CG effects and guerilla location filming in Central America. G2014 was his big American studio breakthrough.

A brief summary (because I really don’t feel like cluttering this blog post with multiple full synopses, and besides, there isn’t very much plot to cover):

The opening credits sequence spells out, through judicious use of archive footage and new material, that the Castle Bravo atomic bomb test on Bikini Atoll in 1954 was really an attack by the American military on Godzilla (or at least, a creature the viewer is highly likely to recognise as Godzilla), masterminded by a covert organisation called Monarch. (Incidentally, I love these opening credits, which present the details of cast and crew as if they’re a series of extracts from redacted documents, in keeping with the “secret history” vibe of the visuals.)

In 1999, two representatives of Monarch visit the site of a collapsed uranium mine in the Philippines and find evidence that a large, unknown creature has hatched and made its way out of a subterranean cavity to the sea. Seismograph readings trace the creature’s path from the Philippines to Japan, where a violent tremor destabilises the Janjira nuclear power plant. (Note: there is no Janjira in Japan.) Joe Brody, an American supervisor at the facility, is obliged to seal his wife and a team of technicians inside the reactor to prevent a larger catastrophe as the core melts down.

In 2014, Joe’s son Ford is a lieutenant in the US Navy. Ford and Joe investigate the cordoned-off Janjira facility, which is being monitored by Monarch. Inside the reactor core, an enormous, pulsing chrysalis has absorbed all the radiation. Joe is fatally injured when a creature emerges from the chrysalis and tears its way out of what’s left of the facility. (It looks like a kind of elongated, angular bat with extra limbs.) The US Navy, under the authority of Admiral Stenz, tracks the creature with the assistance of Monarch, who refer to it as a Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism, or MUTO. Electromagnetic and echolocation readings taken by Monarch – and, secretly, by Joe Brody – suggest that the MUTO was communicating with another creature. Godzilla confronts the MUTO in Honolulu, but only stalls it. The creature is actually heading for a rendezvous with a second MUTO, which has appeared in Nevada. (Godzilla does, as promised, look very much like the classic Godzilla. He’s a lot chunkier around the neck and torso, though - which, in fairness, he should be given how tall he is.)

As Godzilla and the two MUTOs converge on San Francisco Bay, Admiral Stenz authorises the use of nuclear warheads against the creature. The military reasons that modern warheads, being much larger than those available in 1954, will be effective in killing the monsters, notwithstanding the human cost. Rather than being deployed aerially, the warheads are moved into position by road but are eaten by the female MUTO. The male MUTO intercepts the Navy’s backup warhead and offers it to the female as a mating gift. The citizens of San Francisco are directed to take shelter in the subway.

With the last nuclear warhead now seen as a threat to the city and not a weapon against the MUTOs, a team including Ford Brody is dropped in by HALO insertion to locate and disarm it. Despite Admiral Stenz’s efforts, Dr Serizawa of Monarch believes the best course of action is to let the monsters fight. While Godzilla distracts the MUTOs, the team find the warhead in a nest full of MUTO eggs and move it out to a boat so that it can be (more) safely detonated at sea. Ford douses the MUTO nest with petrol and burns it. Godzilla destroys the MUTOs using his breath ray (which may or may not be radioactive but which looks much as it did in his early film appearances) and collapses, exhausted. Ford is reunited with his wife and son the next day at a sports stadium where the survivors have gathered. Godzilla, to public applause and the acclamation of the news media, gets up and wades back out to sea.

G2014 is competent in all the ways Godzilla (1998) wasn’t. That it deflects Godzilla’s origins away from America’s post-war nuclear weapons tests and doesn’t offer an alternative origin is a necessary evil imposed by the circumstances of its scripting. But in hindsight, this leaves valuable narrative wiggle room for its sequels and so proves to be a virtue. In all other key respects, it does just about everything you’d expect from a Godzilla movie.

The monsters of G2014 are in the Japanese tradition, not only a force of nature in themselves but also tapping into our anxiety over contemporary real-world disasters. Scenes of a tsunami washing ashore in Honolulu and the displaced citizens of San Francisco crowding the city’s ruined streets could have been lifted straight from news coverage of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake. The resulting damage to the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, meanwhile, is clearly echoed (albeit time-shifted back a decade) in the nuclear reactor breach seen near the start of the film. When Dr Serizawa tells a frustrated Admiral Stenz to “let them fight”, sure, he might as well have said “f*** the plot”, but his words also tie in with this theme of the film. Desperate but unable to intervene against the barely comprehensible forces that threaten to overwhelm them, the human characters are obliged to simply ride it out and hope for the best.

A lot of the heavy lifting on the acting front is done by Ken Watanabe as the teasingly named Dr Serizawa and Sally Hawkins as his Monarch colleague Dr Graham. The two of them do much to sell the idea of Godzilla as a vast, terrifying force that could equally inspire awe and admiration. Watanabe had starred in the Japan-set historical dramas The Last Samurai (2003) and Unforgiven (2013) and Christopher Nolan’s smash hit Inception (2010). Relevantly to this film, he spent time in 2011 raising awareness of, and funds for the survivors of, the Tōhoku disaster. Hawkins had mostly appeared in British films up to this point, and starred in a 2007 ITV adaptation of Jane Austen’s Persuasion. She would make a bigger impact in Hollywood as the star of Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water (2017). Bryan Cranston and Juliette Binoche start the movie off well but are surprisingly thrown away as Ford’s parents. David Strathairn is in his element as the poker-faced Admiral Stenz. Most amusingly among the cast, Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Elizabeth Olsen are fine but unremarkable as the romantic leads, Ford and his wife Elle, but within a year would be playing a superpowered brother and sister in Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015).

Rewind. In 2005, New Zealand superstar director/producer/scriptwriter Peter Jackson, fresh from his success with the big screen adaptation of the Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001-03), released an over-indulgent three-hour remake of King Kong (1933). This was a pet project of Jackson’s, and he certainly allowed himself free rein with it. Nearly a decade later, around the time he was adapting Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1937) as a film trilogy (2012-14), Jackson apparently considered producing a Kong sequel to be directed by Adam Wingard. Alas, he was too late – Legendary Pictures had negotiated with the rights holder and now had a Kong movie on their schedule. Although he wouldn’t end up directing Legendary’s Kong movie, Wingard would go on to direct both Godzilla vs Kong and Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire for them.

Once they’d secured the rights to use both Godzilla and Kong, Legendary decided to pivot from producing one-off monster movies to creating a shared cinematic universe. To that end, they switched the distribution of Kong: Skull Island (KSI) from Universal Pictures, who had distributed Jackson’s 2005 film, to Warner Bros, who distributed G2014. Plans for the shared universe were formally announced in 2015, with a Godzilla sequel and the inevitable clash between Godzilla and Kong both pencilled in. The name “Monsterverse” was revealed a couple of years later, shortly ahead of the release of KSI.

Shared universes were all the rage, but they weren’t anything new. The Marvel Cinematic Universe was entering its third phase by this point, churning out films based on superheroes who’d been crossing over into each other’s comic books for several decades, and DC were about to attempt something similar. Universal Pictures were planning to launch a “Dark Universe” for their classic Gothic monsters, spearheaded by the Tom Cruise film The Mummy (2017), but it was dead on arrival. (Perhaps its thunder had been stolen by The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003), the extremely loose adaptation of Alan Moore’s and Kevin O’Neill’s comic book, which presented a similar set of characters alongside other protagonists of 19th-century literature?) Universal had already been there and done that, though, in films like Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943), House of Dracula (1945) and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948). Toho had arguably created a Monsterverse of their own when they crossed Mothra and Rodan into Godzilla’s series of movies (both in 1964). There was even precedent (in 1962) for Godzilla and King Kong co-starring in the same film.

Legendary would have more luck with their giant monster rematch than Universal had with their attempted monster mash.

In 1973, the US Army’s “Sky Devils” helicopter squadron is demobilised from Vietnam as part of America’s withdrawal from the Vietnam War. The squadron’s commander, Lt Colonel Packard, is ordered to take his team on a research mission to Skull Island, which has just been brought to America’s attention by the recently begun Landsat global satellite imaging programme. The mission will be led by Bill Randa, a cryptozoologist and agent of Monarch, which at this time appears to be struggling for funding and support from the US government. In Vietnam, the mission also picks up British mercenary and tracker James Conrad and anti-war journalist Mason Weaver.

The expedition arrives at Skull Island and the helicopters crews pummel it with seismic bombs – Monarch hopes not only to map the island but also to test the possibility that it might hide an entrance to a kind of “Hollow Earth” from which giant monsters might emerge and in which they might otherwise evade detection. The bombing does in fact flush out an ape the size of a tower block, which quickly swats the helicopters out of the sky, as well as several other gigantic creatures. Forced to trek through the island’s dense jungle, the surviving members of the expedition meet the indigenous people and an American airman called Hank Marlow. Marlow parachuted onto Skull Island in the latter part of the Second World War after a dogfight with a Japanese pilot; the pair were taken in by the island’s inhabitants, the Iwi, and became friends, although the Japanese pilot was later killed by one of the giant creatures that roam the island. The Iwi worship the giant ape, Kong, who protects them from the other creatures, the most feared of which are a species of two-limbed wyrm that Hank calls “Skullcrawlers”.

Marlow is keen to take this opportunity to return home, and leads the survivors across the island. More of the soldiers are picked off by strange animals along the way, including by a Skullcrawler which also kills Randa. An increasingly deranged Packard wants to kill Kong with the expedition’s remaining supplies of napalm and seismic bombs as revenge for the deaths of his men; Marlow argues against this as it would allow the Skullcrawlers to run unchecked over the island; Conrad and Weaver meanwhile have a couple of close encounters with Kong that show them his gentle side. Packard succeeds in stunning Kong with the napalm but is killed in an ensuing clash between Kong and a Skullcrawler that Marlow calls “the Big One” before he can set off the explosives. The Skullcrawler bests Kong and pursues the other humans, who are aiming for an agreed extraction point at the north of the island. As they reach it the next morning, Kong reappears and kills the Skullcrawler, enabling Marlow, Conrad, Weaver and the surviving Monarch personnel to get away. Marlow is reunited with his family in America, while Conrad and Weaver are detained and debriefed by Monarch.

For me, KSI is the best instalment in the Monsterverse franchise purely because it’s the one that’s most clearly about something. And you don’t have to reach very far to grasp what it’s about, because it’s right there on the screen: the Vietnam War. Or rather, it’s about drawing the broadest possible parallels with the Vietnam War to in turn draw parallels with current affairs.

At the time KSI was being made, the US Army was caught up in prolonged military deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq, in a situation reminiscent of Vietnam: frustrated by territory it wasn’t comfortable with, facing an enemy that wouldn’t engage it on its own terms, and losing popular support back home. Instead of armed insurgents (which the movie teases us with very briefly before revealing that the Iwi are peaceful), KSI has Kong standing in as the spectre of a particularly American anxiety, the unwinnable war.

(Say it with me: “Viet Kong”. I don’t know that this thought crossed the mind of anyone involved in scripting KSI, but I strongly suspect it.)

Beyond this, KSI is an entertaining bit of shlock with admitted flaws. The thematic links to the Vietnam War are driven home by a couple of direct visual references to Apocalypse Now (1979). Moreover, the characters Conrad and Marlow are clearly named after the author and protagonist of Heart of Darkness (1899), the book that inspired Apocalypse Now. The use of the pre-existing Māori word “iwi” (“tribe”/”people”) as a name for the fictional Skull Islanders is questionable. The editing is choppy, making it hard at times to tell whether any given shot follows on from the previous one or establishes a new scene. The cast is the most stellar of any movie in the Monsterverse franchise – and frankly, they’re wasted on underwritten parts. Samuel L Jackson deserved better than the one-note Lt Col Packard. Tom Hiddleston and Brie Larson deserved better than the paper-thin stock characters of Conrad and Weaver. (It’s a fair reflection on the calibre of the characterisation in KSI to say that all three of those actors have been better served even by their appearances in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.) Character actor John C Reilly steals every scene he’s in as Marlow. The big surprise is John Goodman as Bill Randa, who seems to be taking the film more seriously than anyone else involved.

Godzilla: King of the Monsters (GKotM) and Godzilla vs Kong (GvsK) followed, both delayed by a year from their planned release dates. I’d like to say that the Monsterverse started to take shape with these two movies, but they pulled in such different directions, it would be hard to say exactly what that shape was. In hindsight, they feel more like tentative moves in possible directions, and it’s only with the more recent release of Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (GxK) that the true shape of the Monsterverse has become clear.

After the levity of old-school adventure romp Kong: Skull Island, GKotM feels like a move back towards and straight through the grimmer tone and washed-out colour palette of G2014. Following the events of the 2014 film, in which the world at large learns of the existence of Godzilla and other giant creatures, an eco-terrorist organisation infiltrates Monarch to find out more. (Unlike real-world “eco-terrorists”, who tend to commit acts of sabotage against environmentally destructive corporations, this group looks more like an actual paramilitary terrorist organisation, some of whose motives are environmental.) They conclude that the creatures Monarch has dubbed “Titans” are a kind of planetary immune system.

(Note: there appears to be a distinction between Titans and the 2014 film’s MUTOs, rather than a straightforward retcon of one term with the other. MUTOs, which would seem to include the outsized inhabitants of Skull Island, are vulnerable to manmade weapons and are just really big animals. Titans, which may include some extra-large exemplars of MUTOs, are only vulnerable to other Titans and, according to GKotM, possess quasi-magical abilities to shape or repair the Earth’s ecosystem.)

Monarch has located several dormant Titans around the world; the infiltrators plan to defrost one of these so that it can counter the environmental threat posed by humanity. Unfortunately, they pick Ghidorah, designated Monster Zero, whose origins are extraterrestrial and whose effect on the environment is purely harmful. Ghidorah emits a signal that wakes up all the other Titans and forces most of them to submit to his dominance; only Godzilla and Mothra are unaffected. A full-on apocalypse ensues, but eventually Godzilla kills Ghidorah and the other Titans accept him as their leader instead. Material displayed during the end credits suggests that the subdued Titans are indeed repairing the damage done to the planet.

Set five years after GKotM, GvsK takes a sharp turn into more colourful, knockabout, popcorn territory. Monarch has set up a kind of stealth biome around Skull Island to keep Kong safely hidden from Godzilla – they’re concerned that the two might see each other as rival alpha males and fight each other. (Spoiler alert: entire premise of the film.) A storm has ravaged the island and wiped out the Iwi, with the sole exception of a deaf girl who is able to communicate with Kong through sign language. Monarch is working with Apex Cybernetics, a corporation that has developed the technology needed for humans to access and explore the Hollow Earth (as posited in KSI) but has also secretly constructed Mechagodzilla, a bionic weapon that incorporates one of Ghidorah’s skulls as a neural control mechanism. Apex has ostensibly created Mechagodzilla to secure a place for humanity in a world now dominated by Titans, but actually plans to use it to exterminate the Titans and seize world domination for themselves.

Godzilla and Kong inevitably clash, and it is established once and for all that Godzilla is the tougher monster. Apex then dispatches Mechagodzilla to take out Godzilla, but it develops a fault and is possessed by the consciousness of the deceased Ghidorah. (Yes, just like a poor knock-off of Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla (2002)!) Revived by Monarch and persuaded by his young Iwi friend, Kong steps in to help Godzilla and the pair together destroy Mechagodzilla. Having reached a détente, they go their separate ways, Godzilla to patrol the surface world and Kong to take up residence in the Hollow Earth.

The problem with GKotM might be that it’s trying too hard to do too much. It certainly trowels on the portentousness (or is pretentiousness the word?). It makes a naked appeal to Toho fans with an excess of nostalgic references: there’s Ghidorah, Rodan, Mothra, twin Monarch scientists played by Zhang Ziyi who loosely echo the Shobijin, even an Oxygen Destroyer (which here is a highly destructive weapon that doesn’t actually kill any daikaiju). But none of these really feels up to the standard of their earlier incarnations. Ghidorah is OK, Mothra isn’t mystical enough, Rodan is a bit rubbish. The eco-terrorists (led by Charles Dance, who’s always good for a villainous role) aren’t adequately explained and, after what looks like a set-up for their return in the next film, they’re never heard from again. The suggestion that the Titans, terrifying agents of nature’s wrath, might actually offer a magical solution to the ecological problems we’ve caused is a weird little twist of wish fulfilment. The most remarkable thing about GKotM might be that it’s the first feature film credit for Millie Bobby Brown, star of the Netflix series Stranger Things (2016-present).

GvsK, by contrast, has one job to do and sticks to it, taking in a colourful diversion with Kong through the Monsterverse’s Hollow Earth along the way. It makes hardly any demands of its audience. As a way of stitching KSI into the Monsterverse, it serves well enough. It’s a shame that, with KSI having appropriated the word “iwi” to name Kong’s island people, GvsK writes them out off-screen and reduces them to a single Kong Whisperer (but chin up, a community of telepathic super-Iwi will turn up in the Hollow Earth in GxK). For viewers in New Zealand, there’s the added appeal of seeing Julian Dennison, star of Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016), who had already made his Hollywood debut in Deadpool 2 (2018).

GKotM was not only the longest of the Monsterverse movies, clocking in at nearly two-and-a-quarter hours, but also reportedly the most expensive. It was also the worst performing, in terms of its global box office takings, its critical reviews and popular response (according to rottentomatoes.com). It managed to be both too superficial for the critics and too tiring for cinema audiences. GvsK showed a significant uptick on all three fronts – the financial, the critical and the popular. With their licence to use Godzilla renewed, Legendary doubled down on GvsK’s formula with GxK, which might reasonably be referred to as “At Home with the Kongs”. It reaped the rewards, showing easily the highest financial return for the lowest production budget of the series. The ticket sales don’t lie – the public have made their preference clear. Any further sequels (and at time of writing, one has been scheduled for 2027) can be expected to be cast from much the same mould.

In between GvsK and GxK, Legendary Pictures added a TV series to the Monsterverse. They’d worked with several streaming platforms on other series, but chose Apple TV+ as their streaming partner for Monarch: Legacy of Monsters. (Technically this was the Monsterverse’s second TV series – just five months earlier, Legendary had placed an animated Kong series with Netflix. But more on that in three blog posts’ time.) Ordinarily I’d be sceptical about any film or series of films that needed a TV series to explain itself, but here the division of narrative labour works well – the movies get to continue being plot-light showy blockbusters while the TV series gets to spend the necessary time (and less money) on character work and world-building to simultaneously bolster the movies and offer something other than pure spectacle.

The first series of Monarch fills in some of the space between G2014 and GKotM while also detailing some of the secretive organisation’s history. Hiroshi Randa, a Monarch agent and the adopted son of Bill Randa (as played in KSI by John Goodman), goes missing in San Francisco after Godzilla’s showdown with the MUTOs. While trying to tie up his estate, his daughter Cate discovers that he had another family in Japan and, with her half-brother Kentaro, tracks down a retired Colonel Lee Shaw who can help them learn more about what he was up to. Flashbacks to the 1950s show how Shaw, Bill Randa and Hiroshi’s widowed mother Keiko Miura (A scientist called Miura! A classic Toho reference!) formed Monarch with the patronage of the US Army following their own Titan-related experiences. Cate’s and Kentaro’s quest also turns up signs of the Titan apocalypse that’s forthcoming in GKotM, which Shaw wants to try to avert.

Clearly the series’ budget won’t cover scenes in the Technicolour Hollow Earth of the Monsterverse movies, but it can stretch to a spooky forest. And so Monarch presents us with a shadowy space between the surface and the Hollow Earth which the characters refer to as Axis Mundi. It’s suggested that the Hollow Earth is not literally a space inside the Earth where gravity behaves differently but is another world entirely, accessed via Axis Mundi or similar gateways. This doesn’t line up 100% with what we’re shown in GvsK, where for instance Godzilla is able to blast a channel directly down from the surface to Kong’s simian Fortress of Solitude in the Hollow Earth. There’s no suggestion in GvsK that there’s anything but rock between the two worlds. (But perhaps the world of the Monsterverse contains some conventional large underground spaces as well?) As far as the suspension of disbelief is concerned, though, I think Monarch’s version works a lot better. The revelation that time passes differently in Axis Mundi (and possibly in the Hollow Earth?) requires a further stretch, but offers a possible explanation beyond plain immortality of how the same monsters can keep turning up across the ages. (And of how Kurt Russell can play a character as old as the one he’s playing, which is more to the point.)

The world-building may raise as many questions as it answers, but there are some good background touches that hint at a world adapting to the presence of giant monsters. The "Massive Organisms Approaching" PA alerts and TV adverts for personal monster bunkers for rich middle-class families are particularly nice. And the character work is solid enough. The big draw among the cast is action superstar Kurt Russell as the older, retired Shaw and Russell’s own son Wyatt as Shaw in the 1950s. Anna Sawai also does a fine job as Cate – she went on the next year to win plaudits for her starring role in the remake of Shōgun (2024). As a series, Monarch’s remit is only a little above pulp adventure, but there are moments when it reaches for more: the title sequence hints at a theme of duality, most obviously expressed in Hiroshi Randa’s double life and in the double-dealing of Kentaro’s friend May.

As far as Godzilla is concerned, he‘s already gone from threat-slash-defender (G2014) to alpha nature-avatar (GKotM) to Kong’s grouchy cop/buddy-movie partner (GvsK). Now Monarch seems to want to recast him as a kind of dimensional policeman, patrolling the boundaries between Earth and Hollow Earth to keep the Titans on one side of the divide and the series’ human protagonists on the other. This development isn’t exactly reflected in GxK, and no doubt Monarch’s second series and any future movies will offer other possible interpretations. But perhaps it’s best not to overthink it.