Godzilla Final Wars

Godzilla Final Wars (2004)
Toho Studios / CP International / Zazou Productions / Napalm Films
Director: Kitamura Ryūhei, Asada Eiichi (special effects)

For Godzilla’s 50th birthday, Toho organised a co-production with what might still be the largest budget of any Japanese kaiju eiga – an estimated 1.9 billion yen – including location filming in Australia and America, a dozen returning monsters, extensive CGI effects and a soundtrack by prog-rock pretentissimo Keith Emerson. They surely can’t have hoped to recoup that money, but they must have expected there to be some hype among cinemagoers. Yet, even with a limited release in cinemas outside Japan, Godzilla Final Wars made no more in ticket sales than Godzilla vs Megaguirus (2000) had. It’s the only Millennium series Godzilla movie to make a gross financial loss, and a substantial one at that.

This isn’t to say that Final Wars killed the Millennium series. Toho were already planning to rest Godzilla by this point – the 50th anniversary celebration was just a bonus. A very expensive bonus.

This film features a lot of callbacks to earlier Toho tokusatsu films. The synopsis that follows will include frequent pauses to note those callbacks, which readers will hopefully find helpful rather than confusing.

Two strange phenomena have characterised the second half of the 20th century. The first is the widespread appearance of daikaiju, in the face of which humanity has put aside all international differences and come together under the protection of the Earth Defense Force (EDF). (An indulgent selection of clips from old Toho movies illustrates the emergent threat of the kaiju.) The other is the discovery of mutants among the human population. They’re differentiated from regular people by their superhuman athleticism and reflexes. (In other words, don’t expect wings or laser eyes or any of that.) The EDF has formed an elite battalion of these mutants, called M Organisation.

(We do see some of M Organisation’s soldiers fighting daikaiju in person, but still, you’ve got to wonder whether the EDF’s gunships might really be doing the heavy lifting and the mutants might possibly be used to counter more... human-scale threats. Just how peaceful is this world of global co-operation? Judging by appearances, it looks very authoritarian. But more on that later.)

The EDF employs a small fleet of gunships that look like hovering submarines. One of these, the Gotengo (which can be distinguished from the others by the large drill bit on its nose), buries Godzilla under a landslide in Antarctica in 2004, leaving him alive but frozen. An unspecified number of years later, the gunner on that mission has become the captain of the Gotengo. Captain Douglas Gordon is fending off an attack from Manda, a golden sea serpent, at the bottom of the Atlantic. (Manda debuted in the film Atragon (1963), as did the Gotengo.) Gordon shakes off Manda by ordering his crew to dive deeper, close to a volcanic vent, and succeeds in killing the monster, but the Gotengo is badly damaged. The head of the EDF, Commander Namikawa, reprimands Gordon for his recklessness and orders him to report to base for a court martial.

At M Organisation headquarters, Ensign Ōzaki Shinichi is ordered to report to his commanding officer. Ōzaki, who is considered weak by his peers because of his compassion, is assigned to act as bodyguard for Otonashi Miyuki, a biologist, while she examines an unusual kaiju specimen that’s being held in the hangar-like Defence Force Museum. Calcified and more than 12,000 years old, it was dredged up near Hokkaido. The museum staff have already discovered that it was a cyborg and that its organic components included M-base in the DNA, a fifth genetic base that’s only previously been found in the human mutants. In an impromptu psychic vision, Mothra’s envoys the Shobijin reveal to Ōzaki and Otonashi that the inert daikaiju is the evil Gigan, and gift Ōzaki a cross-shaped amulet. (Viewers familiar with Gigan will probably have recognised him immediately from his shape, even under that rock cladding. He was introduced in Godzilla vs Gigan (1972) and last seen in Godzilla vs Megalon (1973). The Shobijin are played by the same actresses as in Godzilla: Tokyo SOS (2003) and are dressed much the same, but now have bob haircuts.)

In the skies over New York, an aircraft carrying Daigo Naotarō, the Secretary-General of the United Nations (which apparently still exists, although Daigo seems to be something more like a celebrity figurehead than a political or diplomatic leader) is destroyed by Rodan. Simultaneously, other kaiju attacks are reported including Anguirus in Shanghai, King Caesar in Okinawa and Kamacuras in Paris. The EDF scrambles its gunships to contain the beasts. Other kaiju that we see attacking cities around the world are: a CGI iguana-monster in Sydney that looks almost exactly like the 1998 Tri-Star Godzilla, but not quite exactly enough to infringe copyright; Kumonga in Arizona; and Ebirah at the “Tōkai Petrochemical Complex”. Meanwhile, an old man and his grandson who are out hunting in the woods near Mt Fuji stumble across a timid Minilla.

(Rodan, the pterosaur, debuted in his own film in 1956 and was last seen in Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla II (1993). Anguirus was a fixture of the Shōwa era Godzilla series and was last seen in Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla (1974). King Caesar, a bipedal lion-dog-faced guardian creature, made his only previous appearance in Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla. Kamacuras and Kumonga, a giant mutated mantis and spider respectively, date back to Son of Godzilla (1967). So does Minilla, the titular son of Godzilla. He’s as round-faced here as he’s ever been, and he gurgles instead of making “wag-wa” noises – he actually sounds a lot like Mr Blobby. As in All Monsters Attack (1969), he has the ability to change his size depending on whether he’s interacting with human characters or Godzilla. Ebirah is a lobster kaiju last seen in Ebirah, Horror of the Deep (1966). Toho named – and trademarked! – the creature that appears in Sydney as “Zilla”, a direct response to an American kaiju that, according to the producer of Final Wars, “took the God out of Godzilla”. Ouch.)

A squad of mutants is sent in to fight Ebirah with bazooka-like phaser weapons. Just as they succeed in bringing Ebirah down, all the daikaiju around the world dematerialise, gathered up by UFOs that converge on a spherical mothership above the EDF HQ in Tokyo. Secretary-General Daigo is transported down to explain that the occupants of the mothership, who rescued him from his plane, come in peace. He is beamed back up along with Commander Namikawa and a senior M Organisation officer, and they’re met by the leader of the aliens, apparently a bald-headed middle-aged man, and his younger deputy. The leader suggests that the humans, who would find the true name hard to pronounce, refer to his homeworld as Planet X and his people as Xiliens. The Xiliens have hoovered up all the daikaiju as a show of goodwill, and have come to Earth to warn humanity that in less than a year and a half, a small, fiery world called Gorath will collide with Earth. They suggest the humans devote their attention and their military resources to that problem.

(Invasion of Astro-Monster (1965) also featured a group of aliens from Planet X with dubious motives. The Xiliens seen here, like those Xiliens, favour black clothing and narrow black visors, although they don’t cover their heads and they’re quick to take the visors off. The uniform they wear here includes black leather trenchcoats, still quite trendy one year after the end of the original Matrix trilogy (1999-2003). Their story about the rogue planet Gorath, meanwhile, is lifted from the sci-fi adventure film Gorath (1962).)

In a press conference, Daigo proclaims the dawning of a new age of interplanetary co-operation and the replacement of the United Nations with the “Space Nations”. The world is seized by “X” mania. But Ōzaki remains sceptical – the timing of it all, just when the EDF has got its hands on Gigan, is suspicious. And Otonashi’s journalist sister, Anna, who interviewed Daigo before his plane accident, has noticed that in more recent footage he doesn’t blink; she later catches him out in a lie about his beloved pet dog. The final proof comes when Daigo is attacked with a knife by a would-be assassin – Otonashi is able to collect and analyse some of the Secretary-General’s blood and discovers that he isn’t human. When Ōzaki goes to Commander Namikawa with the intention of revealing this, he quickly realises she too has been replaced by the Xiliens. What’s more, the EDF’s chief scientist has noticed that all the images of Gorath taken from Earth look identical, suggesting that it’s just a shabby projection and not a real threat at all.

The impostors are killed and the alien deception is exposed on live television. The Xiliens are, it turns out, thin silvery humanoids wearing organic outer skins to disguise themselves as humans. The Xilien leader was hoping to take over the planet peacefully by stealth; his deputy now shoots him and takes control. He’s able to exert some kind of power over M Organisation’s mutants which prevents them attacking him; only Ōzaki is unaffected, and he’s unable to beat the Xilien on his own. The new alien leader leaves to begin a more direct takeover of Earth using his menagerie of captured daikaiju. Ōzaki, the Otonashi sisters and a crew of loyal EDF officers go on the run, pursued by mind-controlled mutants, with the man they hope can save the Earth – Captain Gordon, whom Ōzaki has released from the brig where he was waiting to be sentenced after his court martial.

Gordon retakes control of the Gotengo, which has been repaired, and goes to Antarctica to release Godzilla, the one force that can threaten the Xiliens. He dubs this mission “Operation Final War”. Godzilla clearly bears a grudge against the Gotengo and is easily led across the globe towards the Xiliens’ mothership, fighting and defeating rogue daikaiju along the way. His first opponent is Gigan, who’s been revived and sent in pursuit of the Gotengo (and this time, he does fire laser beams from his red visor). Godzilla soon blasts his head off, much to the Xilien leader’s dismay. In Sydney, he dispatches Zilla even more quickly. In New Guinea, he is only briefly stalled by Kumonga. Making landfall in Japan, he tackles first Kamacuras, then Anguirus, Rodan and King Caesar simultaneously. The Gotengo reaches the Xilien mothership and drills its way in while Godzilla thrashes Hedorah (last seen in 1971) and Ebirah in Tokyo Bay. Gordon, his first officer, Ōzaki and Otonashi are taken prisoner by the Xilien leader, who reveals that the Xiliens intend to farm humanity for their delicious mitochondria.

In the ruins of central Tokyo, Godzilla faces his ultimate foe, Monster X, who’s just arrived inside a meteor. Monster X is a bulky, heavily armoured biped, although as we’ll shortly discover, that armour’s hiding something. Sent by the Shobijin, Mothra arrives to help but is pitted against an upgraded Gigan. (That was fast work, recovering Gigan from the South Pole, repairing him and giving him a makeover.) The new Gigan looks just like the old Gigan except that he has bifurcated chainsaws instead of metal hooks for forearms. He can also now fire razor-edged discs from his chest. Mothra dodges these and they circle back and decapitate Gigan again.

On the mothership, the Xilien leader tells Ōzaki that his people evolved from something like the mutants, and that he and Ōzaki are both rare super-mutants called “Keizers”. This is why Ōzaki was able to resist being controlled earlier. This time, he nearly kills the other humans while under the leader’s control, but Otonashi uses the Shobijin’s amulet to bring him back to his senses. A fight breaks out in the control room, during which the real Daigo, Namikawa and the senior M Organisation officer enter the bridge and come to our heroes’ aid, having been kept alive and apparently broken free in the confusion. Ōzaki and the Xilien leader fight hand to hand to the death while the others escape back to the Gotengo. Ōzaki ultimately wins, but as the Xilien leader dies, the mothership begins to self-destruct and Ōzaki barely joins the others aboard the Gotengo.

As Godzilla fights him to a standstill, Monster X sheds his armour to reveal that he’s really the winged, three-headed daikaiju Ghidorah. (Least surprising reveal ever. The monster puppet of many Shōwa era alien invaders, Ghidorah was last seen playing a very different role in GMK three movies ago. He looks more of a dull metallic colour than his usual golden-yellow; his necks are a bit stumpier, his horns are more pronounced and his eyes glow red.) Ghidorah is able to use the energy beams from his mouths to levitate Godzilla and smack him around, then bites into him and starts to drain his vitality. Ōzaki somehow channels his super-mutant energy through the Gotengo’s weapons systems and gives Godzilla the boost he needs to fight back. In short order, Godzilla blasts off two of Ghidorah’s heads, throws him into orbit and incinerates him. He then turns on the Gotengo, apparently still bent on settling his grudge against the gunship. At that moment, Minilla appears on the scene, having directed the hunter and his grandson to drive him into central Tokyo. He persuades Godzilla to back down and the two of them lope off into the sunset. Ōzaki remarks that it’s not the end, but the start of a new war, although what he means by that is never explained.

With celebratory anniversary episodes of media franchises – and the bigger the number, the more so, although I’m struggling to think of more than a handful that have made it as far as 50 years – the point isn’t to produce an exemplar of the series. It’s nice if that happens, but the real point is for the fans and the creators to look back and wallow in nostalgia. It’s more about iconography than substance. Hey, look, it’s this thing again. Remember that thing? Ha ha, we repeated the other thing. What made the franchise successful or interesting in the first place is hollowed out and presented as the gift shop souvenir version of itself.

Final Wars takes that to an extreme. There’s no suggestion here that the daikaiju might symbolise anything or offer any sort of comment on current affairs, unless it’s to whale on the Tri-Star Godzilla (1998) once again. They only exist to fight each other for our amusement, and they do precious little of that. Godzilla and his sparring partners get scant screentime, with most of the fight scenes – and admittedly there are a lot of them to get through – wrapped up in moments. All that money spent on new costumes and CGI models for a dozen old monsters, and they’re barely even there. I think Hedorah’s on screen for a total of 18 seconds. The film is far more interested in showing us scenes of humans (and humanoid aliens) fighting each other, posturing and looking butch while they drive motorbikes and flying submarines. (Ha, I nearly said the film was “more invested in its characters”! What an idea. The nearest anyone gets to character development is the revelation that they own a dog, and even that’s only in there for a plot reason.)

When the Godzilla movies of the 1970s were emptied of deeper meaning and reduced to a more superficial formula, they at least had camp appeal to fall back on. There’s some camp business here – Matsuoka Masahiro as Ōzaki and Kitamura Kazuki as the young Xilien leader are so arch they’re parabolic – but on the whole, Final Wars isn’t trying hard enough to justify being labelled as camp. What it seems to be aiming for is a kind of generic Hollywood brand of macho nihilism, and it’s quite lazy about it. It’s a rolling parade of explosions, tumbling vehicles, eye-rolling, grimacing and casual sexism with moments of outright misogyny, punctuated by classic Toho references that go nowhere, while a hyperactive dance/rock soundtrack rattles away underneath it all.

I wouldn’t say it takes itself entirely seriously. Exhibit A for the defence is the scene of a television talk show during the “X” craze, in which a panellist declares that it’s the dream of scientists everywhere to fight full contact with an alien. Exhibit B is the moment during the climactic bust-up when Ōzaki repeatedly punches the Xilien leader while, on a screen behind them, we can see an identically framed shot of Godzilla punching Monster X; this is the closest this film comes to offering anything that could be described as art. Exhibit C is the brief scene of a child in Canada playing with an army of kaiju action figures, which almost feels like a comment on Final Wars itself – in the course of its two long hours, the movie conveys all the narrative logic and sophistication of that child. Still, the overall tone of Final Wars is a humourless one.

In support of that is the washed-out cinematography. There’s a blue theme for scenes aboard the Gotengo and a yellow interior for the Xilien mothership, but everything else just looks grey. For a world that’s embraced international peace and harmony, it doesn’t look all that appealing. It’s more like a vision of Soviet-era futurism. Throughout the movie, Captain Gordon looks like he’s cosplaying a beefed-up version of Joseph Stalin. In fact, it looks a lot like a dry run of Iron Sky (2012), the crowd-sourced sci-fi comedy film about Nazis on the Moon, but with less self-awareness. And, well, maybe this speculative vision is fair enough. If the world is in a constant state of emergency because of all those daikaiju, and the diplomatic authority of the UN has yielded to the military authority of the EDF, maybe this is just what it would look like. Perhaps this is a more honest take than the more wholesome, photogenic heroism of G-Force (1989-95) or the JXSDF (2002-03).

Here's what I think might have happened behind the scenes, and bear in mind this is purely speculation on my part. IMDb credits Mimura Wataru and Tomiyama Shōgo with developing the storyline for Final Wars. Tomiyama was the executive producer of every Toho kaiju movie from Yamato Takeru (1994) onward, including this one; Mimura had worked on the scripts for Yamato Takeru, Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla II (1993) and three previous Millennium series Godzilla films. I imagine they came up with the idea of marking Godzilla’s 50th anniversary with something like Destroy All Monsters (1968) but bigger, drawing heavily on the tokusatsu movies of their youth for inspiration. (There is a definite lean in Final Wars towards commemorating the Shōwa era, and I think that’s significant. Barring Zilla, and we all know why that’s there, the daikaiju are exclusively Shōwa era veterans. Those creations that were original to the Heisei and Millennium series do get a nod, but only glancingly, in the opening montage of clips and in the toys scattered on that Canadian child’s floor.)

As the actual scriptwriters, IMDb credits the director, Kitamura Ryūhei, and Kiriyama Isao, who has collaborated with Kitamura on several of his films. Nothing in their resumés indicates any history with kaiju eiga, or with any cinematic genre other than hyperkinetic action thrillers. They’d become international big shots with hi-octane flicks like Versus (2000) and Azumi (2003). I suspect they were brought in to make Godzilla’s birthday movie as saleable as possible to the international audience that had responded so well to sci-fi films like The Matrix (1999) – the Wachowskis’ breakthrough movie is specifically referenced in the Xiliens’ trenchcoats and a couple of “bullet time” shots in the fight scenes. I think Isao and Kitamura took the shell of what Tomiyama and Mimura had plotted out and used it as a frame on which to hang the gung-ho Hollywood-style martial arts explosionbuster they really wanted to make.

At some point, someone must have noticed that the plotline about superhuman mutants offered a link to the hugely successful Marvel comics spinoff X-Men (2000) and its 2003 sequel, and that that in turn resonated with the presence in Toho’s back catalogue of a species of aliens from Planet X, in Invasion of Astro-Monster. Maybe it was baked into the original storyline, maybe it was added into a later draft. The Xiliens we see here are a kind of amalgam of several Shōwa era alien invaders. They have more in common with the aliens from the nebula next door in Godzilla vs Gigan – using specific humans as disguises, actually sort of insectoid in appearance, plus of course they control Gigan. The parallels with Destroy All Monsters, meanwhile, might make us expect the Kilaaks to turn up. It’s plausible that this movie’s villains weren’t originally intended to be the Xiliens. Apart from their deceptive offer of help to humanity and their penchant for Matrix-friendly clothing, they don’t share many of the characteristics of the original visitors from Planet X.

There are further Shōwa era reprises in the casting. Mizuno Kumi, who made a recent comeback in Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla (2002), appears as the head of the EDF, and in a direct callback to the character she played in Invasion of Astro-Monster, her character here is called Namikawa. Takarada Akira, playing the UN Secretary-General, also starred in Invasion of Astro-Monster, Mothra vs Godzilla (1964) and the original Godzilla (1954). Sahara Kenji is unrecognisable as the EDF’s chief scientist; he’d been the star of Rodan (1956) and King Kong vs Godzilla (1962) and had a recurring minor role as a government official in the Heisei series movies. Representing the more recent film series and cameoing in the pre-credits scene of the Gotengo burying Godzilla in Antarctic ice are Nakao Akira and Ueda Kōichi, as the vessel’s original captain and his first officer; they’d played the Prime Minister and a senior Defence Ministry official in Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla and Godzilla: Tokyo SOS, and Nakao had made repeat appearances as the head of the UN’s anti-Godzilla strike force during the Heisei series.

Stealing most of the scenes he’s in with his sheer physicality is Don Frye, playing Captain Douglas Gordon. Frye was a mixed martial artist and pro wrestler who was popular in Japan, so he clearly met the filmmakers’ requirements as far as the fight scenes were concerned. But Frye seems to have parlayed this opportunity into a switch to an acting career. I note purely as an aside that, at time of writing, his IMDb listing is longer than Kitamura Ryūhei’s.

It would have been a shame if this cavalcade of absurdity had been the final hurrah for Godzilla. There will be more Godzilla movies, but it’ll take a few blog posts to get to them. For now, let this stand as the last film to feature a Godzilla portrayed by a stunt actor in a costume. Three cheers for Kitagawa Tsutomu, the main Millennium Godzilla; Satsuma Kenpachirō, the main Heisei Godzilla; Nakajima Haruo, the main Shōwa Godzilla; and all the other stunt actors who stepped into the role when needed.

Godzilla: Tokyo SOS

Godzilla: Tokyo SOS (2003)
Toho Studios
Director: Tezuka Masaaki, Asada Eiichi (special effects)

It’s March 2004, ten months since the JXSDF’s cyborg superweapon Kiryu drove Godzilla away at the end of the previous movie. Radar stations in Hawai’i and Japan detect an unidentified object approaching Japanese airspace. The Japanese air force send jets to intercept it, but they’re unable to establish contact with it or deter it. It soon becomes apparent that the mystery object is Mothra. The Shobijin, Mothra’s twin fairy envoys, have arrived with Mothra to talk to Chūjō Shinichi, the linguist who helped them more than 40 years earlier (in Mothra (1961)).

(The Shobijin here are dressed somewhat like the originals, with long hair and simple, off-the-shoulder garments. They’re showing quite a bit more midriff and leg, though. We’re told that they’re not the 1961 Shobijin but related to them. Although we’re reminded in a later scene that Mothra’s 1961 attack was only provoked by the kidnapping of the Shobijin, the kidnappers aren’t named. This is in line with the rewriting of Mothra in Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla (2002), in which we were told Japan developed their own maser weapons and the fictional Cold War superpower Rolisica wasn’t named.)

The Shobijin want Chūjō to pass on the message that it was wrong to use the 1954 Godzilla’s corpse to create Kiryu and that his skeleton must be returned to its resting place. If it is, Mothra will pledge to protect Japan from the new Godzilla; if not, Mothra herself will wage war on humanity. This visitation is also witnessed by Chūjō’s nephew Yoshito – who, as luck would have it, is a mechanic in Kiryu’s ground crew – and his grandson Shun.

The repairs to Kiryu following the previous year’s battle are still ongoing – the severed right arm has only just been replaced. We see a computer schematic that makes it clear this time that Kiryu has been built around Godzilla’s skeleton. The JXSDF has put its head on their official seal, suggesting they continue to have confidence in it. (On which note, there’s no mention in this movie of the Anti-Megalosaurus Force (AMF), which have perhaps been subsumed into the larger JXSDF.) There’s a change of flight crew, with the old pilots being sent to America for advanced training and a new cohort being brought in. Yoshito is surprised to see his old friend Kisaragi Azusa among them – she was an engineer herself just a few years ago, but has retrained as a pilot. There’s some friction, possibly jealousy, between Yoshito and one of the male Kiryu pilots, Akiba Kyosuke. In Kiryu’s hangar, Yoshito is musing on what the Shobijin said when Yashiro Akane, the hero of the previous movie, walks in to say goodbye to Kiryu. She believes Kiryu doesn’t want to fight Godzilla, but wishes Yoshito well when he says he intends to make it fighting fit again.

Chūjō gets an audience with the Prime Minister, but is unable to persuade him to decommission Kiryu on the basis of his story. The Prime Minister objects, as Yoshito also did, that he can’t easily trust Mothra to defend Japan when she caused so much damage in 1961. He intends to scrap Kiryu only after Godzilla has been defeated. Meanwhile, the JXSDF investigates the corpse of a giant sea turtle that’s washed up on Japan’s Pacific coast. (It’s named as Kamoebas, one of the daikaiju from Space Amoeba (1970), and a JXSDF scientist says that its species was discovered by the scientist character in that movie. Left hanging is the question of whether, in this continuity, the Kamoebas species is the product of alien interference or occurs naturally.) It was fatally wounded by another creature, suggesting Godzilla is on the move again. When an American nuclear submarine is destroyed off the coast of Guam, the JXSDF are ordered to make Kiryu ready for combat. The ground crew aren’t confident: although Kiryu can move, it needs more testing and there’s no way to replace its Absolute Zero Gun, the only weapon effective against Godzilla. Officials at the Defence Ministry continue to mull over the question of whether Mothra can be relied upon.

Godzilla is spotted heading for Tokyo. Hoping to minimise further damage to the city, the JXSDF tries unsuccessfully to corral him towards Shinagawa, which hasn’t yet been rebuilt after the events of the previous year. As the population rushes to evacuate or find shelter, Chūjō discovers Shun has run off and follows him to his school playground. Remembering what his grandfather told him about painting Mothra’s symbol onto an airport runway to summon her, Shun has laid out the school’s desks and chairs in the shape of the symbol. Mothra immediately responds and intercepts Godzilla, physically battering him and using her glowing wing scales as chaff against his breath ray. Chūjō is concerned that Mothra would only shed her scales as a last resort and must be desperate. Watching the stalemate between the daikaiju, the Prime Minister orders the launch of Kiryu to support Mothra. Meanwhile, on Himago Island in the Bonins, the Shobijin sing the old Mothra song to an egg. (Tempting as it is to rewrite this as “Imago Island”, the kanji letters that spell “himago” on-screen translate into English as “great-grandchild”. Wikipedia tells me this is in line with Japan’s naming convention for the real Bonin Islands.) The egg hatches to reveal twin larvae which soon swim at full speed towards Tokyo.

Kiryu arrives on the scene just as Mothra is flagging. It scores some hits on Godzilla with its arsenal of missiles, but is soon knocked over. Mothra flies in front of it to take the force of Godzilla’s breath ray. The Mothra larvae arrive after Kiryu has taken another beating and distract Godzilla by firing their cocoon webbing at him. The adult Mothra sacrifices herself to protect them from Godzilla’s breath ray. Akiba struggles to get Kiryu upright again, but the controls are unresponsive – Godzilla has caused too much damage.

Off duty while Kiryu’s out in the field, Yoshito has taken a staff car into central Tokyo to look for his uncle and nephew. Guided by a talisman bearing Mothra’s symbol that his uncle had dropped, he finds them both safe but buried under rubble near the fallen Tokyo Tower. Consequently, he’s on the scene when Akiba reports that Kiryu’s remote control is dead, and he radios in to reply that he will attempt to make field repairs to Kiryu. Racing through the deserted subway, Yoshito reaches Kiryu and assesses the damage while the pilots and ground forces provide cover. He makes the necessary repairs with radio support from the other members of the ground crew, but is trapped inside a maintenance compartment by a damaged access hatch as Kiryu stands up and re-enters the fray.

Kiryu is able to exploit a weak spot on Godzilla’s chest where he was wounded in the previous film and incapacitates him, whereupon the Mothra larvae cocoon him. Godzilla roars and, as before, Kiryu stops responding to the pilots’ commands. (Looks like Professor Yuhara didn’t entirely fix that problem after all...) But instead of going on a destructive rampage this time, it picks up the cocooned Godzilla and flies out to sea with him. The flight crew are ordered to pursue and shoot it down, but Yoshito radios to tell them not to, revealing that he’s still inside Kiryu. He believes that Kiryu wants to take itself and the current Godzilla down to the bottom of the Pacific, where the 1954 Godzilla’s skeleton can rest in peace. Kisaragi shoots open the damaged hatch, and Kiryu spontaneously turns onto its back so that Yoshito can fall safely out over the water and be rescued by his teammates. It farewells him by displaying the words “Sayonara Yoshito” (in English) on a maintenance computer screen. Their work done, the Mothra larvae swim off home while the Shobijin telepathically thank our heroes. The Prime Minister pledges to work with humility to correct the mistakes of the past. However, in a post-credits scene we see a laboratory fully stocked with genetic samples from Godzilla and other kaiju, implying that some new mistakes are about to be made.

I must admit up front, I like this film. Of course I do – it’s a sequel to the 1961 Mothra that also happens to feature Mechagodzilla. Koizumi Hiroshi’s reprise of Chūjō, 42 years later, is the fanservice I didn’t know I wanted.

All things considered, this is quite a lightweight sequel to Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla. It’s nice to shift the focus from the previous movie’s Top Gun (1986) shenanigans onto the mechanics (or at least, for them to share the limelight with the pilots), but the story beats are pretty similar and there’s not much here that we haven’t seen before. The military characters bitch at each other, but with less reason than they had in the previous movie. Once again Kiryu goes off the rails because Godzilla awakens his predecessor’s ghost, even though that problem was supposedly fixed last time. The ethical problem of exploiting the 1954 Godzilla’s corpse is made more of this time, with the whole business of Mothra being willing to fight humanity over it, but nothing comes of it – in the event, Kiryu is dispatched to give support to an ailing Mothra and no more is said about it.

The question of Kiryu being “alive”, which was raised in the previous movie, is developed here but in a subtle way. No one but Yoshito sees Kiryu’s farewell message to him and it isn’t commented on at all, but the implications are huge. Clearly, the 1954 Godzilla’s genetic material – or presumably it would be more accurate to say his consciousness (or soul?) – has fused with Kiryu’s computer systems to such an extent that he/it can communicate verbally and identify individual humans by name. There have been occasional moments in the past when Godzilla seemed to single out specific people for victimisation (Godzilla vs King Ghidorah (1991), Godzilla 2000: Millennium (1999)) and when it was suggested that there might be some kind of linguistic meaning behind Godzilla’s roars (Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (1964), Godzilla vs Gigan (1972)), but this is something else again. It looks like the JXSDF have inadvertently created a kaiju-derived AI with human-level cognitive ability. That the (re-)reawakened Kiryu reacts intelligently and compassionately instead of going on another rampage suggests that, sometime between the two movies, it has recognised and grappled with the same moral dilemmas as the human characters – and solved them. It’s a shame there wasn’t a third movie, or more time in this one, to expand on this further.

There’s arguably a hint of romance between Yoshito and Kisaragi, following in the footsteps of the pilot-plus-scientist romances in Tezuka Masaaki’s previous Godzilla movies, but honestly, there’s just as much or more of a hint of romance between Yoshito and Akiba. They start off fighting each other, but by the end, Akiba is the one ejecting from his plane to catch Yoshito and it’s the two of them lounging in a dinghy waiting to be rescued, playing James Bond and Love Interest. (You decide which is which!) Kisaragi even comments on how Yoshito, who spends all his time focused on his work, isn’t interested in women. If any kaiju fans out there are looking for queer subtexts, a) you’ve probably picked the wrong genre, but b) you could do worse than look to this film.

Once again, the Shobijin are played by the Grand Prix and Grand Jury Prize winners of the most recent Toho Cinderella talent contest (the fifth one, held in 2000). Once again, feel free to read some meta hilarity into their casting as this pair of objectified magical pixie women. On the plus side, they didn’t get kidnapped and exploited by an unscrupulous businessman this time.

As with the previous movie, the special effects are good. It seems to be a standard Toho trope now for Godzilla’s first appearance to be heralded by a tsunami-like wall of water. Mothra is well realised, both as a practical model and through CGI – the opening scenes with the JASDF jets are nicely done, and there’s a very pretty shot later on of Mothra silhouetted against a setting sun that stands out. There’s a cute moment early on when Kiryu’s rampage from the last movie is presented in a TV news report as a bit of shaky handheld camera footage. The acting is mostly OK, although there’s some terrible acting from the Americans among the cast, and some terrible dialogue for them to deliver. I truly pity the poor bastard playing the submarine’s sonar operator, who was expected to deliver the line: “Oh Jesus – big heartbeats!”

The post-credits scene hints at a third Kiryu movie that never came to pass. After the promise of Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla, the reception of Tokyo SOS was a grave disappointment and the longed-for trilogy was, once again, abandoned. And that might have been it for the Millennium series, except that 2004 would be Godzilla’s 50th anniversary year. Toho couldn’t let that pass without marking the occasion, could they?

Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla

Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla (2002)
Toho Studios
Director: Tezuka Masaaki, Kikuchi Yūichi (special effects)
Also known as: On the posters it’s Godzilla X Mechagodzilla, with the “X” pronounced “tai” like the 1974 film’s title. Some use the acronym GXM for convenience. I don’t think anyone’s seriously interested in calling this one “Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla III”.

Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack (GMK, 2001) was the most successful of the first three Millennium series Godzilla movies by quite a margin, taking well over twice its budget in domestic ticket sales and enjoying widespread critical acclaim. Director Kaneko Shūsuke had done it again, revitalising a beloved but flagging daikaiju franchise with modern sensibilities, a large dose of mysticism and a dash of horror.

For reasons, executive producer Tomiyama Shōgo decided not to ask Kaneko to make another Godzilla movie, but instead brought back Tezuka Masaaki, the director of Godzilla vs Megaguirus (2000), objectively the least successful of the three movies. Perhaps he felt Tezuka’s vision – less horror, more heroic action – was a better fit for Toho’s or his own view of what a Godzilla movie should be. (It’s worth noting that Toho released several of the Millennium series Godzilla movies on double bills with children’s animated films about Hamtaro, an anthropomorphised hamster...) Tomiyama was so confident in his choice that he backed Tezuka to direct multiple films – having abandoned their plan for a trilogy based on Godzilla 2000: Millennium (1999), Toho would absolutely, definitely follow through on a new trilogy featuring the fan favourite character Mechagodzilla. Given the strong military focus of Godzilla vs Megaguirus, Mechagodzilla and Tezuka must have looked like a match made in heaven. The gamble paid off, for this first movie at least.

Godzilla appears at Tateyama in Chiba Prefecture in 1999 during a typhoon. He’s got those big, gnarly, spiny dorsal plates again, but they’re not purple this time and his skin tone is dark and not green. His head is less flattened and better proportioned than it was in Godzilla vs Megaguirus. He has very expressive eyes. The JXSDF sends in a specialist unit, the Anti-Megalosaurus Force (AMF).

(Based on what we see, the JXSDF could be an in-story parallel version of the JSDF or a special branch of it. The actual distinction between this, the regular JSDF and the AMF remains unclear in this and the next movie. We’ll find out in the sequel that JXSDF stands for the “Japan Counter-Xenomorph Self Defence Force”. A series of on-screen captions tells us that the AMF has 4,072 members, is dedicated to defending Japan from monsters and was established in Chiba in 1966.)

The AMF deploys conventional tanks and maser tanks (those fantasy weapons familiar from earlier films) without success. Maser tank driver Yashiro Akane tries to manoeuvre out of the path of Godzilla’s breath ray, but in the darkness and rain her commanding officer’s truck reverses straight into her vehicle and is knocked off the road, where Godzilla crushes it underfoot. Godzilla goes on to devastate Tateyama and then disappear back into the ocean. Yashiro is officially cleared of all responsibility for the AMF deaths but is reassigned to back-office work.

In a conference between the Prime Minister and her Minister of Science and Technology, we learn that this is the first Godzilla attack since the original one in 1954, which ended with that Godzilla’s death. Japan has been attacked by several other giant monsters, however, including Mothra (Mothra, 1961) and the giant humanoid Gaira (War of the Gargantuas, 1966). It was Gaira’s attack that led to the formation of the AMF.

(These incidents are illustrated with clips from the old films, plus a restaged shot of the 1954 Godzilla being killed by the Oxygen Destroyer. This time, Godzilla’s skeleton is left behind whereas in the original it dissolved away. This will become vital to the plot in a few minutes. Another small change is that, when talking about the development of the AMF’s maser weapons from the heat rays used against Mothra, the Prime Minister says the technology was invented in Japan, while in the 1961 film those heat rays were on loan from a Cold War superpower.)

Since the masers were useless against Godzilla, the Science Minister is tasked with overseeing the development of a new, more effective weapon. To that end, he gathers together a team of top scientists including Professor Yuhara, who wants to expand the field of conservation by resurrecting extinct species. Yuhara has created a replica trilobite using a robotic exoskeleton and organic components from a crab, with the crab’s DNA directing the computers that control the body. (This sounds... ethically complex.) The Science Minister has had the 1954 Godzilla’s skeleton recovered from Tokyo Bay and proposes that the scientists should use DNA from it to create a biomechanical nemesis for Godzilla. Yuhara rejects the offer on the grounds that it’ll keep him apart from his young daughter Sara, whose mother has recently died, but he accepts when the Ministry officials agree that she can join him on site.

Objections to the project include that it’ll cost a great deal of money and that it’ll look like Japan’s rearming itself. Nonetheless, Parliament signs off on it. Three and a half years and one montage later, the bio-robot is complete. Sara and her schoolfriends think it should be called Mechagodzilla, but its official name is Kiryu (“Machine Dragon”). Colonel Togashi, the commander of the squad assigned to Kiryu, recruits Yashiro, which doesn’t go down well with one of the other pilots on the team, Hayama, whose brother was among those who died in 1999. Isolated from her peers, Yashiro ignores Yuhara’s clumsy advances but quickly bonds with his daughter Sara, who has taken on part-time work in the project facility’s cafeteria.

The former Science Minister, who has since been elected Prime Minister, unveils Kiryu at a press conference. It looks a lot like the “Super Mechagodzilla” from Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla II (1993), with the over-the-shoulder rocket launchers and back-mounted jetpack. It has a battery life of two hours, although it needs nearly half of that power to fire its main weapon, the Absolute Zero Gun, which literally freezes its target to absolute zero. It can be recharged in the field, remote controlled and airlifted by a small fleet of VTOL jet aircraft called White Herons. As with Yuhara’s artificial trilobite, DNA is a key component of its computer systems. (What isn’t made explicitly clear, but becomes apparent in the next film, is that Kiryu doesn’t just use the 1954 Godzilla’s DNA but has in fact been built around the substructure of his entire skeleton.)

Before the presentation has even finished, Godzilla is spotted heading for Tokyo and Kiryu is scrambled. Kiryu’s ballistic and maser weapons don’t seem to harm Godzilla but do stall him, and Yashiro, at the controls in her White Heron, prepares to fire the Absolute Zero Gun. But a loud roar from Godzilla seems to freeze up Kiryu’s systems and it stops responding to the AMF team’s commands. Godzilla slips away back into the bay. As the White Herons close in to airlift Kiryu back to base, it spontaneously turns on them, then begins to march through Tokyo, all the while firing its weapons at the aircraft and into the surrounding buildings. Yashiro earns her team-mates’ respect by rescuing Hayama from his downed aircraft. Unable to stop Kiryu’s rampage or control it at all, the AMF have no option but to wait for its battery to run down.

Insistent that Kiryu has a life of its own, Sara is upset that the AMF makes it fight Godzilla against its will. Yuhara opens up to Yashiro about the death of his wife and their unborn second child, explaining that Sara has been sensitive about questions of life, death and choice since then. Yashiro has a heart-to-heart with Sara, who rebukes her for feeling her own life is worthless. Yuhara modifies Kiryu’s operating system to prevent it going rogue again. When Godzilla is sighted heading for Tokyo again, Togashi personally lobbies the Prime Minister to order that Kiryu be launched, promising that the AMF now have it under control. A hesitant Prime Minister agrees that it’s their only option and takes responsibility for the order.

Kiryu arrives in Shinagawa just in time to save a hospital by body-slamming Godzilla. A pitched fight ensues, involving both beam weapons and hand-to-hand combat, during which Godzilla breaks off Kiryu’s shoulder cannons. Eventually Kiryu succeeds in throwing Godzilla down and, with barely enough battery power left, the AMF team prepares to fire the Absolute Zero Gun. At the critical moment, Godzilla knocks Kiryu over with his breath ray and three corporate tower blocks are flash-frozen and shattered. Kiryu’s remote control systems are also damaged, so Yashiro volunteers to land, get inside Kiryu’s maintenance booth and operate it manually. Tokyo’s power supply is diverted to recharge Kiryu via one of the other White Herons.

Almost immediately, Godzilla blasts Kiryu in the back and Yashiro is briefly knocked out, but she quickly recovers and gets Kiryu upright again. To prevent Godzilla doing the same thing again, Hayama ejects his co-pilot and flies his White Heron into Godzilla’s face. Hayama tells Yashiro to take this opportunity to fire the Absolute Zero Gun at Godzilla. Instead, Yashiro has Kiryu pull the aircraft cockpit out of Godzilla’s mouth and throw Hayama to safety, then fly Godzilla out over the bay and discharge the superweapon at point blank range underwater. Godzilla survives but is badly injured, with a large wound in his chest. He turns and trudges off into the Pacific as Kiryu bobs to the surface, missing an arm and out of power. (Note: the stump of the severed arm only shows wires and doesn’t give any hint that the 1954 Godzilla’s bones are under that metal cladding.) The Prime Minister is pleased that Japan now has the capability to deter Godzilla, if not actually kill him. Perched on Kiryu’s shoulder, Yashiro watches Godzilla retreat while she waits for her team to retrieve her.

In a post-credits scene, Yashiro is reunited with Sara and Yuhara in Kiryu’s hangar. With a renewed appetite for life, she agrees to take Yuhara out to dinner.

The first thing to say about Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla is that it’s almost a note-for-note reprise of Godzilla vs Megaguirus. A female officer of the JSDF’s anti-Godzilla force holds a personal grudge against Godzilla because of her commanding officer’s death in a disastrous operation a few years earlier. There’s a suggestion of romance between her and a frankly obnoxious scientist who’s been key in developing a physics-defying superweapon to fight Godzilla. There’s also a precocious child with ties to the opposing kaiju that she confides in. Unsurprisingly, as well as sharing a director, this movie was scripted by one of the two writers behind Megaguirus.

I think it all gels better here than in Megaguirus, though. The JXSDF feels like a more satisfying tribute to the Heisei series’ G-Force than the G-Graspers in Megaguirus, which felt a bit too much like a dozen people operating out of a downtown office. As the overly forward scientist, Yuhara is awkward and unfiltered rather than offensive in the way Kudō was, while Yashiro has more personal motivation than merely having lost a colleague to Godzilla, which Tsujimori would have had in common with her entire battalion. Making the child character a relative of one of the adult leads provides a more credible reason for her to keep meeting up with Yashiro than was the case with Jun and Tsujimori. On a technical level, too, this movie outshines Megaguirus throughout. The opening scenes of the JXSDF fighting Godzilla at night in a typhoon stand out as particularly good.

If Tesuka’s back as director, then so is Ōshima Michiru as the incidental music’s composer. This time the old Ifukube march doesn’t even get a look in. The main theme from Megaguirus is reused whenever Godzilla makes an entrance and over the end credits, but there are some great new themes as well for Kiryu and the JXSDF.

At first glance, Kiryu seems to serve much the same narrative function as Mechagodzilla did in its 1993 appearance: a military solution to a natural problem, which in this case becomes as bad as the original problem. There are some important differences, though. For one thing, Kiryu is actually effective – the cost was terrible, but it got results in the end. And then there’s Kiryu’s name, which is more “authentically” Japanese than Mechagodzilla, which just makes the 1993 machine sound like a piece of imported technology and made the 1974 version more obviously an alien creation. It’s significant that Kiryu is the product of a specifically Japanese military-industrial organisation, not an international body with American involvement like the UNGCC in Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla II. This is unmistakably Japan’s dilemma: can it, should it solve its contemporary problems by rearming? The question of rearmament is very briefly mooted in this movie but swiftly glossed over. The answer, supported by the film’s conclusion, seems to be not only that the circumstances might warrant it, but that the end would justify the means.

The question of rearmament is one that Japan has faced since the end of the American occupation in the 1950s, when the US urged them to rearm and they understandably demurred. It would come to the fore again soon after this film’s release, when Japan was asked to join President George W Bush’s “coalition of the willing” in the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq. Japan sent ground troops, but only in their constitutional capacity as a defensive force, not as aggressors. It’s only in the last couple of years that the Japanese government has passed the changes to their constitution necessary for Japan to build and maintain an offensive capability again. This move is believed to have been prompted by the intimidatory actions of their neighbours China and North Korea.

The other interesting thing Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla does is raise the question of whether Kiryu is in any sense “alive”. Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla II had that bit of nonsense at the end about “life against artificial life”, but Kiryu contains organic components and genuinely seems to be haunted. Reclaiming and weaponising the corpse of the 1954 Godzilla has quite literally raised the spectre of that original assault on Japan. This would seem to work against the upbeat ending of Kiryu’s eventual success by suggesting that by aping our enemies, we’ll only become like them.

The only other thing I’ll say about Kiryu for now is that, by having it be Japan’s superweapon (à la 1993) and having it attack Tokyo (à la 1974), the creators of this movie are very much having their cake and eating it.

Let’s end with a bit of actor-spotting. There are some familiar guest stars playing the two Prime Ministers in this movie. Portraying the 1999 Prime Minister is Mizuno Kumi, who appeared in several Shōwa era films, perhaps most notably (for us) as the alien infiltrator Namikawa in Invasion of Astro-Monster (1965). As an aside, there has never yet been a female Prime Minister of Japan in real life. The 2003 Prime Minister, formerly the Science Minister with responsibility for the Kiryu project, is, delightfully, played by Nakao Akira. Nakao featured in Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla II and the two movies that followed it as Colonel Asō, the head of G-Force who oversaw the construction of the Heisei Mechagodzilla. It’s about time that I also mentioned Ueda Kōichi, who played a variety of officials and other characters in small but memorable roles as far back as Godzilla vs Biollante (1989). Here he plays General Dobashi, a top Defence Ministry official, a role which he’ll reprise with substantially more screen time in the next movie.

Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack

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

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

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.