Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack
(2001) Toho Studios Director: Kaneko Shūsuke, Kamiya Makoto (special
effects) Also known as: GMK, which has been widely adopted for
brevity’s sake.
Still looking for that elusive spark that would reignite the fortunes of the
Godzilla franchise, Toho turned to director Kaneko Shūsuke. This was a dream
assignment for Kaneko – he’d expressed an interest in directing a Godzilla
movie in the early 90s and been rebuffed. He’d then gone on to direct the
Heisei era Gamera trilogy for Daiei and kicked arse. He even got to co-write
the third one, and he’d get the chance to co-author GMK too. Toho had
distributed the Gamera trilogy through their cinemas and presumably couldn’t
help but notice their success. Could Kaneko do for them what he’d done for
Daiei?
Admiral Tachibana Taizō lectures a room full of JSDF recruits about the
one great challenge the JSDF has faced since its founding, Godzilla’s
attack in 1954. Godzilla was defeated and Japan has enjoyed peace since
then, but the JSDF needs to remain vigilant as monster sightings are
reported elsewhere in the world. He’s called away by a report of an
American nuclear submarine going missing near Guam. A Japanese submarine
dispatched to the scene finds the sunken vessel scored with claw marks,
and is itself broadsided by a briefly glimpsed creature with a familiar
set of dorsal plates.
In Niigata Prefecture, a team from the TV channel BS Digital Q is filming
a piece about a legendary kaiju that’s supposed to live on the foothills
of Mt Myōkō. (The “BS”, a standard TV channel prefix, stands for
“Broadcasting Satellite” and not for anything else we might cynically
think of.) As we’ll find out later, the journalist in front of the camera,
Yuri, is the daughter of Admiral Tachibana. The local mayor is upset by
the filming when he learns that BS Digital Q specialises in sensationalist
features about the paranormal, but Yuri persuades him that it’ll bring
tourists to the area. She thinks she sees an old man watching her from the
nearby trees, but he’s not there when she looks again.
That night, an earthquake in the area causes a road tunnel to collapse and
bury a gang of delinquent bikers who’ve destroyed a jizō statue (a small,
rounded, roadside shrine guardian). A truck driver who was driving behind
them sees the head of a large, toothy creature moving through the debris,
which he mistakes for Godzilla.
The next day, Yuri is upset that her editor won’t let her follow up the
story about the earthquake, and in particular the detail that the
epicentre was recorded as moving. A colleague, Takeda Mitsuaki, gives her
a book about legendary guardian monsters that he thinks has a bearing on
the event. Illustrations in the book show a three-headed dragon, a
large-eared reptilian creature and a moth.
That night, a party of drunken teenagers at Lake Ikeda remove another jizō
statue, apparently planning to steal it, and are set upon by an enormous
larva that emerges from the lake. (It’s easily recognised as a larval
Mothra.) This event and the one at Mt Myōkō seem to have been predicted by
the book, which suggests an incident at Mt Fuji will be next.
Yuri, Mitsuaki and one of their other colleagues visit the police station
at Motosu, at the foot of Mt Fuji and just next to the Aokigahara Forest.
The police have detained the old man Yuri saw at Mt Myōkō; apparently he
lives in the forest and warns passersby of Godzilla’s imminent return, but
now he’s damaged a shrine. As Yuri secretly films him, he tells her to go
and wake up Ghidorah while there’s still time. Ghidorah is named, along
with Mothra and Baragon, in the book about the guardian monsters. (That’s
right, the third guardian isn’t Godzilla at all but Baragon, the
floppy-eared, burrowing reptile from
Frankenstein vs Baragon (1965). Apparently he wasn’t famous enough
to get a namecheck in the film’s title.) All three will be needed to
defend Japan from Godzilla. The old man believes Godzilla is animated by
the souls of all the victims of the Pacific War, who are angry that people
have forgotten their suffering.
Godzilla appears in the Bonin Islands, near where he was first seen in
1954, and devastates a village. The JSDF investigates and issues a warning
about Godzilla’s possible reappearance, but a complacent government takes
no further action. Yuri tries to tell her father about the three guardian
monsters, but he’s preoccupied with Godzilla. Admiral Tachibana was
orphaned as a young boy in the 1954 attack and hasn’t forgotten.
Nonetheless, he remembers what Yuri told him when he hears reports of the
other monster sightings that seem to line up with the legend. Meanwhile, a
businessman goes to the Aokigahara Forest to commit suicide. He takes a
jizō statue and stands on it in order to hang himself from a tree, but the
ground opens up beneath him and he falls into the cave where Ghidorah
sleeps. He’s trying to convince the Motosu police of what he saw when
Baragon surfaces in the street outside the police station and breaks open
the wall of the cell in which the old man’s being held, before heading off
south through the countryside. Everyone present mistakenly assumes Baragon
is Godzilla.
Baragon is, as before, a quadrupedal reptile with elephantine ears, a
large horn on his forehead and a ridge of much smaller horns over the back
of his head. His skin looks more red than it used to. He also looks quite
plasticky – he’s easily the least impressive daikaiju in this movie.
Godzilla comes ashore at Yaizu in Shizuoka Prefecture. He looks more like
the Heisei era version – rounded, almost feline head, dark skin colour,
dorsal plates not so huge and spiky – but taller and with white,
pupil-less eyes. His atomic breath ray is back to its old blue-white and
there’s an added inhalation effect before he fires it. He marches inland
towards Tokyo and meets Baragon coming the other way at a hot spring
resort at Hakone. Baragon initially surprises Godzilla by burrowing
underneath him and latching onto his arm, but Godzilla gives him a savage
beating and incinerates him with his breath. The government finally
authorises the JSDF to respond to the threat of Godzilla.
The JSDF discovers that conventional missiles can’t hurt Godzilla, who
easily destroys their fighter jets. Admiral Tachibana is dismayed to learn
that Godzilla was only defeated in 1954 by a superweapon (the Oxygen
Destroyer, not named here) whose existence has since been covered up. The
JSDF were in fact powerless against him and only took the credit to
reassure the public. On Lake Ikeda, Mothra hatches from her cocoon, while
in the Aokigahara Forest, the old man succeeds in waking up Ghidorah.
Yuri, who was able to report on the events at Hakone from a distance,
continues to follow Godzilla by bicycle and broadcast live footage,
imploring the JSDF not to attack the guardian monsters as they confront
Godzilla.
The JSDF sets up camp in Yokohama, with a battleship in the harbour under
Tachibana’s command. Godzilla and Mothra arrive at the same time and face
off against each other. In an unusual manoeuvre, Mothra attacks Godzilla
by firing darts at his face from her abdomen. Several buildings and
soldiers are caught in the crossfire as Godzilla targets and misses Mothra
with his breath ray. Ghidorah arrives and joins the fray, discharging
electricity into Godzilla through his teeth, but is quickly subdued.
Godzilla’s atomic breath makes short work of Mothra and most of the JSDF’s
forces, but Mothra dissipates into a cloud of energy that’s absorbed by
Ghidorah.
Ghidorah shines with a golden light and sprouts wings, looking more like
the version we’ve seen in earlier movies. Completely unharmed now by
Godzilla’s breath, he focuses the energy and fires it back at Godzilla,
knocking him into the bay. As the two daikaiju fight underwater, Tachibana
orders a minisub loaded with torpedoes and pilots it down in the hope that
Ghidorah will create wounds he can shoot into. Godzilla, mimicking
Ghidorah’s trick, is able to absorb the energy blasts from his three
mouths and fire them back at him, destroying him. However, the combined
mystical energy of the three deceased guardian monsters drags him back
underwater. Tachibana ends up piloting his minisub down Godzilla’s throat
and shooting his way out from inside. Godzilla is seemingly killed by his
own atomic breath discharging through a gaping wound in his shoulder.
On the surface of the bay, Yuri is happily reunited with her father. The
staff at BS Digital Q celebrate the news of her survival, but as the
editor orders work to begin on a special commemorative programme, he’s
told the mysterious old man has disappeared from the tape of Yuri’s
interview with him and has been identified as one of the victims of
Godzilla’s 1954 attack. (At last, a true paranormal story for the
channel!) At the bottom of the bay, Godzilla’s heart still beats.
At first sight, this might look like a reimagining of classic daikaiju to
rival anything that happened in the Heisei series. King Ghidorah not evil?
Mothra without the singing fairies? But that came about by accident rather
than by design. Kaneko’s original plan was to pit Godzilla against three
forgotten monsters of the Shōwa era: Baragon, Varan (who featured in an
eponymous film in 1958 and made an unnamed cameo appearance in a Godzilla
movie in 1968) and Anguirus (last seen in 1974). Toho’s response to this first
proposal was to ask for the more popular Mothra and King Ghidorah to be
included instead. Kaneko and his co-writers made little to no effort to
accommodate this change beyond renaming the kaiju.
But I’m damned if I know which kaiju subbed in for which. As a lake monster
who also flies, Varan looks like a match for Mothra, but then the big final
showdown involves a flying kaiju and happens in the water in Tokyo Bay, so
maybe he was replaced by Ghidorah. Anguirus, by contrast, looks underqualified
for either role.
What did stick was the idea to switch Godzilla from being a mutated
victim/avatar of American nuclear weapons tests to being the nightmare
embodiment of the vengeance of everyone who suffered during the Pacific War.
(That term, incidentally, is frequently taken simply to mean the Pacific wing
of World War II, but could potentially encompass the Second Sino-Japanese War
which started in 1937.) The scene in which Admiral Tachibana asks his daughter
why the souls of dead Japanese soldiers who fought for their country would
want to attack it, and she observes that many other Asians and Americans died
in the war too, saves this from coming across as a nationalist aggrandisement
of the military dead. Godzilla’s wrath isn’t the frustrated, reactionary
grumping of old imperialists but a broader stand-in for “the sins of the
past”, something a bit more in line with the indiscriminate curses of
contemporary J-Horror films and with Kaneko’s horror-inflected take on the
Gamera mythos.
Recasting other monsters of the atomic age as ancient, mystical guardian
spirits of Japan is a bold choice, though. Perhaps there is a hint of a less
aggressive kind of nationalism in there, a suggestion that it might be in
modern Japan’s interests to reconnect with older parts of its culture. Then
again, it’s only one step away from what Kaneko did with Gamera, turning him
and Gyaos into genetically engineered weapons of ancient Atlantis. Perhaps, if
Kaneko had been given the chance to make a sequel to GMK, he would have
taken Toho’s daikaiju further into the realms of BS Digital Q’s
National Enquirer-esque fantasies.
There’s a certain curmudgeonly flavour to the way GMK handles its
unnamed characters. Delinquent youths are responsible for disturbing two of
the guardian monsters and get a swift comeuppance. This seems a little
undeserved given that, as it turns out, it’s a good thing those monsters were
released and if those kids hadn’t desecrated those roadside shrines, that
mysterious old man certainly would have. Kaneko, who was still in his 40s at
this time, was by his own admission a grumpy old man at heart.
As for the little vignettes of people who are about to be killed by Godzilla,
these were apparently meant to humanise his victims, in lieu of the usual
scenes of anonymous crowds. But they more often come across as comical, either
as mean-spirited jokes (the man at a urinal on the island where Godzilla makes
his first landfall, the woman in a hospital in Shizuoka) or as punishment for
the characters’ stupidity (the tourists who pose for holiday snaps in front of
an oncoming daikaiju at Hakone).
On the subject of mean jokes, GMK features the Millennium series’ first
explicit, undeniable, no-interpretation-required dig at
Godzilla (1998). In the opening scene, Admiral Tachibana specifically
mentions a recent monster attack in New York as a reason for the JSDF to stay
alert. Two members of his audience whisper to each other about this. Wasn’t
that Godzilla, asks one. That’s what they say in America, replies the other,
but the Japanese don’t think so.
As far as the major characters go, Yuri feels like a suitably rounded
protagonist and Admiral Tachibana, the main military figure, is humanised by
the scenes of him at home with his daughter and reminiscing about his
childhood in 1954. The rest are filled in with quite broad strokes and there’s
not a lot of depth to them. Even Tachibana’s childhood trauma is dropped in
front of us but never really followed up on. For an ostensibly moody film,
GMK actually doesn’t waste that much time on mood or on human drama,
focusing instead on knockabout action. I don’t know what to make of the final,
cheesy twist – that old campfire tale standard, “but he died nearly 50 years
ago!”
There are a couple of familiar faces among the cast. Hotaru Yukijirō, clearly
a favourite of the director, having played the comedy cop Osako in the Gamera
trilogy, cameos as the suicidal businessman who discovers Ghidorah’s lair. The
mysterious old man who tries to warn everyone about Godzilla’s return is
played by Amamoto Hideyo, a stalwart of the Shōwa era. He was Dr Who (not that
one) in King Kong Escapes (1967) and the friendly neighbour Shinpei in
All Monsters Attack (1969). Yuri’s editor at BS Digital Q is played by
someone we’ve seen quite recently, Sano Shirō, who was the government
scientist Miyasaka (with much shorter hair) in
Godzilla 2000: Millennium (1999).
On the whole, GMK is a very good-looking film. (Well, except for
Baragon. Baragon looks like the kind of thing that was parodied in the opening
scenes of Shin Ultraman (2022).) There’s a shot up from ground level of
Godzilla coming ashore, with a fishing boat dropping from his shoulder, that
truly makes this giant nightmare version of the character look impressive. In
its story and its characters, I think it’s weaker, but it has enough momentum
to stop you noticing that until after you’ve watched it. It was the most
successful of the Millennium series Godzilla movies by a clear margin and it’s
well liked by the fan community. It just doesn’t quite tick all the boxes for
me.
Godzilla vs Megaguirus (2000) Toho Studios Director: Tezuka
Masaaki, Suzuki Kenji (special effects)
This film opens with a cheeky faux newsreel reporting on Godzilla’s
destruction of Tokyo in 1954. (The scenes feature the current,
flat-headed, super-spiny Godzilla suit – they’ve either been restaged very
closely or had the Godzilla 2000: Millennium
(1999) Godzilla superimposed over the original. In later, colour scenes,
his dorsal plates look a lot more purple than in the previous movie.)
There’s no indication that Godzilla hung around afterwards or was killed
in this timeline. In the wake of the calamity, the seat of the Japanese
government is relocated to Ōsaka. Japan forges ahead with its postwar
reconstruction, but experiences another setback when its first nuclear
power plant, the one at Tōkai, draws Godzilla back out of hiding. The
government concludes that Godzilla feeds on atomic energy and bans the
construction of any further nuclear plants. Japan experiments with various
renewable energy sources, but none of them can keep up with the country’s
demand. Finally, in 1996, the Bureau of Science and Technology succeeds in
developing a means of generating electricity from plasma using deuterium,
which shouldn’t pose any of the problems of nuclear energy. Nonetheless,
Godzilla arrives in Ōsaka to attack the plasma energy plant. A JSDF squad
is deployed to deter Godzilla with bazookas, without success; Tsujimori
Kiriko, one of the survivors, swears to avenge her commanding officer’s
death.
Five years later in a rebuilt Tokyo, Tsujimori is the chief officer of the
G-Graspers (their name advertised in English on their baseball caps), a
wing of the JSDF dedicated specifically to managing the threat posed by
Godzilla. She and a colleague recruit Kudō Hajime, a brilliant but
unambitious young scientist, to work on a project under his former
lecturer, Dr Yoshizawa. Yoshizawa proposes to develop a weapon, deployed
by satellite, that will create an artificial black hole and launch it
directly at Godzilla, safely sealing him away inside its event horizon.
(She talks about a target diameter of two metres, which sounds pretty
unsafe to my amateur ears. At that size, it would have 113 times the mass
of the Earth. Let’s hope there’s an off switch.)
Three months later, the device is ready for testing. Dr Yoshizawa credits
the research into plasma energy with making it possible. She’s keen that
once the weapon has successfully eliminated Godzilla, it should be
decommissioned. (Suggesting a parallel with the Oxygen Destroyer –
Yoshizawa vs Serizawa?) The weapon is successfully tested on a derelict
building in a rural area, although the assembled scientists and G-Graspers
observe a rippling in the air above the target area that lingers for a
moment before disappearing. Kudō believes this is a form of dimensional
distortion caused by the temporary black hole’s gravity. The test is also
observed by Hayasaka Jun, a local schoolboy and insect enthusiast on his
summer break. One of the G-Graspers catches Jun in the nearby woods and
Tsujimori swears him to secrecy. That night, however, Jun hears a gigantic
insect flying past his house and, following it with a torch, sees it
disappear into the distortion, which has reappeared. The insect has
apparently laid eggs in the area – Jun finds one, silvery and the size of
a beach ball, and takes it home.
A short time later, Jun and his mother are settling into a new flat in
Tokyo, where his father has a new job. Jun notices that the egg, which
he’s kept in a cardboard box, is leaking, although it doesn’t seem to have
hatched. He takes the egg out onto the street and discreetly drops it into
the sewers. Down there, it multiplies and hatches into larvae roughly the
size of a person. The larvae crawl back up to the surface and start
attacking people at night. Once they’ve fed well enough, they metamorphose
into similarly sized flying insects like dragonflies. (From what we’re
shown, this process is close to instantaneous and doesn’t involve a
pupation stage – the adult simply emerges from the larva as if shedding a
skin.) Jun sees one of the adult insects flying past his flat. He contacts
Tsujimori and tells her about the egg he took and what he saw. He’s
recognised the flying insect from one of his reference books as a
prehistoric creature called Meganula.
(Yes, it’s an unexpected callback to Rodan (1956). There’s no
suggestion that the events of Rodan happened in this film’s
continuity. Jun refers to the larva and adult respectively as Meganulon
and Meganula, as if they were distinct creatures – a JSDF scientist will
say the same thing later on when examining the beast’s tissue samples.
Meganeura is the taxonomic name of a genus of insects that lived roughly
300 million years ago during the Carboniferous Period – the JSDF scientist
will get that detail right, which is more than can be said for the
scientist in Rodan. We only ever saw the larvae in Rodan, in
which they were referred to as Meganulon.)
Satellite images show Godzilla clashing with a Meganula off Japan’s
south-west coast. A G-Grasper squad flies out in their VTOL plane, the
Griffon, to collect samples of the dead Meganula’s tissues from the
ocean’s surface. Tsujimori takes the opportunity to plant a tracking
device on one of Godzilla’s dorsal plates when he returns to the scene,
and her team launches an automated mini submarine to follow him.
Meanwhile, the black hole weapon, now christened Dimension Tide, is
successfully launched into orbit from Tanegashima Island Space Center. (A
real location, established in 1969 and still operating today!)
The JSDF is called in to oversee rescue operations after Tokyo’s Shibuya
district is flooded. The apparent cause of the flooding was something in
the sewers. They send in an aquatic drone that Kudō’s developed based on
the minisub and find Meganulon eggs littering the submerged streets.
Meanwhile, Godzilla is tracked heading north towards Japan. In order to
use the Dimension Tide against him, Tsujimori proposes to lure him onto
the uninhabited island of Kiganjima. (It’s a fictional island – the
coordinates shown on-screen would place it a little north of Ogasawara.)
The government agrees, although Yoshizawa and Kudō are concerned that the
weapon hasn’t been tested from orbit yet. The G-Graspers successfully
provoke Godzilla into coming ashore and the Dimension Tide is powered up.
Just at that moment, an entire swarm of Meganula flies in from Shibuya and
mobs Godzilla, confusing the satellite’s targeting system. The insects
feed on Godzilla’s energy through their stingers, but eventually he’s able
to swat or blast most of the swarm. With the Dimension Tide successfully
locked on, the JSDF fires. To everyone’s surprise, Godzilla reappears from
beneath the impact crater, as if he was buried instead of absorbed by the
black hole. Because the Dimension Tide takes an hour to cool off and
recharge, they can’t take a second shot and Godzilla wades back into the
ocean.
Several Meganula have somehow survived both Godzilla and the black hole
and return to Shibuya. There they dive under the floodwater and transfer
the energy they took from Godzilla into an enormous larva. When this
hatches, it’s the size of Godzilla and shares some of his physical
characteristics, notably reptilian skin and a mouth full of teeth. Its
wings can scythe through buildings or, when vibrated rapidly enough,
produce a loud, high frequency soundwave that devastates Shibuya. This is
evidently the queen Meganula; the JSDF’s paleontological expert claims
that it’s known as Megaguirus, a fiercely territorial creature.
Godzilla now approaches Tokyo, and a frenetic effort to evacuate the city
begins. Tsujimori recalls that Godzilla’s previous attacks on Japanese
cities were all directed at power stations and ponders what could have
attracted him this time. The G-Graspers scramble in the Griffon and try to
draw Godzilla into an open space so they can fire the Dimension Tide at
him again, but are surprised by the arrival of Megaguirus, who faces off
against Godzilla. The high frequency sound produced by Megaguirus’ wings
interferes with a nearby satellite relay tower and disrupts the Dimension
Tide’s control signal, stalling its firing sequence. During the course of
a violent fight, Megaguirus repeatedly plunges its stinger into Godzilla’s
belly and drains more energy from him, but is defeated when Godzilla bites
its stinger off and roasts it with his atomic breath.
The JSDF are now faced with a new crisis: the Dimension Tide satellite has
lost orbital stability and is falling to Earth. (Happily, though, it’s
going to fall straight down, right onto the spot it was meant to be
targeting.) Meanwhile, Godzilla marches on into Shibuya and tears down the
Institute of Science. Mr Sugiura, the head of the Bureau of Science and
Technology, confesses that he was overseeing continued research into
plasma energy in secret. Tsujimori angrily confronts him about the lives
that have been lost because of his political ambition. She then flies the
Griffon over to Godzilla’s position in order to give the falling Dimension
Tide an easier target to lock onto. Tsujimori ejects safely as the Griffon
ploughs into Godzilla’s back, and Kudō remotely fires the Dimension Tide.
Godzilla unleashes his atomic breath into the oncoming black hole; he, the
black hole and the satellite vanish in a flash of light. There’s no sign
of him in the resulting crater, although Tsujimori worries he may once
again simply be buried in the ground beneath. In a post-credits scene, Jun
is in the science lab of his new school when the building is shaken by a
violent tremor and he hears Godzilla’s roar outside.
On the morning of 30 September 1999, a criticality accident took place at a
uranium enrichment facility attached to Tōkai Nuclear Power Plant. Nearly
seven times the legally mandated maximum quantity of uranyl nitrate was
deposited into a precipitation tank, achieving critical mass and sparking a
chain reaction that rolled on, firing out gamma rays and neutrons across the
facility, until it was brought under control the following morning. The 1999
Tōkaimura nuclear accident was the worst Japan had seen and would only be
topped by the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi incident.
The causes of the accident were a litany of failures including inadequate
training, poor workplace supervision, lax regulatory oversight and cut
corners, all the way down to the technicians mixing the enriched uranium
manually in steel buckets. It was a stark illustration of how badly things can
go wrong when industry ignores regulations and health and safety practices.
The two technicians who’d had their hands on the buckets when criticality
occurred died of organ failure after months in hospital, and hundreds of
others within the facility and in the surrounding area received dangerously
high doses of gamma radiation. In March 2000, the facility owner, JCO, was
stripped of its credentials and its President resigned. Six of the plant’s
staff – including the supervisor of the two technicians who’d died, who had
himself received three months of treatment for radiation sickness – were
charged with criminal negligence in October 2000. JCO itself and three of the
individual defendants were charged with violating the relevant regulations.
Although that’s just two months before the release of this film, I imagine the
prosecution was a foregone conclusion when scripting began. The defendants
pled guilty but argued extenuating circumstances. The sentence that was
finally handed down in March 2003 was much lighter than might have been
expected, with suspended prison sentences for the individuals and a fine of
1,000,000 yen for JCO’s violations. By way of comparison,
Godzilla vs Megaguirus had a budget roughly 950 times that amount.
So here, released mid-December 2000, is a movie in which corruption and
complacency in the energy industry are revealed to be the cause of Godzilla’s
destructive rampage. Tsujimori even gets to punch the chief executive
responsible in the face, which I’m sure must have been a cathartic moment for
contemporary cinemagoers. Perhaps in order to soften the commentary, the
disaster that strikes Tōkai Nuclear Power Plant is moved back to the year of
its commissioning and Japan’s nuclear energy industry is replaced with the
more science-fictional deuterium-based plasma energy industry, fronted by the
glib Mr Sugiura. (It’s not entirely clear if Sugiura is meant to be a
businessman or a civil servant, or some combination of the two, like the
villainous Katagiri in Godzilla 2000: Millennium. As the head of the
Bureau that developed plasma energy, he takes a very hands-on interest in the
related Dimension Tide project and is a constant background presence in the
scenes set at G-Graspers HQ.)
And yet Godzilla vs Megaguirus equivocates. The whole premise of Japan
finding an alternative to nuclear energy and Godzilla attacking anyway seems
to suggest that nuclear’s as good as any other option, notwithstanding the
dangers. The opening backstory makes it clear that safer, renewable energy
production methods such as solar, wind and hydroelectric – at least, at the
state of advancement they were at in the 90s – aren’t enough to meet Japan’s
high energy demands. (Even with nuclear energy production in full swing around
the time this film was made, Japan still depended on imported fossil fuels –
oil, coal and natural gas – for roughly 80% of its power. Today that figure’s
closer to 90%.) An unrepentant Sugiura insists that he had to play fast and
loose to give the domestic energy industry a leg up and help Japan to become
more self-reliant. That’s pretty much exactly the rationale JCO gave for their
crimes after the public found out about them.
While we’re looking for hidden meanings, perhaps Megaguirus, as a product of
the Carboniferous Period, could be said to stand in for those fossil fuels.
Draining away Godzilla’s H-bomb-given energy (taking nuclear’s market share?),
Megaguirus comes to resemble him and is as dangerous and destructive. And then
there’s the flooding in Shibuya, which can be attributed to the hatching
Meganulons although the exact cause remains unclear. Rising sea levels were a
concern in pop culture at least as far back as
King Kong vs Godzilla (1962), and climatologists have increasingly come
to understand the part that burning fossil fuels plays in affecting the
ecosystem and causing those water levels to rise. I don’t know, though –
perhaps this is an interpretation too far. In this reading of the film,
Godzilla would have to represent nuclear energy as a “clean” substitute for
fossil fuels – much as he did in Godzilla vs Hedorah (1971) – while
simultaneously being a generic stand-in for “the bad things that happen to/at
power plants” in the rest of the movie.
Godzilla vs Megaguirus subordinates the commentary, if any, to the
simpler business of presenting a slam-bang kaiju action movie, and that's fair
enough. On that front, this is a return to more familiar territory after the
slightly more grounded Godzilla 2000. Japan’s response to the threat of
Godzilla once again consists of a well-drilled paramilitary outfit with access
to outlandish fantasy weapons, not two scheming civil servants and an amateur
investigative team armed with seismographs. But the G-Graspers are a pale
shadow of the Heisei series’ UN-backed G-Force. (I mean, “G-Force” at least
offered a play on words – what’s “G-Graspers” even supposed to mean?) As a
reimagining, this movie treads quite a lot of familiar ground. Again, we have
an antagonistic kaiju realised at least partly through CGI that wants to
become like Godzilla (so again, decide for yourself whether this is a dig at
Godzilla (1998) or just an overused Toho trope). Dr Yoshizawa’s concern
over the possible future abuse of the Dimension Tide looks like a superficial
reference to Dr Serizawa’s dilemma over the Oxygen Destroyer in
Godzilla (1954) but without the noble sacrifice at the end. (The
similarity in the characters’ names, Yoshizawa and Serizawa, might even be
deliberate. Incidentally, Hoshi Yuriko, as Dr Yoshizawa, presents the most
familiar face in the cast - she played the female journalist leads in
Mothra vs Godzilla and Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (both
1964).) Besides being an unexpected reprise of the less well-remembered
monsters from a 1956 movie, the Meganulons present us with a swarm kaiju just
two Toho Godzilla movies after Godzilla vs Destoroyah (1995). (Or
perhaps, with their insectile appearance and their appetite for energy,
they’re a little closer to the Legion footsoldiers in Daiei’s
Gamera 2 (1996)?)
In terms of the effects, CGI is clearly gaining a foothold at Toho. The
establishing shot of the near-future parallel Tokyo is a little too obvious –
it’s the CGI bullet trains that give it away. There are some very odd
directorial choices in the climactic kaiju fight, with plenty of bad, jerky
slow-motion moments and a comically sped-up shot of Godzilla shaking his head
after a fall. There’s an absolutely crazy shot from below of Godzilla leaping
through the air to bodyslam Megaguirus. Apart from that moment, we’re back to
the old standard of daikaiju being shot from their own eye level, which makes
the scope of the action feel somewhat limited. There is one scene of Godzilla
marching through the streets of Shibuya towards the Science Institute that I
think does benefit greatly from being shot from overhead and behind.
The scenes of the Meganulons and Meganula, by contrast, offer some human-scale
action and are uniformly well realised. Scenes of the Meganula shedding their
Meganulon skins and taking flight are very nicely achieved through CGI. The
daikaiju suits and city miniatures are all as good as they’ve ever been.
There’s one scene in which the effects team actually exceeded my expectations
and I’m in two minds about it: the prop for Kudō’s aquatic drone (presented at
actual size) very clearly isn’t the minisub prop (a miniature standing in for
something the size of a car), it’s a different colour and shape, but it would
have been so cheeky if they’d had Kudō walking in holding the same prop.
The character work is so-so. There isn’t exactly a romantic subplot between
Tsujimori and Kudō – it’s vaguely hinted at but it comes to nothing, and after
all, Kudō’s off-puttingly arrogant. Tsujimori is a stalwart lead, capable and
focused, and her personal grudge against Godzilla is paid off in a nice Moby-Dick moment when she climbs over Godzilla’s back to plant the tracker on him. She has to put up with a level of casual sexism that’s actually
surprising in this movie when you compare it to the Heisei series or the 1990s
Gamera trilogy, with little Jun asking her what a woman’s doing in the
G-Graspers and Kudō developing a desktop assistant that's an objectified
version of her. The other adult characters are too bland to leave an
impression, but Jun feels like in another world he could have been the child
star of a Gamera movie.
The last thing I’ll draw attention to is the music by composer Ōshima Michiru.
Ifukube Akira’s iconic Godzilla theme is, inevitably, heard again in this
movie, but around it is, I think, the first score by another composer that can
really give Ifukube a run for his money. She delivers a tremendous military
march that plays over the scene of the JSDF confronting Godzilla in 1996 and
the later fight between Godzilla and Megaguirus. The stridulating violin theme
for the swarming Meganula shows, by her own admission, the influence of the
synthesised soundtrack of Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) and maybe a hint
of Psycho (1960) as well. We’ll hear from Ōshima again.
Godzilla 2000: Millennium (1999) Toho Studios Director:
Ōkawara Takao, Suzuki Kenji (special effects) Also known as: The slightly
re-edited American release was just called Godzilla 2000
(2000).
I’ll bet Toho were glad they retained the right to continue making their own
Godzilla films when negotiating the terms for TriStar’s
Godzilla (1998). Within a year and a half of the American movie’s
release, they’d produced the first of a new wave of films that could be seen
as reclaiming the daikaiju’s legacy and responding to the choices made by Dean
Devlin and Roland Emmerich. Although these all came out during the Heisei era,
they’re generally referred to as the Millennium series to avoid confusion with
the 1984-95 Heisei series.
The conceit of all but one of the Millennium series films is that each one
ignores all the material that’s preceded it except for the original
Godzilla (1954). (In practice, how much or how little each film will
ignore will vary greatly.) Presenting a string of new takes on Godzilla might
have been a way for Toho to show certain overseas film producers how they
thought it should have been done. It seems, though, that it was really just a
pivot from a planned series after Toho saw the underwhelming ticket sales for
Godzilla 2000. Presenting a selection of reboots was an expedient way
for them to try other approaches until they found one that worked for Japanese
audiences. TriStar themselves undertook to distribute Godzilla 2000 to
American cinemas, but ended up trimming and re-dubbing it to create another in
the long line of American re-edits. Subsequent entries in the series received
limited exposure, if any, in US cinemas.
Ichinose Yuki, a journalist, tags along with independent scientist Shinoda
Yūji and his young daughter Io on a nocturnal expedition to track
Godzilla. (We don’t initially know it’s Godzilla. Well... we do, because
we’re watching a movie with his name in the title, but we’re a few scenes
into the movie before anyone says “Godzilla”. All that’s clear from the
first scene is that they’re tracking something that registers on
seismographs, which implies a natural phenomenon.) Ichinose wants to get
pictures of Godzilla to bargain her editor into giving her a job on a
computer magazine; sadly, Godzilla’s radioactivity has the effect of
ruining her film, so she ends up stuck on the assignment.
Godzilla comes ashore at fogbound Nemuro, up north in Hokkaidō. (In a
possible callback to The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), there’s
a close call with a lighthouse.) Shinoda, Io and Ichinose intercept him
and barely escape with their lives, then witness him destroying a local
power station. Shinoda theorises that Godzilla might somehow hate man-made
energy sources.
Godzilla now has quite a flat, wide head, somewhat greenish skin and
extremely pointy, spiny dorsal plates. He’s very snaggle-toothed. His
breath ray is orange rather than blue and more fiery than before. His
history is never explained in the movie, it’s just accepted that he’s a
periodic hazard for Japan with a particular taste for power stations.
Katagiri Mitsuo, the head of the Crisis Control Intelligence Agency (CCI),
is schmoozing at a corporate soirée when his subordinate Miyasaka Shirō
informs him of the Nemuro incursion. (Presumably the CCI is a kind of
quango with responsibility for giving the relevant government departments
advance warning of any Godzilla-scale threats. It evidently has broad
scope and a generous budget to conduct its own research, as we’ll see in a
second. Katagiri is said to also be a deputy cabinet secretary, but at
which ministry isn’t made clear.) Later, a submarine under the direction
of Miyasaka is planting CCI “G-Sensors” in the ocean trench off Japan’s
east coast when it finds a meteorite made of a highly magnetic substance.
Katagiri thinks it could be exploited as a new, cleaner energy source and
orders it raised. When the operation begins, however, it raises itself and
floats impossibly – Miyasaka suggests it could be something alien.
Sent back out by her editor, Ichinose looks for Shinoda at the
headquarters of the Godzilla Prediction Network (GPN). (Presumably this is
back in the Tokyo area rather than Hokkaidō, given how quickly Shinoda is
able to get to Godzilla’s next landing spot.) GPN HQ turns out to be an
office in the back of a brewery warehouse – although Shinoda has access to
a fair amount of hi-tech equipment, he’s clearly underfunded. The GPN does
seem to include at least two other people, in Matsushima and Fukushima.
Shinoda defers all the GPN’s business and admin activities to his
daughter.
Godzilla approaches Tōkai, where there’s a nuclear power plant. The
government orders the emergency deployment of the JSDF. Katagiri has the
authority to order the reactor shut down as a precaution. He and Shinoda
race there, Shinoda in his truck and Katagiri in a helicopter. Their
relative positions are clear: Shinoda wants to study Godzilla because of
what he might reveal about the development of life on Earth, Katagiri
wants to destroy him because of all the expensive damage he causes. It’s
revealed that Shinoda used to work alongside Miyasaka at the university
lab where Katagiri recruited his CCI staff; had Shinoda not already
resigned by then, he still would have refused any job offer from Katagiri
because of their irreconcilable ideologies. Shinoda tries to warn Katagiri
that Godzilla might attack other power sources in the area besides the
nuclear plant.
General Takada, in charge of the JSDF response to Godzilla, is confident
that his team can take Godzilla down with a new variety of
high-penetration missile. A first wave of conventional missiles launched
from fighter jets and tanks lures the aggressive Godzilla inland to where
the special missiles are waiting for him. Although they break his skin,
they unfortunately don’t injure him seriously, and only the distraction of
an airstrike stops him from destroying the tanks. Meanwhile, Miyasaka has
been shocked to watch the meteorite raise itself upright, levitate out of
the water and eventually glide off towards Godzilla’s position. It scans
Godzilla, then fires an energy beam at him, knocking him into the water.
He retaliates, blasting the rock off what proves to be a metallic UFO. It
flies away down the coast and parks itself once more in an upright
position in the water. Miyasaka speculates that it’s solar powered and
tilts to follow the sun – it could have been buried at the bottom of the
ocean for millions of years before the CCI submarine’s searchlight
reactivated it.
Shinoda is keen to study some of the scales that the missiles knocked off
Godzilla, but needs access to the CCI’s more advanced equipment. He agrees
to Katagiri’s condition that he turn over all the GPN’s data on Godzilla,
although Io craftily ensures that the CCI receives only a dud copy of the
data. Working together, Shinoda and Miyasaka discover that Godzilla’s skin
tissues contain a factor that nearly instantly repairs any damage on the
cellular level. Shinoda names this factor “Organiser G-1”. (The American
re-edit changes this to the more literal “Regenerator G-1”.) He’s soon
dreaming of the potential medical applications.
At sunrise, the UFO is re-energised and breaks free of the electromagnetic
restraints the CCI and JSDF had optimistically placed on it. It flies over
Tokyo’s Shinjuku district and lands on top of the Tokyo Opera City Tower,
crushing the top few floors. (Opened in 1996, this building follows in the
long tradition of prominent recent constructions to be destroyed in a
Godzilla movie.) The surrounding area, including Ichinose’s publisher’s
office, is evacuated. Commandeering the tower’s servers, the UFO hacks
into all the computers in the neighbourhood and absorbs all the
information it can. It also starts to lower the proportion of oxygen in
the atmosphere around it. The CCI decides the best way to counter this
threat is to plant bombs in the upper floors of the tower. However,
Shinoda receives a phone call in the CCI control centre from Ichinose,
who’s inside the tower’s server room trying to get the scoop on what
specific information the UFO wants. Desperate to get her out before the
bombs go off, Shinoda and Io race to the tower and get past the CCI’s
guards with Miyasaka’s help. Once they’re there, though, Shinoda takes an
interest in the data and stays behind while Io escorts Ichinose out.
Katagiri refuses to postpone the detonation to save Shinoda’s life,
despite Miyasaka’s protestations. The bombs fail to damage the UFO, which
destroys the rest of the tower itself, having apparently got what it
wanted.
Shinoda has, however, managed to get out with one of the server room’s
computers. Just before it demolished the tower, the UFO broadcast the word
“MILLENNIUM” (in English!) on all electronic displays in the area,
followed by other words (in English and Japanese) such as “Earth”,
“Alteration” and “Dominate”, giving some hint of its apocalyptic
intentions. Shinoda shows that it plans to change Earth’s environment to
suit an alien form of life, and that it’s particularly interested in
Godzilla. With Godzilla’s “Organiser G-1”, it could regrow the physical
forms of its original pilots. Godzilla chooses that very moment to wade
ashore from Tokyo Bay. Miyasaka suggests turning off Tokyo’s power supply
in the hope that he’ll leave again, but Shinoda and Katagiri agree that
the object of Godzilla’s attention isn’t the city, but the UFO.
After a short but violent confrontation, the UFO gets the upper hand and
samples Godzilla’s DNA, using it to create a gigantic alien organism that
resembles a stingray perched on top of a cluster of tentacles. But the
creature immediately stumbles and mutates, roaring as it does so. Shinoda
guesses that Godzilla’s genetic information, which the aliens have
absorbed along with the regenerative factor, is too much for them to
control. Godzilla recovers and blasts the shell of the UFO, but is now
confronted with an alien that increasingly resembles himself. (Ancillary
material from Toho names this daikaiju “Orga”, although it’s never named
in the film.) The two clash repeatedly, with the alien instantly healing
any injuries Godzilla causes. Godzilla is finally able to destroy the
creature by blasting it from within when it tries to swallow him whole.
Pausing only to smite Katagiri in a strangely personal attack, Godzilla
turns his attention to the city around him and goes on a celebratory
rampage. The surviving heroes muse that humans themselves are responsible
for the problem of Godzilla.
As is often the case, the new Godzilla movie riffs on a recent Hollywood
blockbuster. Here it’s Twister (1996), following a plucky scientific
team with their off-road vehicle and their ramshackle equipment as they race a
better-funded rival to pursue and study a natural disaster. This may be
significant, as Twister was the film that director Jan de Bont took on
after he walked away from TriStar’s Godzilla project. We’d rather have seen de
Bont’s take, Godzilla 2000 seems to say. That the kaiju antagonist is
(initially, at least) a computer-generated image that tries to imitate
Godzilla could also be a subtle dig against Godzilla
(1998).
Of course, it could equally just be a knock-off of the end of
Godzilla vs Biollante (1989), in which Godzilla defeated a foe
mimicking his form by firing his atomic breath ray down its throat. Pale
shadows of Godzilla can also be seen in
Godzilla vs SpaceGodzilla (1994) and the three films thus far to
feature Mechagodzilla (1974, 1975, 1993). This isn’t a new idea in these
movies... but it does take on a new significance in the wake of the
Devlin/Emmerich movie.
The nuclear plant that Godzilla attacks at Tōkai is, in fact, the oldest in
Japan. In March 1997, there’d been a serious radiation leakage at an attached
nuclear waste management facility, which might have had a bearing on its
choice as a location in this movie. It only plays a minor role, though. A far
worse incident happened at a nearby enrichment facility at the end of
September 1999, only a couple of months before the movie’s release and almost
certainly too late to have influenced the script. We’ll hear more about that
in the next blog post.
There’s another reference to a nuclear power station, more (in)famous now than
it was at the time, when Shinoda checks in with a colleague in Fukushima. It
seems the GPN keeps an active watch over Godzilla’s most likely targets.
Interesting, then, that the other GPN operative we hear from is based in
Matsushima. There are a couple of towns of that name, but presumably this is
the one down south in Kyūshū, which is home to a large coal power station.
Shinoda firmly believes that Godzilla is interested in attacking other energy
sources besides nuclear, an idea that really isn’t followed up on in this
film, but which, again, will be explored further in the next film. I can’t
find any indication of any large power stations in the Nemuro area, so what
kind of facility Godzilla attacks there must remain a mystery.
The introduction of “Organiser G-1” and, with it, the suggestion that Godzilla
is functionally immortal is quite a departure from earlier films. Hitherto,
Godzilla has been resilient, certainly, but not invulnerable. The nearest any
previous film has come to this is the broad suggestion in
Godzilla vs Biollante that Godzilla’s cells hold some sort of
regenerative factor and, at the other end of the rationality spectrum,
Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla II (1993) resorting to mysticism to bring him
back from the brink of death. A quarter of a century later,
Godzilla Minus One (2024) will show a Godzilla with a similar
super-healing ability, but without any explanation.
As far as the visuals go, the cinematography is far too dark in some crucial
scenes, notably across the entire last half hour, making it difficult to
follow what’s going on. The American re-edit goes some way towards mitigating
this, turning the brightness up a bit as well as tightening up the pacing. The
compositing is noticeably better than in the Heisei series movies, and
director Ōkawara Takao seems to have got the memo about shooting from street
level for greater impact, although that’s more in the earlier scenes. The
climactic (and too damned dark) fight falls into much the same pattern as in
previous films, with characters watching the events unfold from a nearby
rooftop as if to deliberately justify the default use of kaiju-eye-level long
shots.
Having all the lights go out in Nemuro as Godzilla wades in and crashes
through the power lines is a nice touch, too often overlooked in similar
scenes in the past. There are a handful of other moments I’d consider
highlights of this film. One is the title caption scene, as a spooky moment in
a fogbound lighthouse becomes the reveal of Godzilla carrying a ship past the
window in his teeth. Another is Ichinose’s first encounter with Godzilla as
Shinoda reverses his truck out of a tunnel with the kaiju in pursuit, plunging
his feet through the tunnel roof. (But why on Earth did the effect of the
windscreen shattering need to be realised with CGI?)
Old hands might notice two familiar faces among the cast. Shinoda is played by
Murata Takehiro, who had a secondary role in Godzilla vs Mothra (1992)
as Andō Kenji, the company man with a conscience. Apparently he got a lot of
positive attention for that performance, and he proves to be a capable leading
man here. And the villainous Katagiri is surely unmistakeable to anyone who’s
seen Yamato Takeru (1994), in which he played the evil Moon god
Tsukuyomi. He chews the scenery just as much here – in what might be the
movie’s most bizarre moment, he seems to try to outroar Godzilla seconds
before being swatted with a gigantic forelimb.
Gamera 3: Revenge of Iris (1999) Daiei Film Co, Ltd Director:
Kaneko Shūsuke, Higuchi Shinji (special effects) Also known as:
Gamera 3: Awakening of Iris, based on the Japanese title, but most
sources go with Revenge.
The on-screen title caption offers neither of these – instead it gives us “The
Absolute Guardian of The Universe / Gamera3 / incomplete struggle” in English
beneath some other stuff. A pre-credits caption at the end of the film also
suggests “Gamera: 1999 / The Absolute Guardian of The Universe” in English
only. I don’t think anyone uses that title.
Let’s try to decipher that other stuff on the title caption. There are some
fiery graphics that may or may not hint at the three-ness of the film – with
three horizontal lines in parallel, they could arguably be read as the
relevant Japanese numeral. There’s the name “GAMERA” spelled out in
Anglo-Saxon runes, reinforcing the linguistic mistake made in Gamera’s origin
story as laid out in the first film. Finally, there’s kanji for the Japanese
subtitle, but only the subtitle – the main “Gamera 3” bit is tucked away in
the middle of the English language section.
One final observation: the poster for Gamera 3 includes the katakana
letters spelling out the name “Iris” (pronounced “Irris”, not “Eye-ris”) above
the relevant kanji, while the title caption only has the kanji. Google
Translate renders these as “Evil God” (ja-shin). Presumably this is the usual
thing of kanji having several possible pronunciations in Japanese. It does
raise the question of whether Ayana’s family knowingly named their cat “Evil
God”. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Although Gamera: The Guardian of the Universe (1995) and
Gamera 2 (1996) had performed well financially and critically, there
was a bit of a gap before Gamera 3 appeared. This wasn’t because the
Daiei team were stepping back to give the TriStar Godzilla (1998) some
space. Rather, they’d noticed a new appetite among Japanese audiences for
horror, including among younger viewers. A 1995 TV adaptation of the novel
Ringu (1991, “The Ring”) had gone over well, and the 1998 cinematic
remake would spearhead the J-Horror boom. Early plans for the third Heisei
Gamera movie were shelved and, with director Kaneko co-authoring the script,
the tone of the movie shifted further away from child-friendliness and more
towards horror. This worked well as far as the critics were concerned, but did
nothing to help the movie’s box office performance. It was, after all, still
only a kaiju movie.
It's 1999. Dr Nagamine Mayumi (whom we met in the first movie), an
ornithologist and now the world’s foremost authority on the kaiju Gyaos,
is investigating a new spate of Gyaos sightings in equatorial parts.
Meanwhile, off the southernmost coast of Japan, a submersible discovers a
stretch of the ocean floor paved with giant turtle shells – a Gamera
graveyard.
Flashback to 1995. Hirasaka Ayana’s family are scrambling to evacuate
their flat in Tokyo following the civil defence alerts about Gamera’s
fight with the adult Gyaos. Ayana’s father has gone back into the
apartment block to fetch her mother, who’s trying to coax the family cat,
Iris, out of hiding. Waiting in the family car, Ayana watches in horror as
Gamera crashes into the building and destroys it.
(Fun fact: this is not the rounded, more cuddly Gamera actually depicted
in the first movie but the spinier, more nightmarish version as seen in
the second movie.)
Four years later, Ayana and her little brother Satoru are living with
relatives in Asuka, a village south of Kyoto. Ayana struggles with her
aunt and uncle’s suggestion that she adopt their family name and with
bullies at the provincial school. To protect her brother from the bullies,
Ayana goes into the cave of a legendary monster the locals call
Ryu-sei-cho and brings out the stone meant to seal it in place. According
to Ayana’s cousin, the creature’s named after three Chinese constellations
that roughly correspond to the Western constellation Hydra; ancient
legends liken it to a red bird that’s opposed to a similarly legendary
tortoise, which strongly implies it’s related to Gyaos.
In Tokyo, government secretary Asakura Mito and her sinister associate
Kurata Shinya visit the marine insurance company from the first movie to
view the ancient magatama they collected. (Kusanagi, the insurance
investigator who collected them, is away in Washington, which is why we’ll
be seeing his daughter Asagi again but not him.) All the magatama
shattered after Gamera’s confrontation with Legion three years earlier.
Asakura is keen to track Asagi down, and also makes contact with Nagamine
at a meeting of the Monster Damage Control Committee, where she and the
government minister she sparred with in the first movie are now consulted
as experts.
Osako Tsutomu, former policeman and security guard and now a newspaper
seller, is sleeping rough on the streets of Tokyo’s Shibuya district. He’s
horrified to see two Gyaos and Gamera fly overhead one busy Friday night.
Gamera pursues the two Gyaos ruthlessly and with no regard for collateral
damage. The whole district is left ablaze and between 15,000 and 20,000
people are killed or injured. (Although Osako isn’t among them, as we’ll
discover later.) The government mobilises the JSDF to eliminate Gamera.
Moribe Tatsunari – the son of the family who are purportedly the guardians
of the cave and own the land it’s on, and a classmate of Ayana – has
persuaded her to return the stone she moved, but the damage appears to be
done. On a return visit, Ayana finds a metallic magatama, a bit like
Gamera’s but dark blue, that glows in her hand. Tatsunari finds her still
in the cave later that day, cradling a small, tentacled creature with a
dragon-like head that’s hatched from a calcified egg. She’s named it Iris
and plans to raise it, believing that they share a mutual hatred of Gamera
and that Iris will be the instrument of her revenge for her parents’
death.
Kurata, who used to be known as a computer game designer, has sent
Nagamine a copy of his latest work, a global environment simulation. One
of the parameters of the program is mana, a reserve of mystical energy.
The simulation shows that a global slump in mana coincided with the
appearance of Gyaos in 1995, and a further slump is now underway.
Meanwhile, the number of Gyaos sightings around the world increases, with
Gamera variously reported as clashing with the kaiju and with the JSDF.
Asagi, who’s returned to Japan from studying overseas, meets up with
Nagamine and tells her about the importance of mana to cultures across the
South Pacific. She believes that Gamera’s consumption of mana in order to
defeat the unexpected threat of Legion has further upset an already
unbalanced ecosystem, leading to the revival of more Gyaos. Despite this,
she trusts Gamera to solve the problem.
As Iris grows, it ventures out of the cave and into the nearby woods,
draining the life out of the creatures there. Ayana finds it and,
apparently recognising its magatama around her neck, it attempts to absorb
her. Alerted by a phone call from her cousin when she doesn’t return home
that evening, Tatsunari goes to the cave and finds Ayana unconscious
inside a cocoon. He cuts her free and she’s hospitalised. In her absence,
Iris wrecks the village and dessicates half the inhabitants, including
Ayana’s aunt, uncle and cousin. It’s soon grown into its full adult form,
which looks more bipedal and armoured, but still has several tentacles
with large barbs on the end. Bright lights shine from its torso and behind
its spiny headpiece, where its eyes should be. It makes whale-like noises
as it strides through the forest, impervious to the JSDF’s attempts to
stop it. Eventually it takes flight, stretching its tentacles out and
using membranes between them as wings.
Initially believing the reports of the attack to be another Gyaos
sighting, Nagamine recruits Osako and goes to investigate. Analysis of the
tissue samples she takes from the cave suggests Iris is genetically
similar to Gyaos but something new. She sees Ayana sleeping in the
hospital and calls Asagi to tell her about Ayana’s magatama. Asakura and
Kurata also hear about Ayana’s magatama and, realising the similarity to
the publicly known details of Asagi’s connection to Gamera, they arrange
to have Ayana moved to their own facility in Kyoto. Kurata separately
meets with Nagamine and leads her and Asagi to where Asakura is watching
over Ayana. Kurata believes that the Gyaos are a necessary counterbalance
to a decadent humanity and that Gamera, as a vessel for the planet’s mana
but flawed by his connection to humanity, is only getting in the way.
Iris, with its ability to fuse with Ayana and adapt, would be an even more
effective opponent for both Gamera and humanity. Asakura, meanwhile, as a
former shrine priestess, is motivated by her belief that she should be the
one to fuse with and control Iris.
Iris flies towards Kyoto, where Ayana is, while the Japanese air force
mistakenly fires on Gamera and prevents him from delaying it. The centre
of Kyoto burns as Gamera belatedly catches up with Iris and attacks it
with fireballs. Iris spears Gamera with its barbed tentacles and the two
daikaiju crash into Kyoto’s main train station, where the protagonists
have gathered. Asakura and Kurata are both killed by falling debris.
Tatsunari, who has made his way to Kyoto with Osaka, is just in time to
see Ayana unwillingly reabsorbed into Iris. Cocooned inside Iris’ torso,
Ayana relives her memories and Iris’ and realises that the creature has
only been reflecting and acting on her own trauma and bitterness all
along.
Gamera tears Ayana out of Iris’ body, but Iris retaliates by impaling
Gamera’s other hand and draining his energy through its tentacle. Gamera
blasts his own hand off to stop the process. Iris launches a couple of
fireballs at Gamera, but Gamera is able to use the energy to generate a
phantom substitute for his severed hand, which he plunges into Iris’
chest, killing it at last.
Gamera hands Ayana to the others and seemingly revives her. (Nagamine
spends a minute trying to resuscitate her, but she only wakes up when
Gamera roars.) As reports come in of a swarm of Gyaos approaching Japan,
the JSDF is ordered to switch its attention from Gamera to the Gyaos. The
protagonists, Ayana included, watch admiringly as Gamera strides out
across the apocalyptic ruins of Kyoto to fight the incoming Gyaos.
After the attempt at a more “realistic” take on giant monsters in
Godzilla (1998), Gamera 3 delivers all the realism you actually
need in a kaiju movie. It has its overtones of mysticism and pseudoscience and
a sympathetic daikaiju with a personality, but it also takes the time to
acknowledge that Gamera’s outsized acts of heroism cause thousands of
incidental casualties, leave cities in ruins and may not please all the
survivors. This is the kaiju not as a stern protector but as a
well-intentioned (we hope) natural disaster.
It's also a pretty grim subversion of Gamera specifically, who used to be a
friendly face to children everywhere. There’s a moment after the clash between
Gamera and two Gyaos over Shibuya when we see a weeping mother hugging her
child, who’s avoided being trampled on purely by chance but insists repeatedly
that Gamera saved him; we pan out from there to see the city on fire. It’s
probably the single darkest joke a kaiju movie’s ever made.
Having Gamera’s enemy this time be essentially payback for the accidental
deaths he caused in an earlier movie is a great choice. It’s astonishing,
unprecedented in a kaiju movie. Godzilla vs SpaceGodzilla (1994) toyed
with this idea but threw it away on two secondary characters who changed their
minds at the end of the movie with hardly any development.
Gamera 3 puts its vengeful character front and centre. And Iris is an
effective analogy for Ayana’s anger, causing plenty of destruction and
collateral harm itself and threatening to consume Ayana entirely. The other
thing Gamera 3 does that Toho never quite could is present a distorted
mirror of a popular lead character (well, other than Godzilla himself).
Godzilla vs Destoroyah (1995) teased but didn’t follow through on the
idea of the telepath Meru as a less moral counterpart to Saegusa Miki. But
there’s no mistaking the parallels between Asagi and Ayana, and no denying the
dramatic efficacy. Once again, Daiei has belatedly schooled Toho.
Ayana is certainly a better human villain than Asakura and Kurata, who are too
cartoonish. The motives for their villainy are never really explained clearly
enough. We only know that they both want to see Iris win and Gamera fail, and
even then probably not for the same reasons – he’s a nihilist and she’s some
kind of cultist. At least Tezuka Tōru, playing Kurata, is having fun chewing
the scenery. He can be seen behaving himself in a much smaller role as a
government minister in Shin Godzilla (2016). Maeda Ai (Ayana) went on to
greater things, mostly on TV, and cameos extremely briefly in a Godzilla movie
four years down the line.
Once again, the special effects are exemplary for the genre, with a nice
fusion of street-level action and monster business. Iris is more obviously
computer generated than other contemporary daikaiju – well, how else to
realise those tentacles? – which, by contrast, might make the CGI Gyaos a
little subtler. One SFX moment I’d pick out as a favourite is the one in
which, during the Shibuya battle, a Gyaos cuts through a skyscraper with its
sonic beam but we only see it collapse as a reflection in a neighbouring
skyscraper. As far as the turn to horror is concerned, there’s plenty of
special prop business with the dessicated victims of Iris’ early attacks and
an excellent jump scare when Ayana’s aunt flops out of the ceiling right in
front of Dr Nagamine.
The end of the film was meant to be hopeful but is often read by critics and
fans as downbeat, and no wonder, with the world apparently doomed to burn as
the battleground for daikaiju who only notice we exist when it’s dramatically
important. I’ve previously mentioned the unsubtle ecological subtext to those
Heisei era Toho movies that feature Mothra, and the Heisei Gamera trilogy has
gone harder on that subtext. It’s not as if awareness of ecological issues
originated in the 1990s – people were talking about polar ice melting at least
as far back as King Kong vs Godzilla (1962) – but it’s become one of
society’s foremost concerns since then. Here again, Gamera 3 outdoes
its American contemporaries for grim realism: Gamera may be humanity’s best
hope for survival, but people are still going to die and cities are still
going to burn. We can only console ourselves that it’s better (for us, at
least) than the alternative.
Godzilla (1998) Centropolis Entertainment / Fried Films /
Independent Pictures / TriStar Pictures Director: Roland Emmerich Also
known as: Some people like to style it in all caps, as GODZILLA,
presumably just because that’s what it looks like on the poster. It’s not well
liked by the core Godzilla fan community, and some refer to it as
GINO – Godzilla In Name Only. Which is harsh, but within a couple of
years Toho would be saying the same thing in their actual films.
Four years came and went with no TriStar Godzilla movie. When they’d formally
confirmed that pre-production was underway in 1994, the director attached to
the project was Jan de Bont, a Dutch hotshot who’d made his directorial debut
earlier that year with the summer phenomenon Speed (1994). He’d also
been a cinematographer on such action milestones as Die Hard (1988) and
The Hunt for Red October (1990), so he looked like a good choice for a
muscular American take on Godzilla. He'd taken on board the substantial
briefing document provided by Toho and had come up with a storyline that met
with general approval. Unfortunately, the budget he presented was too rich for
TriStar’s parent company, Sony, and he walked away from the project at the end
of the year. Godzilla spent all of 1995 in Development Limbo.
In mid-1996, TriStar brought in the director/producer team of Roland Emmerich
and Dean Devlin. Emmerich and Devlin had scored a hit with
Stargate (1994) and were about to enjoy even greater success with
Independence Day (1996), both of which they’d also co-scripted. Their
participation was conditional on them being allowed to ignore Toho’s document
as well as the earlier scripts and handle the story and the kaiju in their own
way. They would retain the idea of Godzilla being mutated by the fallout from
nuclear weapons tests, but would steer clear of the more fantastic elements of
de Bont’s storyline and instead present Godzilla in a way more grounded in
reality, as a flesh-and-blood animal with its roots in the real world. The
concept designs for this new Godzilla met with a frosty reception at a meeting
with representatives of Toho, but they signed off on it nonetheless. TriStar
greenlit Emmerich and Devlin’s script at the turn of 1997 and filming
completed that year, in plenty of time for a summer blockbuster release in
1998. Marketing for the movie was extremely coy about what its titular star
would look like...
The opening credits play over a grainy montage of historical nuclear test
footage, supposedly set in French Polynesia, intercut with shots of
iguanas and their eggs on beaches, again supposedly in French Polynesia.
(Iguanas are native to the Americas, not the South Pacific – the largest
native reptiles French Polynesia boasts are geckos and sea turtles.) In
the present day, a Japanese tuna fishing vessel is sunk by a large animal
with claws and a tail. The only survivor, the ship’s cook, is taken to a
hospital in Tahiti, where he’s visited by a French man who asks him what
he saw. He repeats the name “Gojira”.
(This is an obvious homage to the destruction of the Daigo Fukuryū Maru in
Godzilla (1954), except that instead of being blasted with
radioactive energy, the ship is mauled. Online sources claim the ship is
called the Kobayashi Maru – it’s possible one of the crew might be saying
this when he makes an emergency call over the ship’s radio, but it’s never
clearly named on-screen. The name “Kobayashi Maru” in an American genre
script would, of course, be a Star Trek reference. In the world of
Star Trek, the civilian spaceship Kobayashi Maru is the subject of
a training exercise for Starfleet officers. That the exercise is famously
impossible to win could suggest some sort of comment here on global
nuclear politics, but I think it’s more likely someone simply reached for
the first ship name with “Maru” on the end that they could think of.)
Not much later, American biologist Nick Tatopoulos is airlifted out of
Ukraine by helicopter and flown to Panama. There he’s introduced to
paleontologist Dr Chapman, who simultaneously disparages him and lusts
after him, and the ineffectual Dr Craven, who reports on the attack on the
Japanese ship. Nick has been studying the long-term effects of radiation
on earthworms in the grounds of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, but has
been brought to Panama to investigate the traces of a much larger
radioactive mutant. Those traces include a trail of three-toed footprints
ten metres across and another mauled fishing ship in Jamaica. As Nick
recovers organic samples from the wrecked ship, he’s watched by the French
man who is posing as an insurance investigator. Soon after that, three
fishing trawlers are pulled underwater off the Eastern seaboard of the
USA. Dr Chapman suggests the creature responsible could be a species of
dinosaur that’s survived, undiscovered, into the present era, but Nick
believes, based on its radioactive spoor and its first sighting near
Tahiti, that it’s the result of mutation caused by past French nuclear
tests in the area.
In New York, Nick’s former college sweetheart Audrey Timmonds is working
in the WIDF news office, hoping to get a break as a TV reporter and
fending off the predatory advances of anchorman Charles Caiman. She’s
having lunch at a diner with her married friends, fellow office admin Lucy
Palotti and cameraman Victor Palotti, when the gigantic creature makes
landfall and strides through the city, disrupting a re-election rally by
the city’s Mayor Ebert and causing widespread damage. Victor manages to
get close-up footage of the creature, which is used in Caiman’s report of
the incident and the subsequent looting and evacuation of central New
York.
This is where we get our first good look at the new Godzilla. It looks and
moves a bit like the velociraptors in Jurassic Park (1993), albeit
much larger and with an extremely overdeveloped lower jaw. It lacks the
familiar row of large dorsal plates, although it has rows of smaller
plates down either side of its back. It walks bipedally but hunched over.
It moves deliberately in these early scenes, but is capable of greater
speed and agility when threatened. Barring some human-scale effects shots,
it’s entirely computer generated.
Audrey recognises Nick from coverage of his team arriving to investigate.
She’s unable to get Caiman to take her seriously when she says she knows
someone with inside information about the creature, but ends up using
Caiman’s ID to get access to the evacuated area.
The French man and his team of four have also arrived in New York and
planted a bug on Mayor Ebert, allowing them to eavesdrop on his briefing
with Colonel Hicks. The creature has disappeared following its grand
entrance – the response team believe it’s hiding in Manhattan and are keen
to stop it roaming any further. Nick suggests baiting the creature into
the open with fresh tuna, based on its previous targets. Sure enough, it
bursts out of the sewers near Madison Square and heads for the fish, but
makes a prompt getaway when the military open fire. (When it turns and
roars at a brace of pursuing ground vehicles, they’re engulfed in flames,
which is as close as this film gets to paying tribute to Godzilla’s
classic atomic breath.) The city is further damaged by a combination of
monster rampage and stray artillery.
Audrey finds Nick and follows him to a mobile operation centre where he
pregnancy-tests a blood sample from the creature. (Notwithstanding the
test is positive and Nick starts talking about asexual reproduction, he
continues to refer to Godzilla as “he”.) Left alone in the tent, Audrey
finds video footage of the Japanese sailor in Tahiti and the giant
footprints in Panama, which she uses as the basis for a journalistic
report that she hopes will secure her a better job at WIDF. However,
Caiman records over her report and takes the credit for it, mangling the
sailor’s repeated “Gojira” and renaming the creature “Godzilla”.
Nick is unable to persuade the army to devote resources to searching for a
hypothetical nest of Godzilla eggs while they’re focussing on the adult
creature. He’s also thrown out of the response team when the stolen video
footage is broadcast. He’s almost immediately picked up by the French man,
who introduces himself as Philippe Roche, an agent of the Direction
Générale des Services Extérieures.
(The actual French overseas intelligence service is the Direction Générale
de la Sécurité Extérieure – the scriptwriters got the acronym right,
anyway. Although Philippe clearly says “Roche”, which is a plausible
French surname, in the credits it’s given as “Roaché”, which isn’t.
Colonel Hicks sees his insurance investigator ID and pronounces it
“Roach”, which is a plausible insult from a bad-tempered American soldier.
It’s almost certainly a pseudonym – his four-man team all have hyphenated
names beginning with “Jean”, which is so absurdly hyper-French it can only
be a cover.)
Philippe wants Nick’s help to find the nest. He’s concerned that, if the
situation escalates, Godzilla’s origins could be tied back to French
nuclear tests in the South Pacific. Disguised as American soldiers, the
French team and Nick enter the New York subway network, followed by
Victor, who saw Nick being abducted, and Audrey. While Godzilla is lured
away by another abortive military trap and escapes into the Hudson River,
the French team find hundreds of eggs beneath the Madison Square Garden
sports stadium, each more than two metres tall. The eggs begin to hatch
and the humans escape into the lower levels of the stadium. The man-sized
Godzillas take down Philippe’s team as they forage through the stadium
complex for food. Nick, Philippe, Audrey and Victor manage to reach the
broadcast control booth, from which they’re able to transmit a message
calling for the army to launch an airstrike to prevent the creatures from
spreading and multiplying. They flee the building seconds before it’s
destroyed.
Before they can celebrate, Godzilla emerges from the ruined stadium,
evidently displeased at finding its children dead. The four commandeer a
taxi and escape, hotly pursued by Godzilla. They lead it onto the Brooklyn
Bridge, where it becomes tangled in the suspension cables and is an easy
target for the military’s F-18s. Philippe slips away with Victor’s camera
footage, which he promises to return after he’s edited his team out of it.
Audrey, now in demand as a reporter, quits WIDF and heads home with Nick.
Unseen by anyone, in the wrecked basement of the stadium, one final
Godzilla egg hatches.
The main theme of kaiju fan complaints about this film is that Roland Emmerich
and Dean Devlin didn’t “get” Godzilla. Steve Ryfle in particular, in his book
Japan’s Favourite Mon-Star, offers a curated selection of quotes from
interviews with Devlin that make him sound dismissive or even contemptuous of
the Japanese Godzilla movies, with the clear implication that he was entirely
the wrong person to take on this project. Conversely, in the behind-the-scenes
bonus material on the DVD release, Devlin talks about the happy childhood
hours he spent watching those old movies. (Emmerich, on the other hand, is
clearly just not a fan.) It’s not that he wasn’t familiar with them or didn’t
like them, he says, it’s just that he didn’t want to copy them, he wanted to
do something different. One might fairly ask why he insisted on using the
title Godzilla
and didn’t just produce his own film, and doubtless the monetary advantages of
brand recognition are a part of the answer. But still, I don’t think it’s
wrong of him or Emmerich to remark on the flaws of the Japanese movies or to
have wanted to do their own thing.
On its own terms, as a formulaic, family-friendly action blockbuster about a
giant mutated iguana, I think the 1998 Godzilla gets a lot right. It
even has some features in common with better kaiju movies. The opening credits
sequence neatly anticipates Legendary Pictures’ Godzilla (2014) and its
sequels. The street-level effects shots and chases through the streets of
Manhattan give scale and drama in exactly the same way as equivalent shots in
Gamera: The Guardian of the Universe (1995) and Gamera 2 (1996).
The realisation of Godzilla and its velociraptor-like offspring through CGI is
both a triumph and a failing: the film simultaneously benefits from all the
development work put in by the makers of Jurassic Park (1993) and its
sequel The Lost World (1997) and sets itself up for inevitable negative
comparisons and comments about diminishing returns. And didn’t
Godzilla vs Destoroyah (1995) and Gamera 2 both just do that
same sequence of people being picked off by small kaiju in an underground
complex... but with more interesting monsters?
One possible reason why the film doesn’t quite land is the comedy. This isn’t
to say comedic business isn’t welcome in giant monster movies.
Gamera 2 parodied news coverage of its narrative too, although it
didn’t site several major characters in the newsroom. Mayor Ebert and his
assistant Gene – famously named after film critics Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel
in retaliation for their panning of Emmerich and Devlin’s previous films – are
the kind of lightweight comic relief characters who often pop up in Japanese
kaiju eiga. The endless business with characters mangling Nick’s surname
wouldn’t be out of place either – he shares a name with Patrick Tatopoulos,
who provided the film’s creature designs, so I suspect the name and the
manglings are an in-joke. The repeated digs by the French characters at the
expense of American coffee are fine too. But stick them all together and the
overall tone of the movie starts to feel more heavily weighted towards comedy.
I think the casting gives a further indication that the filmmakers had their
tongues in their cheeks: three of the four actors that I would guess viewers
are most likely to recognise are known for their comedy roles. Hank Azaria
(Victor) and Harry Shearer (Caiman) are both prominent members of the
Simpsons (1989-present) voice cast, and Shearer’s also well-known as
one of the stars of the music mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap (1984).
Matthew Broderick (Nick) was probably still best known in 1998 (and may still
be today!) for his star turn in the teen comedy
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986). Notable entries in his filmography to
either side of this movie include the Jim Carrey vehicle
The Cable Guy (1996) and the ill-advised live-action
Inspector Gadget (1999). The fourth, Jean Reno (Philippe), may have
been more of an action movie star, coming to America’s attention as the
eponymous assassin in the Luc Besson film Léon (1994) and swiftly
landing a role in Mission: Impossible (1996), but in France he’d also
made a splash in the time-travel comedy Les Visiteurs (1993), a sequel
to which was released in 1998.
And then there’s the poster and trailer tagline, “Size Does Matter”. With
everyone so reluctant to show off the redesigned Godzilla ahead of time, the
one thing that’s going to define this movie in the minds of prospective
cinemagoers is a sexual innuendo.
But I wonder if its biggest flaw, its true failing, is simply that it tries to
apply American cinematic standards of "realism” to Godzilla? I don’t just mean
the decision to present Godzilla as some bland animal when, in the Toho movies
up to this point, he’d often been more of a supernatural force and a potent
symbolic entity. (I don’t know, maybe I am saying Dean Devlin didn’t
“get” Godzilla...) I’m also thinking of the more theatrical standards of
Japanese cinema, at least in this genre and at this time. Tragic melodrama is
a key part of Godzilla’s DNA that’s entirely absent from this movie. Perhaps
it would have helped to give Iguana Godzilla some personality if they’d
realised it through motion capture? Apparently mo-cap was considered, but
rejected precisely because it made Godzilla look like he was being portrayed
by a human actor. The trouble with this film is that it was in a position to
lean on Jurassic Park, which proved that creatures could be
convincingly realised on-screen through CGI, but preceded that other milestone
in special effects cinema,
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002), which similarly proved
the capabilities and worth of motion capture. (And of Andy Serkis. Let’s be
honest, if the TriStar Godzilla had been made in 2004, no one but Andy
Serkis would have been playing the title role.) The Legendary Pictures movies
would use elements of mo-cap to great effect.
Let’s talk about French nuclear weapons testing. Presumably attributing
Godzilla’s mutation to American tests was never an option in an American
movie, and blaming the Russians would have meant including a charismatic
Russian character in the main cast, also presumably a no-no. Blaming the
French meant the filmmakers could cast the highly bankable Jean Reno, a
win-win situation. It’s just possible some cinemagoers might have remembered
all the fuss about the 1985 sinking of the Greenpeace vessel
Rainbow Warrior at harbour in New Zealand, an act of terrorism
sponsored by the French government to counter the vessel’s proposed protest of
nuclear tests in French Polynesia. Bear in mind, though, that this film was
released about five years before America got all weird about the French
because of their opposition to the invasion and occupation of Iraq. (Who could
forget the hilarity of “freedom fries”? On a related note, when Caiman is
reporting on Godzilla’s first incursion into New York and describes it as the
city’s biggest calamity since the World Trade Center bombing, it took me a
minute to remember that he’s talking about a terrorist incident that took
place in February 1993.)
France didn’t sign up to the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty the Soviet Union
and the USA had ratified in 1963 – the one that banned all nuclear tests
except those carried out underground – and continued its nuclear weapons tests
for some time after that. At the time, France was in the middle of a series of
tests in Algeria, 13 of them underground and five atmospheric, that it
continued under the terms of the treaty it had signed in 1962 granting Algeria
its independence. When the tests had started, France had been at war with its
former colonial property. Later on, it turned its attention to the islands of
the Pacific Ocean, conducting 193 tests after the middle of 1966 in French
Polynesia – these are the ones referenced in this film. The majority from 1975
onward were underground detonations but most prior to that were devices
deployed by balloon. The last one was carried out in January 1996 – at the
time Emmerich and Devlin were writing their first draft script, for all anyone
knew, France might have been planning to continue its nuclear tests.
France did sign the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty when it was
introduced at the United Nations in 1996 and ratified it in April 1998, one
month before this film was released. That treaty, however, has not yet come
into force because eight nations including the USA never ratified it and
Vladimir Putin withdrew Russia’s ratification in 2023.
The 1998 Godzilla underperformed at the box office and was mauled by
the critics, leading to the abandonment of a planned trilogy. It did, however,
lead to the second American animated Godzilla series (1998-2000). In
this, Godzilla’s last surviving child imprints on Nick Tatopoulos, allowing
him to direct it to defend America from the predations of other monsters, not
unlike the premise of the Hanna-Barbera animated Godzilla (1978-79).
They even got the same actors to do the voices for Mayor Ebert, Colonel (now
Major!) Hicks and Dr Craven. All of whom are second fiddle to Animated Iguana
Godzilla, whose roars are provided by the guy who voiced Megatron in
The Transformers (1984-87).
Gamera 2: Advent of Legion (1996) Daiei Film Co, Ltd Director:
Kaneko Shūsuke, Higuchi Shinji (special effects) Also known as:
Gamera 2: Attack of Legion, the US title. Once again, I’m going with
the version helpfully included in the title caption. (Although it’s rendered
with no punctuation as “GAMERA2 advent of legion”, which would look messy at
the top of this page.) Also discussed: the
Rebirth of Mothra trilogy (1996, 1997, 1998)
NASA tracks a cluster of objects on a collision course with Earth. A group
of amateur meteor watchers sees one passing low overhead and striking the
ground near a lake in Hokkaido. The JSDF scrambles to inspect the scene of
the crash; although there are no signs of radioactivity or chemical
fallout, it looks as though the meteor was braking on impact. A strange
green aurora appears in the night sky over the site, accompanied by
localised electrical interference. The meteorite itself can’t be found, as
if it melted or moved away of its own accord. Honami Midori, a curator at
the Sapporo Science Centre, and her boss compare notes with Colonel
Watarase and Lieutenant Hanatani, two of the JSDF soldiers at the scene.
A couple of days later, two security guards at a Kirin brewery (hooray,
product placement!) investigate a disturbance in the warehouse. One of the
guards is Osako Tsutomu, formerly of the Nagasaki Police Department. He
quit the force after his terrifying experiences in the previous film and
became a security guard at the opposite end of the country because he
thought it would be an easier job. He isn’t best pleased when he and his
colleague find a large, spiny, silvery, one-eyed creature, like an insect
the size of a man, wandering among the beer crates. Watarase and Hanatani
investigate this incident too, and call Honami in to ask if she has any
theories. The contents of 10,000 crates of beer are spilled across the
floor, but most of the glass has gone, leaving only a residue of powdered
silicon. Honami has just learned that all the fibre-optic cable has
mysteriously vanished from NTT’s Hokkaido network centre, which may
explain the telecoms issues the Science Centre has been having lately. The
strange incidents form a line from the meteorite impact site towards
Sapporo.
The day after that, more of the alien creatures attack a Sapporo subway
train. In addition to the glass from the train’s windows, they attack any
passengers carrying electronic devices. Above ground, what looks like an
enormous red flower bursts through the roof of a mall. Below ground, the
creatures continue to relay silicon to the plant’s roots, which
dramatically raise the atmospheric pressure and concentration of oxygen in
the subway. Concerned that humans can’t survive alongside the aliens, the
JSDF decides to destroy them by setting off explosives in the subway – the
high concentration of oxygen should amplify the blast of a relatively
small payload. Honami hypothesises that the plant is the aliens’ way of
reproducing and spreading themselves to other worlds, by explosively
launching seed pods into space. Obitsu, an NTT engineer who’s been
liaising with Honami, runs a computer projection showing that if the plant
launches its seed, everything within miles of the city will be flattened
by the blast.
As the plant blossoms and prepares to seed, Gamera flies in from the
coastal waters to the south. (He looks somewhat less rounded and cute and
more sharp-edged than he did in the previous film. We see that he has
retractable underarm flaps that he uses in flight, when he’s not spinning
like a UFO.) He sucks in the hyper-oxygenated air around the plant and
roasts it with a fireball, then just to be sure he pulls it up by the
roots and gives it another flaming. The creatures from the subway respond
by swarming up and covering Gamera, leaving him stumbling around blindly
and discharging electricity across his skin. Seeing this, Hanatani quotes
the Biblical Gospel of Mark (chapter 5, verse 9) and names the alien
creatures Legion – the name is soon picked up and falls into common use.
Gamera is able to take flight when some of the creatures are drawn from
him to a nearby electrical transformer station, and he spins the rest off
as he makes his escape. After he’s gone, a new, larger variant of the
alien creatures, one resembling a gigantic mosquito, bursts up from the
subway and flies off. The JSDF pursue it but, despite hitting it with
missiles, are unable to bring it down.
The corpse of one of the insectoid Legion creatures is recovered from the
beach after Gamera’s escape and dissected. It has pneumatic joints instead
of muscles and its exoskeleton has the same molecular structure as a
silicon semiconductor. (Although we’re not shown this, we’re told later
that it also has wings powerful enough to carry it across the water from
Hokkaidō to Honshū.) Discussing the findings at her home, Honami, Watarase
and Obitsu speculate that the creatures might communicate
electromagnetically, and that they might be deliberately targeting Japan’s
cities as a source both of food and of “enemy” electromagnetism that
disrupts their communication.
Watarase and Honami travel to Tokyo (where, delightfully, the Tokyo Tower
hasn’t yet been rebuilt following the events of the previous film) to
discuss strategy with a senior JSDF officer. The JSDF is stretched too
thin to prepare for possible attacks on all Japan’s cities, but it seems
likely that Legion will attack another city somewhere between Sapporo and
Tokyo. Legion strikes again at Sendai, with the insectoid creatures
neutralising a pachinko arcade and the plant erupting from the main train
station. The JSDF moves in and evacuates the population, flying civilians
out in tandem-rotor cargo helicopters. By chance, Honami, who’s among the
evacuees, meets Kusanagi Asagi, who had a telepathic connection with
Gamera in the previous movie and who has been holidaying with a friend in
Sendai. The evacuation is disrupted when Gamera flies overhead and is
attacked by the kaiju-sized mosquito creature, which appears from under
the runway at Sendai Airport. Gamera fights to protect the last helicopter
and allow it to get clear, while Legion fights to stall Gamera long enough
for the plant to seed. The mosquito creature’s proboscis opens out
sideways, allowing it to knock Gamera down with a powerful electrical
discharge. By the time Gamera manages to get to the plant and knock it
over, it’s already seeding. Sendai is obliterated in the explosion and
Gamera is left comatose at the centre of the crater.
By comparing the electromagnetic output of the neon signs of the pachinko
arcade with that of the transformer that attracted the small Legion
creatures in Sapporo, Obitsu finds a common pattern. Honami suggests that
this could be used like a pheromone to lure the creatures into a trap the
next time they appear. The JSDF anticipates an attack on Tokyo and is
mobilised on the government’s orders to defend the city. The large Legion
creature surfaces in Ashikaga (roughly 50km inland from Tokyo); the JSDF’s
artillery bounce off its metallic hide, and it makes short work of the
tanks and jets with the electrical discharge from its proboscis. It fires
a swarm of the smaller creatures from its abdomen which fly towards the
city centre.
Honami plans to put Asagi onto a plane home at the airport, but Asagi
insists that Gamera isn’t finished and the pair travel to the crater at
Sendai instead. They find a crowd gathered around braziers, keeping vigil
over Gamera, who is covered in an ashy crust. As they will Gamera to
recover, the sparks from their braziers form a cloud of energy over him
and he shakes off the ash and lifts off. Asagi’s magatama shatters in her
hand. Gamera confronts the larger Legion first, but is again outmatched.
As the Legion swarm flies back to assist, Obitsu persuades the duty
manager of a local NTT relay station to broadcast his electromagnetic
pheromone signal, and the swarm is distracted onto the station’s power
lines where they’re easily picked off by JSDF helicopters. The JSDF is
eventually persuaded to support Gamera and, with their help, Gamera is
able to break off Legion’s proboscis. Unfortunately this doesn’t
incapacitate Legion, which is still able to fire punishing beams of energy
at Gamera. In a final bid to stop Legion, Gamera draws wave after wave of
energy into himself from across the Earth. The abdominal plates of his
shell hinge open and he releases the gathered energy, vaporising Legion at
last. As the sun rises, he takes flight, saluted by several JSDF soldiers.
As they stroll through the centre of Sapporo some time later, Honami
suggests to Obitsu that Gamera isn’t really protecting humanity but acting
to preserve all terrestrial life. Obitsu wonders if humanity’s destructive
behaviour might lead Gamera to consider us his enemy.
So, my first thought on rewatching this film is: Wow, the Kirin Brewery
Company really emptied their marketing budget on this!
My second thought is: This looks suspiciously like a response to
Godzilla vs Destoroyah (1995). There’s a swarm of puppet-like
human-scale kaiju; a scene of armed troopers fighting the monsters in a
confined underground space, a bit like in Aliens (1986); a sort of
daikaiju queen of the swarm portrayed by a stunt actor. As with Destoroyah,
there’s a rare and satisfying “scienciness” to Legion – Honami likens the
organism’s combination of hive creatures and plant to the symbiosis between
leafcutter ants and the fungus that they farm, in a moment that feels very
much like the scriptwriter indulgently showing off his research. Both films
include scenes of atomic-bomb-esque destruction, but where
Godzilla vs Destoroyah throws its scenes in without warning whenever
characters start talking about Godzilla going into meltdown, essentially
faking out the audience, Gamera 2 really delivers the scene and means
it. (It might be a stretch too far to compare Gamera’s new trapdoor torso
fireball attack, never seen before or since, with the fiery glow of the dying
Godzilla’s chest in the Toho film.) Basically, at various points the makers of
this film seem to be turning to the makers of that film and saying, “See, we
can do that too”. (Or even – heresy! – “We can do that better”.) There’s a
clear seven months between the release dates of the two films, so a direct
response isn’t impossible given the fast production schedule of a 90s Japanese
kaiju movie, but it would have been tight if so.
The effects overall are, once again, excellent. Like
Gamera: The Guardian of the Universe (1995), Gamera 2 makes good
use of ground-level shots to give scale to the proceedings and to show off the
miniature work. There’s a brilliant shot of a public phone box shattering as
Gamera stomps towards the Legion plant in Sapporo, and a shot of the queen
Legion bursting out of the ground with a phone box similarly foregrounded. On
a slightly different scale, the inclusion of a large model of a cargo
helicopter circling Gamera and Legion during the standoff at Sendai Airport
really helps to sell that scene.
Some of the production’s other choices are peculiar. There are some weird
freeze frame moments scattered across the film – of Honami and Watarase
piecing together the clues at the meteorite site, the survivors being rescued
from the subway train, and Obitsu and Watarase piecing together more clues
later on in Honami’s home. These feel like perhaps an attempt to use the
visual language of docudrama – perhaps they’re meant to make the movie feel
less far removed from reality. There’s also a fair bit of religious,
specifically Christian imagery. Aside from Hanatani naming the kaiju
antagonist after a Biblical demon (and citing the chapter and verse to back it
up!), there’s the way the “me” of Gamera’s name, メ, is presented in the
opening title graphics as an upright cross on a fiery background before
settling into its place in the film’s title, and the way the people gathered
in Sendai raise Gamera from the dead by essentially praying him better. There
was already a hint of this in Gamera: The Guardian of the Universe, in
which Asagi, with her stigmata and the symbol of her saviour around her neck,
declares her faith at the end of the film that he’ll return to save the world
again. Lastly among the odd choices, an ecological message is clumsily tacked
onto the final scene because apparently that’s just what we do in kaiju eiga
now.
There are some good choices too, mostly in the use of comedy. There’s plenty
of “realistic” news coverage of the events playing on TV screens in the
characters’ home or in the background, some of which verges on the parodic.
There’s also some comedy business of Honami’s mother stopping her father from
eavesdropping when she has male visitors. Most noticeably, Hotaru Yukijirō is
back as the cowardly ex-cop Osako, albeit briefly. He and Fujitani Ayako, as
Asagi, are the only two returnees from the first film. The new main cast are
fine, but for me they’re less memorable than the old main cast.
So what were Toho doing at this time? Obviously not making more Godzilla
movies, but they weren’t going to let their visual effects team sit idle
either. So, while everyone was waiting for the American Godzilla movie to
arrive, Toho turned to their other superstar kaiju and produced a new trilogy
of Mothra movies. These are known outside Japan as
Rebirth of Mothra (1996), Rebirth of Mothra 2 (1997) and
(...checks notes...) Rebirth of Mothra 3 (1998). As with the Heisei
Gamera trilogy, the second and third instalments use Anglo (technically
Arabic) numerals in their promotional materials and on screen, and these are
pronounced in the trailers and interviews as if in English (“Tsū” and “Surī”).
They were pitched at a younger audience than the Heisei Godzilla movies, with
child protagonists throughout, cartoonish villains and simple, super-obvious
environmental messaging.
It’s interesting, in the wake of two films in which Daiei modernised the
children’s favourite Gamera with a grittier, more mature tone, to see Toho
going in the other direction and presenting their modernised Mothra as a bit
of light fantasy for kids. It’s also fascinating to watch the 90s generation
of Toho kaiju filmmakers, over the course of the trilogy, essentially
rediscover how to make a kids’ film. This surely wasn’t a lost art – it had
only been 20 years since the studio’s live action output was headlining the
children’s Toho Champion Festival. And yet, as slick as the movies are in
their visual effects, thanks in no small part to an injection of CGI, they’re
clunky as hell on the narrative level.
In the first film, an unlikeable, bickering brother and sister are drawn into
a battle between titanic supernatural forces when their father’s logging
company disturbs an ancient seal. The second film takes more of an
Indiana Jones approach, with a trio of kids and a couple of fishermen
racing to uncover the secrets of a vanished civilisation that’s connected to a
pollution-loving aquatic daikaiju. (This second movie follows in the
questionable footsteps of Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla (1974) by
plundering the indigenous culture of Okinawa for the name of the civilisation
whose ancient temple surfaces, Atlantis-like, off the Okinawan coast.) By the
third film, the writers have just about got the hang of sympathetic child
characters but make them subordinate to the fantasy characters in a story of
kaiju battling across the present day and the Cretaceous Period.
As far as the kaiju antagonists go, Rebirth of Mothra 2 fares the best
with an original creation that also comes with an entourage of toxic starfish
to menace the human cast. The first and third films fall back on variations on
the familiar old King Ghidorah.
The protagonists, meanwhile, get a significant makeover. Mothra’s fairies,
formerly referred to as the Shobijin and more recently, in
Godzilla vs Mothra (1992), as the Cosmos, are now called the Elias.
Naturally, they’ve been recast. They used to be not so much characters in
their own right, more a kind of weird interface between Mothra and the humans,
but now they’re expected to carry large parts of the plot of this trilogy
themselves, so they’ve been reimagined as individuals with distinct
personalities and proper names. What’s more, there’s a third Elias, coded in
her costume and performance as evil, who’s working against them and trying to
use the antagonist kaiju to save Earth by destroying humanity. The good Elias
have their own tiny version of Mothra to ride around on, which they call
“Fairy” – if Toho weren’t making toys off the back of the illusory tiny Mothra
that appeared in Godzilla vs SpaceGodzilla (1994), they surely would be
now. The evil Elias, meanwhile, gets to fly about on a kind of miniature
cybernetic dragon, which opens up a world of questions about the presumably
extinct civilisation the Elias represent.
In further contrast with their rustic islander predecessors, the Elias appear
in increasingly elaborate fairy princess costumes across the trilogy. And yes,
they still sing the old Mothra song. The first movie screeches to a halt to
showcase what looks like a pop video for the song, with the two good Elias
matted incongruously onto the generic background of a roaring log fire. They
also get a completely new song in the third movie, and very nice it is too.
The more disappointing change, perhaps, is that Mothra, traditionally one of
the few explicitly female daikaiju, is replaced by a male version. I don’t if
this was considered necessary to appeal to the target child audience or done
for any other particular reason. The more familiar Mothra dies in the first
movie and hands over to a male larva which quickly pupates to win the
climactic fight. He’s referred to by secondary sources as Mothra Leo, but
on-screen he’s just Mothra. In what looks like another strong bid for spin-off
toys, during the trilogy he mutates into a succession of specialist forms that
allow him to do plot-mandated things like dive underwater, grow plate armour
and literally fly millions of years into the past.
I wouldn’t recommend the Rebirth of Mothra trilogy to anyone but kaiju
completists. They’re not terrible enough to make the Tri-Star movie look good
– I wouldn’t go that far, but more on that in the next blog post! – but
they certainly make the Heisei Gamera trilogy look even better by comparison.
That Daiei, after so quickly turning around Gamera 2, should have
waited a few years before producing Gamera 3 (1999) makes it look
cruelly as if they’re just hanging back and giving Toho more rope.