Godzilla vs Biollante (1989) Toho Studios Director: Ōmori
Kazuki, Kawakita Kōichi (special effects) Also discussed:
Princess from the Moon (1987)
The Return of Godzilla (1984) performed well enough at the box office
to justify a sequel, although it took Toho five years to produce one.
Godzilla vs Biollante shows more of an interest in picking up on
details from its predecessor than most of the Shōwa era films – this is an
early indication that the Heisei series will be a much more interconnected
affair than the movies of the 60s and 70s. Here we have a new kaiju whose
existence is only made possible by the events of
The Return of Godzilla, and which in its turn will have an unexpected
bearing on a later instalment in the series.
A quick note on the Japanese title. Shōwa era movies that pitted Godzilla
against a titular adversary, starting with
King Kong vs Godzilla (1962), used the word 対, pronounced “tai”.
Godzilla vs Biollante actually has an English "VS" in the title. This
is how it’s going to be for the rest of the Heisei series.
The film opens with some computer text on a screen describing the four
levels of a "G” alert system. There’s then a short reprise of the battle
between Godzilla and the Super X, the JSDF’s hi-tech flying tank, as seen
in The Return of Godzilla. In the aftermath of that battle, we see
scientists collecting samples of Godzilla's genetic material from the
scene – the samples appear to be scales or skin fragments. (Missing from
the reprise is any mention of the fact that two nuclear missiles collided
right above this spot in the previous movie. The scientists are at least
wearing some kind of hazmat clothing, but the soldiers with them aren’t so
well protected. Perhaps we might generously assume Godzilla absorbed all
the dangerous radiation.) The clean-up crew are abruptly killed by a team
of American paramilitary types who steal the samples. (These villains are
accompanied on screen by a rockin' electric guitar version of Ifukube
Akira's famous Godzilla march. They’re easily the best English-speaking
actors in the film, so it’s a tragedy that they’re so short lived.) They
themselves are almost immediately killed and robbed by an unnamed agent of
the Middle Eastern state of Saradia.
In Saradia, the Japanese Dr Shiragami is researching the genetic
modification of wheat, not just to meet Saradia’s food needs but to end
the nation's commercial dependency on oil sales. A breakthrough in his
work could see Saradia outpace America in the international grain export
market. He's already successfully spliced wheat and cactus genes for a
desert-growing crop and is hoping to use Godzilla's genetic material to
make the hybrid regenerative as well. However, his work has attracted the
attention of an unscrupulous American corporation called Bio-Major, who
were responsible for the earlier, failed attempt to secure the Godzilla
samples. Agents of Bio-Major bomb Shiragami’s lab, killing his daughter
Erika, and steal the genetic material.
Fast forward five years.
Shiragami is now living in Japan and has invited Ōkouchi Asuka, the
daughter of an old colleague of his and a friend of Erika, to visit. At
his request, she’s brought the 17-year-old Saegusa Miki, apparently the
strongest student at the "Japan Psyonics Center" where she works, to
listen for telepathic messages from his roses. Miki can't read anything
from the roses but, as they’re about to leave, she hears a woman's voice
calling for Asuka. No one notices the team of Bio-Major agents surveilling
the house from their mobile operations centre, which is badly disguised as
an American courier van. They themselves haven’t noticed the nameless
Saradian agent further up the hill watching all of them.
Later, Asuka meets her young scientist boyfriend, Kirishima Kazuto, for
dinner at the Godzilla Memorial Lounge. This is a central Tokyo restaurant
with a window built into a hole in the roof in the shape of Godzilla’s
foot – either it was damaged but not too badly in the 1984 incident, or
the owners have a very shrewd grasp of marketing. Kazuto has received an
offer to go and work at MIT and is hoping Asuka might go with him. He’s
currently working at the Tsukuba Bioengineering Laboratory, which is
funded by her father’s institute, the Ōkouchi Foundation, the only
organisation in Japan to have secured samples of Godzilla’s cells.
Kazuto’s lab has been working on something called Anti Nuclear Energy
Bacteria (ANEB), which use the unique properties of Godzilla’s cells to
render atomic waste harmless. The Japanese government hopes to use ANEB as
a weapon against Godzilla, if he returns – and, as a sidenote, ANEB could
potentially upend the balance of power established between the nuclear
superpowers.
Mt Mihara, the volcano Godzilla fell into five years ago, is under
constant watch by the JSDF. The officer in charge, the eccentric Colonel
Gondō, complains that nothing ever happens and he’s bored. He will shortly
become unexpectedly busy. The younger students at the Japan Psyonics
Center have been having increasingly regular dreams about Godzilla
returning. Soon enough, Mt Mihara erupts and causes an earthquake. This
persuades Dr Shiragami to come out of his self-imposed retirement and work
on Godzilla’s cells again, to advance the development of ANEB, after the
earthquake wrecks his greenhouse and endangers his roses. Shiragami's one
condition is that he keeps the Godzilla cells in his home laboratory for
seven days. He uses this time to splice Godzilla’s genetic material with
the roses which, plot twist, he's already spliced with genetic material
taken from Erika after her death.
Bio-Major's agents raid Shiragami's lab again, this time with the Saradian
agent on their heels. They all get an unpleasant surprise when they're
attacked by giant plant tendrils. Their attacker breaks out of the lab and
into the nearby lake. Following this setback, Bio-Major demands, under the
alias of a terrorist organisation called "Alien", that Japan hand over its
ANEB or else they'll detonate a bomb at Mt Mihara, releasing Godzilla.
They set off a smaller explosion to prove they’re not kidding.
The JSDF now have an elite wing ready to defend against Godzilla attacks,
headed by a hotshot young officer called Major Kuroki. They’ve constructed
the Super X2, an improved rebuild of the Super X, and they’re being a lot
less secretive about the X2 than they were about its predecessor, even
giving press tours of the thing. It’s piloted by remote control, can go
underwater and its entire front section opens up to either side to reveal
the Fire Mirror, a weapon made of synthetic diamond that can reflect
Godzilla's atomic breath ray back at him. They also have the latest
computer equipment, by which I mean that when they’re talking through
their tactical plans later in the movie, we’ll see some fairly shonky
wireframe computer graphics (which look more likely to be cel animation).
We’ll also see the familiar old maser tanks, which now fire electric blue
rays.
Meanwhile, the hybrid that escaped from Shiragami’s lab has grown into a
gigantic, thick-stemmed rose standing in the neighbouring Lake Ashi. With
its single bloom and two large leaves it looks very slightly humanoid, and
it makes the occasional whimpering sound. The bloom will turn out to have
Godzilla-style teeth at its centre. Shiragami had hoped to create the
world’s hardiest flower to immortalise his daughter’s DNA, but realises he
has made a mistake. He names the rose-creature "Biollante". (He spuriously
claims this is the name of a plant spirit from Norse mythology.) Miki
initially senses Erika within it, but Erika is soon drowned out by the
Godzilla component and Biollante becomes an unthinking monster. It
apparently senses Godzilla, who may be drawn to it because of their shared
genes.
The government, represented in person by Kazuto and Colonel Gondō, meets
with an agent of Bio-Major to hand over the ANEB and prevent Godzilla
being released. Unfortunately, the handover is disrupted by the Saradian
agent and the bomb, which is on an automated countdown, goes off.
Godzilla looks a bit more animalistic than in his previous appearance,
albeit his teeth are more even. His eyes are smaller and more sunken – the
irises look yellow. He has more prominent nostrils and small, pointed
ears. He has more of a muzzle and a puffier top lip, giving him more of
the appearance of a Chinese dragon (or, as many have said, a cat). This is
more or less how Godzilla will look through the rest of the Heisei series.
He fires a solid-looking bluish ray from his mouth.
When they realise Godzilla is heading across the bay from Mt Mihara to the
mainland lake where Biollante is waiting, the JSDF try to intercept him
with the Super X2. As it turns out, the Fire Mirror can only withstand and
reflect so much of Godzilla’s fiery breath and the X2 is critically
damaged. At Lake Ashi, Biollante attacks Godzilla with tendrils with
little sharp-toothed mouths on their ends – these variously bite Godzilla
and spit some kind of corrosive green substance at him. In retaliation,
Godzilla sets fire to Biollante with his breath. As it burns, Biollante
releases a cloud of shiny golden spores into the air.
Worn out after all of this, Godzilla heads for the nearest nuclear power
station so that he can recharge. Miki has a brief psychic standoff with
Godzilla when he's heading towards Ōsaka, and this actually stalls him for
a moment. Then there’s some kind of mutual energy discharge; Miki faints
and spends the rest of the day asleep, while Godzilla continues on his
way. The JSDF take the opportunity to confront Godzilla in Ōsaka and
attack him with missiles loaded with ANEB. The ailing Super X2 lands two
direct hits with little effect, while Colonel Gondō fires an ANEB missile
straight down Godzilla’s throat from the roof of a tall building, at the
cost of his own life.
Godzilla appears unaffected by the bacteria; it’s theorised that his
cold-blooded physiology could be preventing them from multiplying. In
order to raise his body temperature, the JSDF send in the maser tanks and
also deploy the Thunder Control System, a ground-based microwave array
that’s supposed to work alongside cloud seeding technology to control the
weather. (Perhaps a callback to Son of Godzilla (1967)? On a
sidenote, it looks like Godzilla doesn't like lightning as much as he did
in The Return of Godzilla.) Godzilla makes short work of the maser
tanks. Then, in a surprising twist, Biollante's spores emerge from the
cloud formed by the Thunder Control System and spontaneously generate a
massive new body just below the surface of the ground. (Yes, well, no one
ever said it had to make sense.) This new Biollante body still has the
snappy tendrils, but instead of a flower it has a head that resembles that
of an alligator with tusks. It can move over the ground on leg-like roots.
When it attacks Godzilla this time, it spears his hand with a pointy
tendril. After a brief fight, Godzilla dispatches it by firing his breath
ray into its mouth. Again it releases a cloud of golden spores, but this
time we see Erika's face superimposed on the cloud, implying she's won
back control of Biollante's mind. Miki claims that Biollante thanks them
all before the spores disappear into the sky.
Godzilla finally becomes groggy and collapses face down into the sea, but
recovers, supposedly because the water lowered his body temperature again.
Denied the chance to retrieve ANEB for his employers, the Saradian agent
kills Shiragami. Kazuto gives chase, but the agent is killed when he
stands on part of the Thunder Control array and is vaporised. The last
shot, over the end credits, is of a gigantic rose in orbit, hinting at a
possible return for Biollante.
There are no prizes for guessing what this movie’s all about. Genetic
engineering became a practical science in the 1970s – the first recombinant
molecule was created in 1972, the first genetically modified bacterium in
1973, the first GM mouse in 1974. In 1978, the company Genentech was founded
and by 1982 it was producing synthetic medical insulin. Then and ever since,
the scientific community and the general public have voiced concerns ranging
from the religious (the idea that scientists are “playing God”) to the
legal/ethical (the fear that corporations might take out patents on living
organisms) to the medical/nutritional (the worry that the introduction of GM
crops into the food chain might spread allergens across species or have other
negative side effects on conventional food crops). Alongside this, in popular
fiction and the tabloid press, there have been GM scare stories that draw from
a broad palette of partly understood science and outdated, discredited or
pseudoscientific ideas about biology.
Godzilla vs Biollante straddles the line between believability and
sensationalism. There are real-world efforts to engineer hardier food crops
that can grow in the desert that mirror what we’re told about Dr Shiragami’s
early work. And the idea that Godzilla’s atomic-powered biology might offer
the key to creating bacteria that could break down nuclear waste doesn’t seem
too far-fetched either – there’s been similar research into using synthetic
microorganisms to clear up plastic waste, which Kazuto even mentions while
he’s escorting Kuroki and Gondō to his lab. On the other hand, the notions
that Shiragami has somehow transferred his daughter’s soul into his roses by
splicing human DNA into them, or that adding kaiju DNA would cause the flowers
to mimic Godzilla’s gross anatomy, are pure fantasy. Still, it’s no more
egregious than most other examples of SF cinema I can think of. And although
Godzilla vs Biollante isn’t the first big screen take on genetic
engineering – notable forerunners include The Boys from Brazil (1978),
which involves cloning a monster of another kind, and
Blade Runner (1982), which hybridises the noir detective genre with a
GM reimagining of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) – it might be the
first GM giant monster movie, anticipating Michael Crichton’s novel
Jurassic Park (1990) and its film adaptation (1993).
As far as the realisation of Biollante goes, it’s highly imaginative and
largely successful. Sadly I can’t award it the crown of being the first
Japanese plant kaiju – Tsuburaya Productions got there first with an episode
of Ultra Q (1966). (In fact, it’s partly a plant kaiju
and partly female thanks to Erika’s influence, which makes it a member
of two underrepresented kaiju communities.) I do think it owes more than a
little to Frank Oz’s musical film version of
Little Shop of Horrors (1986), particularly in the toothy buds on its
tendrils. Although I’d say it works on screen, it’s pretty obvious how the
effects team have used wires to animate those tendrils.
Beyond that, the effects shots are fine but not spectacular. There's a touch
of the Gerry Andersons about the Super X2 in flight, notably in shots of it
circling Godzilla or entering the sea. The best composite shot in the film is
probably when the characters first see Biollante standing in Lake Ashi,
although the sheer novelty value does a lot to sell that scene. The city
miniatures are, again, a pale shadow of what they once were, and one building
placed right up in the foreground in one scene spoils the illusion completely.
The characters are an odd bunch. Dr Shiragami is the focal character of the
film, but he’s no hero. On the contrary, he's an unethical scientist who
creates a monster, although he does get to deliver the expected "We're the
real monsters" speech during the denouement. Nominally, the hero ought to be
Kazuto, but he feels like one of those side characters who just gets dragged
into the main plot for the benefit of the others – they only want him for his
microbes. How on Earth has he ended up in the action scenes? Let’s be honest,
Asuka is only there for the multiple conveniences that she’s a) Kazuto’s
girlfriend and his boss’s daughter, b) an old friend of Shiragami’s daughter,
and c) an administrator at the school for gifted youngsters that has produced
Saegusa Miki. She can thus tie three plot strands together in her first couple
of scenes and stand around for the rest of the movie. Miki isn’t the hero yet,
although she’ll become the lynchpin of the Heisei Godzilla series. Major
Kuroki is too driven and unemotional to be a really heroic figure, and Colonel
Gondō is just nuts. This film oozes 1980s cynicism – where are the storybook
heroes?
Kuroki is a character to watch. Here he’s played by Takashima Masanobu, the
son of Takashima Tadao who starred as Sakurai in
King Kong vs Godzilla and was the commander of the weather research
team in Son of Godzilla. (Hmm... once again I wonder if the inclusion
of a weaponised weather control system in Godzilla vs Biollante is a
callback to the latter film...) The character will reappear in
Godzilla vs Destoroyah (1995), but there he’ll be played by the actor’s
brother Takashima Masahiro, of whom we shall hear more in due course.
Sawaguchi Yasuko, who played Naoko in The Return of Godzilla, returns
here as Erika, but it’s little more than a cameo role. The new rising female
star of the Godzilla franchise is Odaka Megumi, playing the teen psychic Miki.
Odaka was the winner of the second ever “Toho Cinderella Audition”, held in
1987, the contest that had launched Sawaguchi’s career. Odaka’s film debut for
Toho that year was in Princess from the Moon (1987), which starred
Sawaguchi. This was a glossy new fantasy take on a classic folk tale, the Tale
of the Bamboo Cutter. It’s a popular story that’s been adapted several times
in various media – a more recent and more traditional retelling was the Studio
Ghibli animated film The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (2013).
The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter goes something like this. One day, an old bamboo
cutter finds a tiny child inside a stalk of bamboo, which he and his wife
adopt as their own. On later return visits to the forest, he finds caches of
gold that they use to raise the child in increasing comfort. She ages quickly
into adulthood and, because she lives like a princess, noble society accepts
her as such. Several suitors approach her, but she sets them all impossible
tasks to prove their good character and they either cheat or give up. She
finally attracts the attention of the Emperor himself. Before anything can
come of it, a caravan of celestial beings descends from the Moon and takes the
princess away – she herself was a celestial being all along. She was sent to
Earth to live a human life for reasons that are only vaguely defined, and
she’s expected to forget her mortal life once she returns to the Moon,
although it’s suggested she doesn’t entirely forget.
Princess from the Moon gives this story a von Däniken-esque spin, so
the celestial beings from the Moon are aliens that literally live on the Moon,
and they descend to Earth not in a divine procession but in a UFO that looks
like it’s been borrowed from Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).
Adding a bit to the backstory of the bamboo cutter and his wife and their
decision to raise the princess themselves, the film rewrites them as bereaved
parents whose infant daughter is buried in the forest. The princess is thus
able to use the dead child’s DNA as a template for her own body in a way
that’s reminiscent of another feelgood American SF movie,
Starman (1984). Instead of finding fairy gold inside bamboo stalks, the
bamboo cutter is able to trade away fragments of the princess’ crashed space
capsule, which seems to be made out of gold.
The film’s also of potential interest to kaiju fans because one of the
princess’ suitors is sent to retrieve a gem from the forehead of a sea
monster. Unlike the scuzzier suitors, he actually attempts it but ends up lost
at sea. The design of the sea monster came from sketches that Toho had left
over from a planned collaboration with the UK’s Hammer Films that had fallen
through, which would have centred around the legendary Loch Ness Monster.
Toho clearly had high hopes for Princess from the Moon, although it got
a mixed reception on its release. It was billed as their 55th anniversary
film. Besides starring Sawaguchi as the titular princess, it co-starred Mifune
Toshirō, an absolute giant of Japanese cinema and the former star of Toho’s
quasi-historical epic The Three Treasures (1959), in the role of the
bamboo cutter. This production had prestige written all over it. Odaka’s
comparatively small role as Akeno, a blind village girl who befriends the
otherwise aloof princess, was obviously meant to propel her to greater
heights, and it did win her plaudits. Two years later, here she is playing
probably the most significant non-kaiju character in the Heisei Godzilla
series.
Here’s the thing: at some point in the five years since their big relaunch of
Godzilla, Toho had realised that they needed to appeal to female cinemagoers.
It seems that women formed the largest contingent of those who still regularly
attended the cinema in TV-flooded Japan in the 1980s. Women had turned out to
see The Return of Godzilla, and not just mothers taking their
pre-adolescent sons to see a monster movie, but young professional women with
disposable income looking for a fun evening out with their friends. If they
wanted to hold onto this audience, the makers of any further instalments in
the Godzilla franchise would have to provide better on-screen representation
than they had with Return.
So this film introduces Miki, a young woman empowered with psychic abilities
that enable her to build up a sort of bond with Godzilla and, from our
perspective, give her an unusual authority to explain parts of the plot. And
rather than have her be the only speaking woman in the film, as Naoko was in
Return, the writers of this and the next five films wisely include at
least one other prominent female character who carries her own plot strand as
well as interacting with Miki. (Whether these films can be said to pass the
Bechdel Test must depend on whether you’d count a conversation about Godzilla
as a conversation about a male character...) Ōkouchi Asuka isn’t the best
example of this, but she’s a start.
I’m not sure whether the fact that Biollante is genetically part woman counts
as further representation or not. Let’s face it, I’m the wrong person to
comment on the feminist implications of a film whose antagonist is an
85-metre-tall rose with teeth.
Like Return, Godzilla vs Biollante performed well but not
outstandingly at the box office. Another sequel was justified, but Toho would
take an extra year to think about it and would start bringing back the
big-name antagonists to try to draw the crowds.
The Return of Godzilla (1984) Toho Studios Director:
Hashimoto Kōji, Nakano Teruyoshi (special effects) Also known as: Just
plain Godzilla in Japan; Godzilla 1985 (the US re-edit with
added Raymond Burr).
Guess who’s back, back again. After nine years in hibernation, and in defiance
of the decline in Japanese cinema attendance, Godzilla was relaunched with
great fanfare and with a 1980s makeover. This wasn’t billed as the first new
Godzilla film in nine years, but as marking the 30th anniversary of the 1954
original, with the filmmakers wanting to move away from the levity of the more
recent movies and back to the darker tone of Godzilla’s first appearance.
In that spirit, The Return of Godzilla breaks entirely with the many
threads of the Shōwa era series – the team player and cosmic voyager of
Invasion of Astro-Monster (1965), the dreamland children’s hero of
All Monsters Attack (1969), the tag-team wrestler of
Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla (1974) – and begins its own, new continuity
that proceeds directly (with a 30 year hiatus) from Godzilla (1954)...
While out sailing, Maki Gorō, a journalist, runs across a fishing ship
that’s been attacked by Godzilla. On board, he discovers a lot of corpses
– they’ve been drained of blood and look like they’ve been mummified – and
the last survivor, a junior scientist called Okumura Hiroshi. The crew
have been killed by a sea-louse the size of a Labrador, which has
presumably been parasitising Godzilla and has mutated because of exposure
to his radioactive blood. The fascinating suggestion that Godzilla could
have gigantic parasites is never touched on again (although the earlier
bits of Shin Godzilla (2016) will edge into similar territory).
Godzilla is known about, but not widely. Photos exist of a previous
incident (they’re plainly stills from Godzilla), although no one’s
entirely sure whether or not this is the same individual creature. (Which
implies that this new continuity not only ignores all the films from 1955
to 1975, but also rewrites the ending of the original film so that
Godzilla isn’t killed with the Oxygen Destroyer. Yet later films in the
Heisei era series will reference the Oxygen Destroyer, so perhaps it’s
just that the details of Dr Serizawa’s terrifyingly powerful weapon were
suppressed and none of the politicians even knows that the original
Godzilla was killed.) The government initially suppresses news of
Godzilla’s return to avoid mass panic but is obliged to reveal the truth
after he destroys a Soviet nuclear submarine, to prevent an escalation of
hostilities between the USSR and the USA.
After his story is squashed by his editor, Gorō meets up with Hiroshi’s
sister Naoko and sneaks her into the police hospital to see her brother.
This is actually just so that Gorō can get some press photos; Naoko isn’t
too pleased about that. Yet somehow, Gorō and Naoko end up working
together in the science institute's biophysics department alongside
Hiroshi and his mentor, Professor Hayashida. (I’d make a snide remark here
about the science institute’s HR department, but I’ve seen enough American
movies from the 80s that were just as cavalier about throwing their
protagonists together.) Hayashida is the source of the photos of
Godzilla’s 1954 attack and is keen to find out more about the kaiju.
Godzilla comes ashore to attack a nuclear power plant and we get our first
good look at him. He looks a bit like he did in
Ebirah, Horror of the Deep (1966) but with a bit more animalistic
menace. He has large eyes with large red irises, a nose that’s so flat you
can hardly see it, a mouth that’s narrower than it was in 1966 but isn’t
exactly muzzle-shaped, and a mouthful of teeth that includes some
prominent canines. He pulls the power plant’s reactor core straight out
through a chimney stack and absorbs the radiation directly from it. His
spines flash while he does this, as if he's powering up. He's then
distracted by a flock of migrating birds and heads back out to sea.
When he hears about this, Hayashida correctly theorises that Godzilla is
influenced by the same magnetic fields as those birds. Somehow it follows
that Godzilla could be drawn away from Japan with the modulated sound of
migrating birds. Meanwhile, the American and Russian ambassadors to Japan
both lobby the Prime Minister for permission to use a limited nuclear
attack against Godzilla. The Prime Minister refuses on the grounds that
they wouldn't have the stomach to do something similar on their own soil.
Besides, no one really knows what the effects of such a strike would be
and whether they could be contained. Instead, the JSDF deploys the Super
X, which is an experimental flying fortress they’ve been working on in
secret. (No one ever mentions that this would seem to severely bend the
rules of Japan’s postwar commitment to disarmament except for strictly
defensive purposes. Logically, the JSDF must have been working on this
thing long before anyone knew Godzilla was back in town – what exactly
were they expecting to need it for?)
The Super X looks like a UFO with turbine engines in its underside. In a
standoff against Godzilla in central Tokyo, it fires cadmium missiles into
Godzilla's mouth, the logic being that cadmium is used to seal nuclear
reactors so this should basically stop his heart. The plan works, too – we
hear Godzilla's heartbeat slowing (which again reminds this viewer of
Ebirah, Horror of the Deep) and he collapses sideways into a tower
block. The Super X also fires conventional rockets and pale blue laser
beams. In their initial response to the incursion, the JSDF also attack
Godzilla with maser tanks that fire red laser-like beams. (So even though
we’ve all agreed that in this continuity, Japan hasn’t suffered any kaiju
attacks since the big one in 1954, they’ve still developed maser tanks?!
What do the JSDF think they’re doing?)
While he was heading into Japan, Godzilla tipped over a Soviet ship parked
in Tokyo Bay, and the damage he did set off an automated nuclear launch
sequence. The ship’s political officer gets into the control room but is
killed by an exploding console before he can stop the launch. The missile
is fired from an orbital platform; we're shown that America has these too.
The US comes to the rescue by firing its own missile to destroy the rogue
nuke in the air above Tokyo. The resulting explosion causes a thick red
mist to descend on the spot where Godzilla is lying, then dissipate.
(Hopefully it hasn't just irradiated everyone in the area.) It also knocks
out the Super X’s engines with an EMP blast. In the aftermath of this
catastrophe, Godzilla is resuscitated by several lightning strikes (yet
again, shades of Ebirah!) and resumes his rampage.
Ultimately, Professor Hayashida successfully uses recorded bird sounds to
lure Godzilla to a volcano on an island. When he gets there, explosives
are detonated around the caldera to cause a controlled eruption and
Godzilla falls straight in. It’s a very emotional moment – the Prime
Minister cries and everything.
The film ends with an appalling pop ballad (apparently titled "Godzilla:
Love Theme"), sung in English by Dutch trio The Star Sisters, that
includes the lyrics "Take care now Godzilla, my old friend".
This is a solid attempt to update the atomic metaphor of Godzilla for the late
Cold War era. (The music is certainly very 80s.) It falls victim to an issue
that has plagued Godzilla movies since King Kong vs Godzilla (1962),
that of American bit part actors giving wooden performances in minor roles.
Because this film requires Russian characters but perhaps understandably
couldn’t cast real Russians, it presents the double horror of Americans acting
badly and
delivering lines in excruciatingly poor Russian. The helmsman on the Russian
submarine is surprisingly good, while the first officer is stand-out bad –
couldn't the director have swapped the actors?
The Return of Godzilla takes care not to favour the American or Russian
characters – for the economically strong but militarily exposed Japan of the
1980s, both of them could be a threat. (Notwithstanding that, then and still
now, the US armed forces maintain a large post-occupation presence in Japan.)
In the script, the diplomatic representatives of both nations are far too
quick to advocate using nuclear weapons on Japanese soil against Godzilla,
which the Japanese Prime Minister firmly rejects. This might call to mind the
middle section of Mothra (1961), in which a fictional Cold War
superpower offers to take care of Japan’s kaiju problem by, in effect, using
Japan as a testing ground for experimental atomic weaponry. By contrast, in
the American version – Godzilla 1985
(1985) – the scene of a damaged computer accidentally triggering a nuclear
missile launch is re-edited and re-dubbed so that those diabolical Russians
are shown deliberately launching the missile. The American edit’s producer has
claimed this was a joke on his part and in no way a reflection of politically
reactionary tendencies among senior executives in the US film industry,
although I think we might fairly roll our eyes at that.
The fact that the rogue missile and the counter-missile that destroys it are
both launched from orbital weapons platforms looks like a reference to
contemporary world news, although it’s an extrapolation or two beyond that. US
President Ronald Reagan had publicly announced his proposal for a Strategic
Defense Initiative (SDI) in 1983 – critics and the press soon took to calling
it the “Star Wars” programme. The SDI was intended to end the deadlock of the
nuclear arms race between the Western and Eastern Cold War blocs with a
combination of lasers and kinetic projectiles, deployed in orbit as well as on
the ground, that would shoot down missiles launched from the Soviet Union
before they could reach their targets. Nothing much came of the project and it
was abandoned in the 1990s after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. It’s
been suggested in the decades since that Russia had similar plans in the 1970s
and 80s that failed either because of their cost or because the Soviet space
programme simply wasn’t able to follow through on them. Neither superpower
placed actual nuclear missiles in space (that we know of, anyway...), in
accordance with the United Nations General Assembly’s unanimous 1963
prohibition on the orbital deployment of weapons of mass destruction, and the
Outer Space Treaty that formalised that prohibition in 1967.
As far as the cast goes, The Return of Godzilla makes a fairly clean
break from the past. Among the lead players, we might recognise Natsuki Yōsuke
– who played Detective Shindo, the policeman assigned to guard Princess Salno,
in Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (1964) – although it’s been 20
years. Here he takes on the role of Professor Hayashida. Rumour has it this
was the part Hirata Akihiko would have played, if he’d only been well enough
to accept and lived long enough to do it. A couple of stalwart Shōwa-era
actors make cameo appearances in the political negotiation and briefing
scenes. Koizumi Hiroshi is instantly recognisable as the scientist who
explains the blow-up-the-volcano plan to Parliament. (He was Dr Chūjō in
Mothra and Professor Miura in Mothra vs Godzilla (1964).)
Otherwise, there aren’t a lot of familiar faces to distract us. And this is
fitting, because our attention should instead be focused on one of the movie's
new faces.
Sawaguchi Yasuko has a somewhat thankless task playing Naoko, the only
speaking female role in the movie. She serves a pivotal plot function as the
link from Maki to Okumura to Hayashida's lab, and beyond that she's relegated
to being Maki's love interest. But this was Sawaguchi's big break as an actor.
1984 was the first year Toho Studios ran the "Toho Cinderella Audition" talent
contest to find and sign up a new star actress, and Sawaguchi was the first
winner.
The Return of Godzilla was Sawaguchi's second film - her actual debut
was in Keiji Monogatari 3 (1984), which Google Translate tells me means
“Detective Story 3” but which IMDb tells me is known in Anglo markets as
"Karate Cop III: Song of the Sea". I think I can safely say
The Return of Godzilla was the bigger deal of the two. I hesitate to
describe it as a “prestige production”, but I think the fact that Toho used
this film as a vehicle for their new star suggests they thought it might
benefit her career, or she might benefit it, or maybe a bit of both. Sawaguchi
went on to take leading roles in Princess from the Moon (1987) and
Yamato Takeru (1994), both summer blockbusters from Toho based on
popular folk tales. If IMDb is any reliable indicator, she's enjoyed the
greatest acting success of any of the "Toho Cinderella Audition" winners, with
a lengthy filmography that includes the star role in a current TV series
that's been running for more than 20 years.
This isn’t the last time the "Toho Cinderella Audition" will play a part in
the fortunes of the Godzilla franchise, by the way. But more on that in the
next post.
I haven’t said much about the production values of the last few films, beyond
the occasional bit of sniping and mention of the increasing reuse of old
effects shots. Perhaps there wasn’t that much more to be said. But
The Return of Godzilla marks a sea change in the nature – and by
extension, the quality – of the “kaiju vs miniature” effects. The reason is
straightforward: Japan’s urban skylines had changed quite a bit since 1954 (or
even since 1975), with some skyscrapers that would dwarf the 1954 Godzilla
were he to show his face in mid-80s Tokyo. In order for him to appear as
physically imposing as he did to cinemagoers in the 50s, Toho decided that
their returning Godzilla should be scaled up accordingly. But in reality, the
Godzilla costume still had to be roughly as tall as the actor inside it, so
the model buildings had to be made on a proportionally smaller scale. The
miniature cityscape we see here looks good, but it can’t match the level of
detail we got in the 60s films, particularly when we’re looking for debris in
the scenes of destruction. Probably the clearest example is the moment when
Godzilla collapses against a skyscraper, which just doesn’t break apart in the
way a building of that size and heft should. These slab-like edifices that are
meant to be larger feel a lot lighter than they used to.
Although The Return of Godzilla comes after what’s popularly known as
the Shōwa Godzilla series and is generally considered the opening instalment
of the Heisei series, it isn’t actually a film of the Heisei era. Hirohito,
the Emperor Shōwa, died in January 1989 – four years after its release, a
little more than a year after he was first diagnosed with duodenal cancer and
eleven months before the release of this movie’s long deferred sequel.
Terror of Mechagodzilla (1975) Toho Studios Director: Honda
Ishirō, Nakano Teruyoshi (special effects) Also discussed:
King Kong (1976), Gamera Super Monster (1980), Star Fleet
(1982-83).
A title sequence montage of the fight scenes from
Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla
(1974) reminds us of what Mechagodzilla looks like, what it’s capable of
and how it was destroyed. We fast forward to a submarine looking to
salvage what’s left of Mechagodzilla from the sea floor. (Presumably
they’re just off the coast of Okinawa, since that’s where Mechagodzilla
went into the water?) They find no trace of any “space titanium” within
500 metres, but they do find some kind of sea monster which quickly
destroys the sub. On the coast nearby, a young woman sits on the rocks and
pictures the scene in her mind’s eye. A recording of the sub’s last radio
transmissions and some amateur photographs find their way to the local
office of Interpol, where they’re reviewed by an investigative team and
Ichinose, a biologist they’ve brought in to consult. The crew on the
recording claim they’re being attacked by a dinosaur, while the
photographs suggest some UFO activity above the scene of the disaster.
In a hotel room in Tokyo, a bearded man in dark glasses welcomes another
man in dark glasses to Earth. These are both aliens from the third planet
of a black hole, the same bunch who appeared in the previous movie; the
new arrival is their new commander, who bears an uncanny resemblance to
their old, deceased commander. (Which is actually fair enough, considering
they’re only disguised as humans – they may only have so many different
masks.) Refreshingly, the aliens have a motivation this time, although
it’s been recycled from Godzilla vs Gigan
(1972) – their own planet is doomed and, because humanity has been so
careless in overdeveloping and polluting Earth, they think it’s fair game
to invade. They’ve already drawn up plans for the new, spotless alien city
that will replace Tokyo. The bearded alien proposes enlisting the help of
Dr Mafune Shinzo, a brilliant scientist who was spurned by the scientific
mainstream and hates his fellow humans enough to collaborate in their
elimination.
Dr Mafune worked at the “Ocean Development Laboratry” [sic] some 30 years
earlier, where he specialised in the not obviously related fields of
submarine exploration and cybernetic control of animals. (Then again,
given the cinematic world we’re in here, maybe they’re a natural
combination – maybe Mafune’s research was sponsored by the government in
the hope of finding a way to control Godzilla, at least once they knew
Godzilla existed. Although, NB: assuming a contemporary setting, “30 years
earlier” would be just around the end of World War Two. This isn’t
mentioned at all. The fact that Mafune continued his research during and
after the American occupation implies he hadn’t been working on something
military for the Imperial Army, but who knows?) When he claimed to have
discovered a living aquatic dinosaur, which he dubbed Titanosaurus, his
colleagues decided it was time for him to retire, which he did 15 years
ago. (Again, given which cinematic world we’re in... Which part of this
did Mafune’s colleagues have difficulty with, since by “15 years ago” they
would have known about Godzilla for at least five years?) The present head
of the institute explains all of this to Ichinose and an Interpol agent,
Murakoshi, who are looking into the dinosaur that reportedly attacked the
submarine. They go in search of the retired Mafune and are directed to a
secluded mansion in the woods in his home town of Manazuru.
At Mafune’s house, Murakoshi and Ichinose meet his daughter, Katsura.
(She’s the same woman who was sitting down by the presumably Okinawan
coast earlier, although they don’t know that. Manazuru is further south
than Tokyo, in Kanagawa Prefecture, but it's certainly nowhere near
Okinawa. Perhaps she has a speedy private submarine or something. Perhaps
the filmmakers simply forgot where the previous film had been set.)
Katsura tells them Mafune died five years ago and sends them packing.
Meanwhile, Mafune – alive and well, but looking a lot older and shaggier
than he did 15 years ago – is toasting his success in perfecting his
control of Titanosaurus with the bearded alien in a hi-tech secret lab in
his basement. He’s amused when Katsura tells him the authorities came
calling to ask about his dinosaur research – those fools, they laughed at
him, but he'll show them, he’ll show them all, etc. The alien
invites Mafune and Katsura to come and see the real reason his
organisation has asked for Mafune’s help, the perfect means by which
Mafune can exact his revenge on the world. It’s in a super-futuristic
alien secret base hidden inside a cave under Mt Amagi. It’s Mechagodzilla.
The aliens have recovered all the pieces of Mechagodzilla and reassembled
it since the end of the previous film. It looks much the same as it did
before, if less shiny. The one small change is that the camp "MG" patch on
its upper arm has been replaced with an even more camp "MG2", which can be
seen very briefly later in the film (but blink and you'll miss it). The
alien commander asks for Dr Mafune to apply his knowledge of control
mechanisms to Mechagodzilla’s repairs, following which they can bring the
world to its knees by unleashing the cyborg alongside Titanosaurus.
Although he’s shocked to discover that his associates are the alien
invaders from the previous movie, Mafune soon agrees.
The aliens are using captured humans as labour, silencing them by cutting
their vocal cords. One of them escapes the base while Mafune is there and
manages to give a fragment of “space titanium” to a water pipe maintenance
worker before being chased through the nearby woods and gunned down by the
aliens. The maintenance worker takes the fragment to Interpol, giving them
the lead they need to find the alien base at Mt Amagi.
Despite receiving no help from Katsura, the Interpol investigation team
have found some of Dr Mafune’s old notes and are preparing to take a
second submarine down to look for Titanosaurus. Ichinose naively invites
Katsura to come with them, but she refuses and seems strangely upset.
Later, she tries to warn Ichinose against proceeding with the dive, but is
prevented by the bearded alien who reminds her that her loyalty is to his
people. In a flashback scene, we’re shown that Katsura was fatally wounded
in a lab accident when her father was testing his dinosaur control
equipment some years before, but her life was saved when the aliens
entered the lab, took her away and replaced her heart with cybernetic
machinery. (So just how long have they been hanging around on Earth?) He
tells Katsura to send Titanosaurus to destroy the Interpol sub, which she
does. But the creature is deterred, apparently by the supersonic sound
waves emitted by the sub’s comms equipment.
The Interpol agents who are sent to investigate the Mt Amagi area are shot
at by men with laser handguns. They alert the JSDF to the likely presence
of aliens in the area. Meanwhile, Katsura arranges to meet Ichinose and
persuades him to tell her about the sonic weapon being constructed as a
defence against Titanosaurus; she reports back to her father. She’s
concerned that, in the aliens’ hands, Titanosaurus will join the long list
of destructive kaiju that have threatened Japan. (The three examples she
names, in a little clips montage from previous movies, are King Ghidorah,
Rodan and Manda.) Dr Mafune is unconcerned, and prematurely releases
Titanosaurus to attack Tokyo. With the sonic weapon sabotaged, the JSDF
will have no defence against it. In the control room of his base, the
alien commander is secretly pleased by Mafune’s rash action: Godzilla will
confront Titanosaurus, and the fight will leave Godzilla weak enough to be
defeated by Mechagodzilla.
The name "Titanosaurus" sounds like it came from the same monster naming
committee that brought you "Megalon" (and probably “Gigan”, if my hunch is
right). In fact, it's an authentic dinosaur name, but owing to the
scarcity of fossil remains that can be attributed to it – or more
accurately, that can't be attributed to other dinosaurs – no one's
entirely sure what it would have looked like. (In other words, it’s the
“Miscellaneous” bucket for paleontologists.) The Titanosaurus we see here
is an aquatic quadruped, but on land it walks bipedally. It looks a bit
like a cross between a reptile and a seahorse. Its skin looks green or red
depending on the lighting. It has a long, slender neck, a thin fin running
from the top of its head all the way down its spine and a fanned-out fin
behind each ear. There's another fin in its tail that, as we’ll discover,
it can fan out vertically between two fleshy prongs and use to create a
powerful draft by waving its tail to and fro. It abruptly stops what it’s
doing and walks back into the sea when Katsura is shot by an Interpol
agent and Mafune, observing the scene remotely from his lab, abandons
Titanosaurus’ controls. Godzilla, who has indeed come looking for a fight,
is left perplexed.
The aliens operate on Katsura again and repair her cybernetic innards,
earning Mafune’s gratitude. He’s less pleased when the commander tells him
they’ve linked Katsura’s brain remotely to Mechagodzilla. Mafune had
previously suggested that a living brain was the one thing that would
really give Mechagodzilla the edge, and now Katsura can act as its mobile
control centre. The alien commander plans to lure Interpol to his current
base, launch Mechagodzilla and have the base self-destruct with the agents
inside.
Believing Katsura to be dead and unable to accept that she was involved in
Titanosaurus’ attack, Ichinose goes to the Mafune house where he’s
captured by several of the aliens, Dr Mafune and Katsura. He’s tied up and
watches as Katsura triggers the launch of Mechagodzilla. Meanwhile,
Murakoshi leads an Interpol team into the alien base where they’re able to
rescue several of the muted human slaves before the base explodes.
Controlled by Katsura under the alien commander’s orders, Mechagodzilla
and Titanosaurus wreak havoc on Tokyo. Godzilla suddenly appears on the
scene and confronts the duo. (Funnily enough, he appears just as
Titanosaurus is about to step on two kids who call out for Godzilla to
save them...) Godzilla and Titanosaurus seem pretty well matched, but
Mechagodzilla decides the fight when it fires a rocket straight into
Godzilla’s belly. (At which point, smoke comedically billows out of his
mouth.) His opponents take the opportunity to bury him in a crevasse and
jump up and down on top of his grave.
At this point the Interpol team fly in with their sonic weapon mounted on
a helicopter and drive Titanosaurus back. Before Mechagodzilla can shoot
down the helicopter, Godzilla bursts up out of the ground and gives the
cyborg a radioactive blast. (He then takes a moment to dust himself down.)
Mechagodzilla fires off its full range of weapons, but Godzilla charges it
and twists its head off. This isn’t enough to stop it – underneath its
Godzilla-esque head is a small dome that seems to be the source of the
destructive beam it usually fires from its eyes. Meanwhile in Mafune’s
lab, a firefight breaks out between the aliens and some Interpol agents
led by Murakoshi; the aliens are routed. (We see one of them revert to his
true alien form when he’s killed, as in the previous film, but this time
the aliens don’t look like green apes, more like humans with bits of
discoloured latex scattered over their faces.) Mafune is killed in the
crossfire and the shock of his death finally brings Katsura back to her
senses. In order to destroy Mechagodzilla’s control system, she shoots
herself with an alien handgun. Mechagodzilla immediately stops and seems
to blow a fuse, allowing Godzilla to finish it off. The alien commander
attempts to escape in a UFO, which Godzilla quickly destroys with his
radioactive breath. He then turns his attention to Titanosaurus, who ends
up falling apparently dead into the sea. Our heroes are left mourning
Katsura’s death while Godzilla wades off into the sunset.
The last new Godzilla movie to be released for a decade to come,
Terror of Mechagodzilla
looks like a late (and, alas, unsuccessful) attempt to recapture some of the
series’ early vigour with several of the franchise’s key figures returning
behind and in front of the camera. It also proves to be the swansong for a
couple of them.
Honda Ishirō, the OG (Original Godzilla) director, has been persuaded back
after five years of working in television, as has Ifukube Akira, the OG
composer. Honda, whose direction defines this first era of Godzilla, would
never work on another film – he lived until 1993, but emerged from a prolonged
retirement only to work as an assistant on Kurosawa’s later films. Ifukube’s
music was played from stock in Godzilla vs Gigan (1972) but he last
actually worked on a Toho tokusatsu movie in 1970. He adds what sounds like
some interesting bass electronics to his usual orchestral composition here,
although strangely it’s in scenes featuring Titanosaurus rather than
Mechagodzilla. The bombastic Godzilla fanfare and march he composed for the
1954 movie remain indelibly associated with Godzilla and routinely turn up in
even the most recent films in the franchise. Ifukube would return to provide
the music for some of the 1990s Godzilla films and died at a ripe age in 2006.
The actor playing Dr Mafune is hardly recognisable for most of the movie, with
his "old man" hair and bushy moustache, but the stills montage that plays over
the description of his early career and a flashback mid-film reveal the
familiar face of Hirata Akihiko. He was, of course, the tragic Dr Serizawa in
the 1954 film and many other characters since; it’s sad to see him reduced to
the most cliché of mad scientists here. (Not to mention that wig and moustache
– anyone who’s seen Christopher Lee in the Hammer horror film
The Gorgon (1964) will have some idea of what’s been inflicted on
Hirata.) He continued to act but was too unwell to appear in Godzilla’s 1984
comeback and sadly died that year. Representing the new generation of Toho
kaiju eiga actors are Sasaki Katsuhiko as the hero Ichinose, who was
previously the inventor Gorō in Godzilla vs Megalon (1973), and Mutsumi
Gorō playing an entirely different alien leader to the one he played in the
previous movie. Sahara Kenji appears as a high-ranking JSDF officer in a
briefing scene, but blink and you really will miss him.
It's the end of an era, and what a weak note to go out on. Toho’s Champion
Festival, already reduced from three events a year to one, would limp on until
1978; absent a new tokusatsu movie, the 1976 festival would consist entirely
of animated works and be dominated by Disney imports. There’s not much more to
say about Terror of Mechagodzilla, a lazy and underwhelming rehash of
the previous year’s offering. (It’s the first movie in the franchise to pit
Godzilla solo against multiple antagonists – is that really the most
interesting thing about it?) So instead, let’s take a whistle-stop tour of the
giant monster milestones of the next decade.
In 1976, Paramount Pictures distributed a remake of King Kong (1933).
The American “creature feature” craze had peaked and subsided some 15 years
earlier, so it’s not clear why those involved should have thought the time was
right for a Kong remake when they mooted the idea in late 1974 and bought the
rights from RKO General in early 1975. But it was a prescient choice: the
runaway success of Jaws (1975) would prove that an action film with a
giant animal antagonist could be a hit. There’s some debate over whether
producer Dino De Laurentiis was asked by Paramount to handle this film in
particular or whether he’d already had the idea and suggested it to them when
they asked him to produce a film for them. If the latter, there must have been
something in the air because the other person who’s said to have originated
the idea, TV executive Michael Eisner, had mentioned it to Universal Pictures
as well as Paramount before Paramount decided to proceed with De Laurentiis as
the producer. There was a brief but abortive flurry of lawsuits and
counter-lawsuits because Universal had separately approached RKO General for
the rights to Kong and, not knowing that Paramount had acquired the rights,
essentially assumed that they would get them.
The tone of King Kong (1976) was intentionally different from the
original film. De Laurentiis wanted something with a lighter feel, a knowing,
winking, humorous edge and more focus on the romantic aspects of the story
(specifically between Kong and the female lead) than on the fantastic wildlife
of Kong’s island. (Incidentally, the island isn’t named at all in this movie,
although “the beach of the skull” is named as a landmark.) The director that
De Laurentiis engaged, John Guillermin, had just made the multi-award-winning
The Towering Inferno (1974) and brought some of that disaster movie
atmosphere to scenes in King Kong that played more as horror in the
original. To realise Kong, the plan was to use animatronics including a
hyper-ambitious 12-metre-tall full-size mannequin. In other words, the
spectacle of the film would come not from stop-motion or composite action
sequences but from the sheer material fact of Kong’s presence on screen next
to the actors, with an emphasis on wonder rather than uncanny horror. In the
event, the giant mannequin didn’t work and Guillermin was obliged to shoot a
human scale Kong for later compositing, with special effects make-up artist
Rick Baker wearing a Kong costume in a rare instance of an American monster
movie using the effects techniques more commonly found in Japanese kaiju eiga.
The animatronics were used in a minority of scenes, mainly of Kong emoting or
manhandling the female lead, for which only a disembodied head or hand was
required.
Of the three lead actors, the biggest name was Jeff Bridges, playing the
romantic male lead Jack Prescott. Jack was reimagined from the first mate of a
chartered ship (named Jack Driscoll in the 1933 film) to a paleontologist who
specialises in primates and has somehow heard about this mysterious, uncharted
island with a giant ape living on it. Bridges’ film career had only started in
1970 and he’d already had a couple of starring roles and a couple of
Oscar-nominated supporting roles, so his was clearly a name to watch. Charles
Grodin was cast in the Carl Denham role, reimagined as Fred Wilson, roving
executive of the Petrox Oil Company, who has acquired satellite images of the
uncharted island which he plans to prospect and decides instead to exploit
Kong as a marketing gimmick when the island turns out not to be sitting on
large oil reserves. Grodin was known largely for supporting roles, mostly
comedic, although he’d recently been acclaimed in the lead role of
The Heartbreak Kid (1972). Debuting as Dwan, the Ann Darrow role of the
aspiring young actress, was Jessica Lange, who has since enjoyed a lengthy and
successful career.
Changing the unscrupulous entrepreneur character from a filmmaker and
impresario to an oil company executive was a good move thematically, updating
the film’s concerns from the sharp business practices of the 1930s American
film industry to the destructive activities and moral shortcomings of
multinational fossil fuel companies. It’s no accident that the makers of this
film made this choice in the middle of a decade-long energy crisis and in the
wake of the Middle East oil export crisis of 1973-74. Unfortunately, the
change means the film has to jump through some plot hoops to get Jack and Dwan
on board the Petrox expedition’s ship (he’s stowed away, she’s been
shipwrecked by total coincidence in the ship’s path). Relocating Kong’s final
showdown from the Empire State Building to the World Trade Center, which had
only recently opened in 1973, adds the potential for further commentary as the
plaza of this monument to capitalism is stained with Kong’s blood, while a
terrified Dwan is cornered and ruthlessly objectified by the assembled press.
(I imagine, though, that the final reel resonates in a different way with
viewers coming to the movie after the 2001 terrorist attack on the famous Twin
Towers.)
Sadly, the execution doesn’t do justice to the ideas. I think the leads just
about rescue the script, but it’s a near-run thing and they deserve full
credit for their efforts. The movie often comes across as cheesy, but hey,
that’s a deliberate tonal choice made by the producer before anyone else even
started working on it. The massive overreach of a life-size animatronic Kong
that had to be covered for by a man in an ape suit tips the whole thing over
the edge from ironic indulgence into full-blown camp. Nonetheless,
King Kong did fairly well at the box office and some film critics had
nice things to say about it. It made enough of a splash to inspire knock-offs
like the mid-budgeted Hong Kong imitator The Mighty Peking Man (1977)
and the nano-budgeted American-Korean collaboration A*P*E (1976). It
even got a very belated sequel, King Kong Lives (1986), once more
produced by De Laurentiis and directed by Guillermin, which resurrects Kong
alongside a Lady Kong and, eventually, a Baby Kong. The critics weren’t nearly
so kind about that one.
The following year, Star Wars (1977, latterly
Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope) changed the face of cinematic
science fiction and raised everyone’s expectations with regard to special
effects. One of George Lucas’ admitted inspirations for Star Wars was
Kurosawa’s jidaigeki films, and particularly
The Hidden Fortress (1958), so it’s only fair that Japanese cinema
should have taken something back from it. There were two prompt attempts to
cash in on the craze around the American film: Toho’s
The War in Space (1977) and Toei’s Message from Space (1978).
Apart from the title and the heroes’ orange flight suits,
The War in Space doesn’t show much influence from Star Wars –
it’s more of a rewrite of Atragon (1963) but set on Venus and with
spaceships. Message from Space, on the other hand, looks exactly as if
someone who’d seen Star Wars had outlined it to someone else and that
person had written up what they imagined it must have been like, then handed
the script to a third person to visually design the thing from scratch.
Neither of these movies has any daikaiju content, although we will touch on
one of them again in a minute.
Star Wars did influence one daikaiju movie, and that was
Gamera Super Monster (1980). Daiei Film (the production company set up
by Tokuma Shoten, who’d bought the bankrupt Daiei Motion Picture Company’s
assets) had decided it was time to exploit that Gamera property that had been
gathering dust for most of a decade. Their new movie was a compilation of
effects scenes from the seven old movies, reframed by the story of a young boy
and his adult friends shot inexpensively in contemporary suburbia.
Little Keiichi is astonished to discover that Kilara, the woman who runs the
pet shop round the corner from his home, and her two friends are Superwomen
from outer space. They operate out of a campervan on the roof of an apartment
block and their Superwoman costumes consist of silver body stockings with red
boots, gloves and capes. They work secretly to defend the world from the
predations of the spaceship Zanon, whose spy on Earth is a Superwoman
defector called Giruge. (You can tell she’s a baddie because her body stocking
is black.) The plan of whoever’s in charge of the Zanon (we hear a
voice over a radio but never see inside the ship) is to beat humanity into
submission with kaiju attacks, all of which are repeated from earlier movies,
and they bring Gamera under their control at one point so that footage
from the original film can be redeployed. Gamera fights the other kaiju
(including Guiron, on his own planet, for reasons) while the Superwomen work
behind the scenes to foil the aliens’ schemes, and the day is saved when
Gamera flies into orbit and rams the Zanon.
The influence of Star Wars is limited to, but extremely obvious in, the
design of the Zanon which is a straightforward knock-off of an Imperial
Star Destroyer. The movie also shows the influence of the Christopher Reeve
vehicle Superman (1978), not just in the title and the costume of the
Superwomen, but in the closing title sequence in which Kilara takes Keiichi
“flying” over Tokyo at night. Also present are visual references to the recent
anime series Space Battleship Yamato (1974-75), which was enjoying a
resurgence in popularity thanks to a spate of TV movie sequels, and the then
current Galaxy Express 999 (1978-81): in a mid-film scene of Gamera
flying through space, the kaiju costume is gratuitously superimposed on images
from the animated series. These weren’t Daiei properties, so presumably Daiei
went out of their way to get permission to use the clips, but there’s no
coherence, visually or narratively, to these shots. The reason for them is
probably the same as for the Hollywood film references – simply to tie Gamera
into the pop culture experience of the contemporary viewers, to try to make
Gamera look cool by association.
The Superwomen can’t be added into the stock footage, so their involvement in
the proceedings is pretty much limited to a showdown with Giruge and a couple
of other low-octane plot-related scenes, plus several scenes in which they
“monitor” the kaiju fights on a big TV in Kilara’s flat while Keiichi cheers
Gamera on. Because its premise is essentially “boy learns life lessons from
watching old kaiju eiga”, Gamera Super Monster invites comparisons with
All Monsters Attack (1969). But it far outdoes
All Monsters Attack in its proportional reuse of footage and its
paucity of new special effects material. It boasts a grand total of about two
minutes of new monster effects, consisting of shots of Gamera flying through
space and one scene of his legs trampling a billboard advertising a kaiju
movie called “Dodzilla”, which is a moment of gloating the Gamera franchise
really hasn’t earned yet. Gamera Super Monster can’t even claim to
offer the kind of social commentary that justified All Monsters Attack.
It’s just sort of there.
It’s probably for the best that Gamera sank back into dormancy for another
decade and a half.
Finally, an extended sidenote. While Daiei was perpetrating
Gamera Super Monster, Fuji Television was producing
X-Bomber (1980-81), a science fiction serial that used puppetry instead
of live action or animation. It owed much to the works of Gerry Anderson, the
British creator of Thunderbirds (1965-66),
Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons (1967-68) and many, many others.
Unlike Anderson’s series, in X-Bomber the puppets were operated with
rods from below rather than with strings from above. According to the extras
on the English version’s DVD release (but we’ll come to that in a minute),
Anderson was persuaded by this series to try rod puppetry on his next serial,
Terrahawks (1983-86). Although there was no obvious overlap of
personnel, X-Bomber also seems to have been influenced by Toei’s
Message from Space, in the distinctive costume of its main villain and
in the inclusion of a spaceship that looks like an antique galleon.
X-Bomber is kaiju-adjacent, because alongside its puppetry it employs
the familiar tokusatsu technique of stunt actors in costumes playing the
outsized characters. The three lead heroes pilot spacecraft that can combine
to form a gigantic mecha, Big Dai X, which is portrayed across the series by
an actor smashing up miniature landscapes and vehicles, while the Imperial
Master who supervises the villains and makes a full appearance in the final
episode is also a stuntman in costume being attacked by a puppet.
X-Bomber was exported to the UK, dubbed and broadcast as
Star Fleet (1982-83). It was shown in a prime 10am slot on Saturdays
between imported episodes of Sesame Street (1969-present) and homegrown
children’s magazine programme The Saturday Show (1982-85). Its impact
can be judged by the fact that Brian May and Eddie Van Halen released a
(commercially unsuccessful) hard rock cover of the theme tune composed by Paul
Bliss, largely for the amusement of May’s four-year-old son who was a fan of the
show. At a time and in a country short of exposure to kaiju eiga,
Star Fleet introduced the British children of the 1980s to the
larger-than-life side of Japanese visual fantasy. And friends, I know: I was
one of those children.
Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla (1974) Toho Studios Director:
Fukuda Jun, Nakano Teruyoshi (special effects) Also known as:
Godzilla vs the Cosmic Monster (the title of the US dub – it was going
to be “Godzilla vs the Bionic Monster”, but Universal Pictures thought that
sounded too much like their TV series The Bionic Woman (1976-78) and
threatened legal action, so the title was changed).
Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla marked 20 years since the release of the
original Godzilla (1954), and was even marketed as Godzilla’s 20th
anniversary film!
This film opens with a scene of the spiny quadrupedal kaiju Anguirus, last
seen falling into a chasm at the start of
Godzilla vs Megalon (1973), trudging through a snowy landscape and
roaring plaintively. The focus of his attention seems to be an erupting
volcano. The signifcance of this will become clear later.
On Okinawa Island, a small crowd watches Nami, the descendant of the
ancient Azumi royal family, performing a ceremonial dance. She’s abruptly
seized by a vision of a city in flames, terrorised by a kaiju.
(Misleadingly, the kaiju in her vision is King Ghidorah, who won’t be
appearing again in this movie.) Among the crowd are brothers Keisuke and
Masahiko. As he drives back to the excavation site he works at, Keisuke
drops Masahiko off at the Gyokusendō cave, a recently opened tourist
attraction. When he reaches the site, Keisuke is shown another cave that
his team has discovered, which contains some cryptic murals and a small
shrine. Saeko, an archaeologist from the local university, suggests that
the murals depict some kind of prophecy involving King Caesar, the
guardian of the Azumi royal family. The mural of King Caesar looks a bit
like a squatting lion, and there’s a very similar looking statuette in the
shrine inside the cave. Saeko takes the statuette and some photos of the
murals back to the university to decipher them. Unknown to her, a couple
of shady looking men are in the otherwise deserted faculty building,
hanging around outside her office.
Keisuke and Saeko both travel to Tokyo to visit Professor Wakura, she
because she wants the professor’s opinion on her findings and he because
the professor is his uncle. Masahiko is also in the area – he found a
mysterious fragment of metal in the Gyokusendō cave and has taken it to
the physicist Professor Miyajima for analysis. Miyajima insists that the
metal is “space titanium”. An earthquake shakes the lab; Miyajima’s
daughter remarks that this has been happening daily for the past 10 days.
As Saeko and Professor Wakura work into the night on the mysterious
artefacts, one of Saeko’s stalkers breaks in and, pointing a gun at the
archaeologists, demands the statuette. Keisuke chases him off after a
brief fight. The next morning, Mt Fuji erupts and ejects a large rock
which turns out to contain Godzilla. This fits with the prophecy outlined
in the murals, which suggest the world will be threatened by a destructive
monster, although Saeko is surprised that Godzilla should be that monster.
(Which is funny given his track record, but reinforces his recent shift
into heroism.) Meanwhile in Okinawa, on hearing the news, Nami’s
grandfather regrets that his family has lost the secret of summoning King
Caesar, the only being who might defeat Godzilla, but revels in the
thought that Godzilla laying waste to Japan might be divine vengeance for
the historic oppression of the Azumi.
A few things might clue us in to the fact that something’s not right about
Godzilla. He walks quite stiffly, making strange creaking sounds as he
does so, and his roar sounds a bit hoarse. He’s ambushed en route to Tokyo
by Anguirus, supposedly his old friend, who bursts up out of the ground to
attack him. (So either Anguirus has been studying commando tactics or he’s
now taken to burrowing through the Earth like Baragon.) Anguirus grazes
Godzilla’s arm, revealing a shiny metallic patch underneath the skin, but
Godzilla soon gains the upper hand and brutally breaks Anguirus’ jaw
before marching onward. Keisuke drives over to Professor Miyajima’s lab to
check in on his brother and happens upon the debris of the kaiju’s battle,
including a metallic brick-like object. He takes this with him, and
Miyajima confirms that it’s made of the same stuff as Masahiko’s metal
fragment. Miyajima decides to take a closer look at Godzilla.
Godzilla destroys the dockside area of Tokyo with a yellow beam that
doesn’t look much like his usual radioactive breath. He’s intercepted by
the real Godzilla, whose sudden appearance amuses the false Godzilla’s
operators watching from a distant control room and surprises Miyajima, his
daughter Ikuko and the two brothers, who are watching from the sidelines.
With the deception exposed, the impostor drops its disguise and reveals
itself to be a cyborg. Miyajima suggests calling it Mechagodzilla, which
happens to also be the name the aliens use for it.
Mechagodzilla looks, unsurprisingly, like a blocky, angular, metallic
version of Godzilla, with a pointy muzzle and very pronounced nostrils. It
fires missiles from its fingers and some kind of destructive beam weapon
from its eyes. As we’ll discover later, it also packs hidden weapons in
its kneecaps and a concealed hatch in its chest and can produce an
impenetrable force shield by rapidly spinning its head. In a bit of a camp
touch, it has a sort of logo, comprised of the Roman letters "MG", printed
on its upper arm. When it needs to return to base after sustaining damage
in this first fight with Godzilla, it flies away on rockets embedded in
its heels.
Miyajima, Ikuko and Masahiko return to Okinawa and go to Gyokusendō in
search of Mechagodzilla’s alien controllers, since that was where Masahiko
found the first piece of extraterrestrial metal. They walk straight into
the hands of the aliens, who have a hi-tech base hidden behind the rock
wall of the cave. The aliens’ commander tells his guests that he and his
minions have come from the third planet of a black hole to conquer Earth.
The aliens’ commander has Ikuko and Masahiko locked up to coerce Miyajima
into helping complete the repairs to Mechagodzilla.
On a barren island, in the middle of a thunderstorm, Godzilla is struck
several times by lightning. Far from harming him, this seems to energise
him. (Perhaps a callback to Ebirah, Horror of the Deep (1966), when
Godzilla took on a role originally intended for King Kong and was
reinvigorated by lightning because that’s just something Toho thought King
Kong did?) In fact, it makes him glow with electric power. (A bit like the
Ready Brek kid, but blue instead of orange. (One for the Brits there.)
This narrative non sequitur will prove important in the big fight towards
the end of the film.)
Following further research, Professor Wakura has determined that the King
Caesar statuette can be used to summon the real guardian by placing it in
the shrine on top of the gate of Azumi Castle. Keisuke and Saeko make
their own way back to Okinawa by ship, aboard the
Queen Coral passenger liner, but soon realise they’re being
followed. The man who invaded Wakura’s home earlier on breaks into Saeko’s
cabin by night and steals the statuette, but is discovered and shot by
Keisuke. Wounded, the man drops his human disguise – he’s actually a green
apelike creature, one of the aliens. He takes the statuette and runs up on
deck, but is shot by Saeko’s other stalker, a man in dark glasses, and
falls overboard. But when the Queen Coral arrives in dock, Saeko
discovers that Keisuke had entrusted the real statuette to the ship’s
captain and replaced it with a replica, which went overboard with the
assailant. (So when and how exactly did Keisuke make that?!)
Saeko and Keisuke soon learn that Professor Miyajima has gone missing.
Keisuke goes to Gyokusendō to look for them and finds the Professor’s
metal smoking pipe in the cave, but is caught by an alien. The alien is
shot by the man in dark glasses, who’s followed Keisuke into the cave.
He’s an Interpol agent called Nanbara, who’s been investigating the aliens
for the past six months. He forces the alien to let him and Keisuke into
the secret base, just in time to save Miyajima, Masahiko and Ikuko from
being steamed to death. Although they escape the base, Nanbara, Masahiko
and Miyajima head back in to sabotage Mechagodzilla’s controls.
Keisuke, Saeko and Ikuko take the statuette to Azumi Castle, only to find
that two of the aliens are waiting at the shrine with Nami and her
grandfather. They threaten to kill their prisoners unless they’re given
the statuette, but are shot dead by one of Nanbara’s colleagues. Saeko
gets the statuette into position, and the gems in its eyes focus the light
of the rising sun into laser-like beams that blow a hole in a nearby cliff
face. The real King Caesar is revealed within, sleeping upright inside a
hollow chamber. Since they’ve been unable to prevent this by securing the
statuette, the aliens dispatch Mechagodzilla to kill King Caesar. Nami, as
a descendant of the Azumi royal line, is able to wake King Caesar up by
singing his signature song.
King Caesar looks a bit like the lion-dog guardian statues commonly found
in Japan and China. He also looks a bit like a shaggy, demonic poodle with
glowing red eyes. The way his large ears prick up is reminiscent of the
old “Coco the Clown” fright wig. He’s able to take Mechagodzilla’s beam
weapon in through one eye and fire it back at the cyborg from his other
eye, which is a very neat trick. He’s also strong enough to wrestle
Mechagodzilla and give it a good pounding, but he’s soon subdued by a
barrage of finger missiles. Just when all seems lost, Godzilla wades
ashore and joins the fray.
Mechagodzilla gives the two kaiju a thorough beating, firing its full
range of weapons and defending itself from Godzilla’s breath with its
head-spinning force shield. This fight includes some of the most graphic
violence yet seen in a kaiju movie, with Godzilla sustaining a gushing
wound in the side of his neck and being stuck like a pincushion with
missiles. This is when Godzilla makes use of the electric energy we saw
him absorbing earlier, giving off his blue glow again and somehow turning
himself into a giant electromagnet. His pull is strong enough to overcome
Mechagodzilla’s rockets and drag it out of the sky (along with a couple of
nearby electricity pylons). King Caesar batters Mechagodzilla’s torso and
Godzilla twists its head off. While the aliens are distracted by this turn
of events, Nanbara rushes one of the technicians, uses his gun to shoot
the alien leader and shorts out the master computer with Miyajima’s metal
pipe. The heroes escape as the alien base self-destructs (and what’s that
going to do for Gyokusendō’s value as a tourist attraction?), and the
others at Azumi Castle watch as Mechagodzilla explodes. Godzilla swims off
home, while King Caesar settles back into his cliffside cubby and is
sealed in by an impromptu avalanche. The statuette is enshrined at Azumi
Castle; Nami’s grandfather says that his ancestors can rest peacefully
now.
The idea of villains discrediting heroes with robot duplicates dates back
nearly as far as the idea of the robot itself. The Maschinenmensch, used by
the mad scientist Rotwang to undermine the workers’ hero Maria in Fritz Lang's
Metropolis (1927), might be the earliest example. The modern use of the
word “robot” to mean an artificial servant dates back to Karel Čapek’s stage
play R.U.R. (1920), although the robots in that play aren’t mechanical,
but are more like a genetically engineered underclass. The concept of
malevolent robot doubles might also have been familiar to contemporary viewers
from the Star Trek episode "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" (1966),
which features the plot device used in Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla of a
double being exposed when metal is revealed beneath its artificial skin. Toho
had previously borrowed the character of Mechani-Kong from the animated
King Kong Show
(1966-67), in which Mechani-Kong is used to discredit the real Kong, for their
movie
King Kong Escapes (1967), in which it’s just a vaguely Kong-shaped
robot. It’s perhaps surprising that it took them this long to come up with
Mechagodzilla.
But Mechagodzilla is just a fun gimmick. The real point of interest in this
film is its setting: Okinawa. Okinawa is the largest of the Ryūkyū Islands, a
chain of small islands stretching between Taiwan and the main body of Japan.
This location made the Ryūkyū Islands an ideal trading post for international
mariners and consequently a target for invasion. The Ryūkyū Kingdom, unified
and centralised on Okinawa in the 15th century and already a Chinese
tributary, was made a tributary of Japan as well at the start of the 17th
century. In 1879, Japan formally annexed the Ryūkyū Islands and Shō Tai, the
last monarch of the Ryūkyūan Shō dynasty, was forced to abdicate and retire to
Tokyo while the bulk of his territory was redesignated Okinawa Prefecture
under the Meiji Emperor. (The northernmost islands in the chain, grouped as
the Ōsumi, Tokara and Amami Islands, were folded into Kagoshima Prefecture
instead.) China was made to renounce its interest in the islands in 1895 after
the First Sino-Japanese War.
The people of the Ryūkyū Islands had their own culture, their own ethnic
identity and their own entire family of languages, related to but distinct
from Japanese. All of this was suppressed following annexation because it
didn’t fit with Imperial Japan’s narrative about itself, that it had been one
nation united by one identity and one language since the dawn of the Yamato
dynasty more than a thousand years earlier. In common with many minority
languages in colonial and colonised countries in the 19th and 20th centuries
(and elsewhere in Japan – the Ainu in the north suffered similar treatment),
the Ryūkyūan languages were ruthlessly stamped out in schools to facilitate a
standardised education in the language of, and to the obvious benefit of, the
governing authorities. When Nami’s grandfather talks about avenging the
injustices done to his people, he isn’t talking about ancient history – he’s
of an age to have experienced this cultural imperialism directly himself.
After the Second World War, America assumed exclusive authority over many of
Japan’s smaller territories, including the Ryūkyū Islands. The US military
used Okinawa as a base of operations in the Korean and Vietnam Wars and built
up a significant presence on the island. The people of Okinawa had several
reasons to resent this second occupation of their land, including the
predictable behaviour of American GIs stationed overseas, the fear that Maoist
China might attack Okinawa in an escalation of the Vietnam War, and related
rumours (later proven true) that America was secretly deploying nuclear
weapons on the island with the Japanese government’s consent. America held
onto the islands of Okinawa Prefecture until 1972, when it formally handed
control of them back to Japan. As with its handover of other Japanese
territories, this was conditional on America continuing to maintain a military
presence; Okinawa still hosts the overwhelming majority of US troops in Japan.
Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla
was conceived at least partly as a way of celebrating the 1972 handover of
Okinawa.
And so, in addition to the novelty of Mechagodzilla, we get a new kaiju
personally tailored for Okinawa. The Okinawan shisa is a guardian statue
equivalent to the Chinese shishi or the komainu of mainland Japan, a sort of
lion-dog hybrid. They’re usually found in pairs – one male and one female, one
with its mouth open and the other closed. One of them’s meant to welcome good
luck into a house or keep it in, the other to forbid entry to evil spirits or
to chase them away, and opinions differ as to which roles the open-mouthed and
closed-mouthed shisas play. But there’s general agreement that the female one
is the welcoming one and the male one is the one fighting off evil. This, and
the use of the title “King” (see also King Kong and King Ghidorah), indicates
that King Caesar falls into line with the majority of cinematic kaiju as being
presumptively male. “King Shisa” is his actual name, but because the Japanese
language habitually softens the “si” sound to “shi” (...yes, everyone in
Godzilla vs Megalon was pronouncing Seatopia as “Shi-topia”...), it’s
ended up being perversely rendered in English as “King Caesar”. Toho liked the
name and have adopted it as the kaiju’s official Anglo name.
King Caesar is one of the most culturally appropriative things ever to appear
in a Godzilla movie. It’s a bit like... Well, imagine if a more powerful
nation had taken Northern Ireland from the British after World War Two, then
handed it back in 1972, and the British film industry marked the occasion by
releasing a James Bond movie in which Bond is sent on a mission to Northern
Ireland and teams up with a seductive leprechaun secret agent called Blarney
Galore. It’s a little bit like that.
And yet it’s clearly well intended. The world is saved by the revival of
something at least vaguely resembling traditional Okinawan culture (in a
team-up with Godzilla) and, as silly as he might look to Western eyes, King
Caesar isn’t played for laughs. And Nami’s grandfather’s outburst when he
wishes Godzilla would give Japan a pasting is a frank admission of how a lot
of people in Okinawa felt – and still feel – about the people who spent the
first half of the 20th century trying to erase their identity. That’s a bold
move for a kids’ film.
(Incidentally, what does Godzilla represent in this movie? Does he still stand
in for some aspect of America? Or does Mechagodzilla represent America, being
the product of alien invaders with superior technology, and has Godzilla
become a fully Japanese hero now? And would the people of Okinawa be any
happier to see their kaiju champion playing second fiddle to a symbol of Japan
than to the embodiment of American militarism?)
Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla doesn’t get everything right – as noted
above, the name of the royal family of the Ryūkyū Islands was Shō, not Azumi.
Azumi is, however, the name of a completely different ethnic community that
lived further north, on the other side of Kyūshū. They’re believed to have had
common ancestry with the diverse peoples of the Pacific Islands, dating back
to a diaspora from Taiwan some 5000 years ago according to one current theory.
Although their culture revolved around the sea and they also traded with
China, there’s nothing to suggest that they ever occupied or became monarchs
of the Ryūkyū Islands.
Gyokusendō cave, which figures so prominently in this movie, is a real place.
It was discovered in 1967 and part of it was opened to the public in 1972, so
it was quite a new tourist attraction when
Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla was released. Its inclusion looks like the
sort of thing Daiei used to do to economise on the Gamera movies – I wonder if
there was any sponsorship or cross-promotion. Obviously the real cave doesn’t
include a section of rock wall that slides away to reveal a secret alien base,
although I shudder to think of the movie’s child viewers pestering their
parents into taking them on holiday to Okinawa so that they could run around
the cave tugging on the stalactites in the hope of finding a hidden door
control. It’s now part of Okinawa World, a theme park which was opened in
1996. A commercialised representation of traditional Okinawan culture is at
least better than the total denial of it, and if Okinawa World does its part
to preserve at least some of one of the old cultures of the Ryūkyū Islands, I
guess some good will have come of it.
Speaking of Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla not always getting it right...
The English language subtitles for this film credit the actress playing
Princess Nami as Barbara Lynn. She’s not the American blues singer! She's
actually a South Korean actress listed on IMDb as Bellbella Lin. The rest of
the cast includes some familiar faces, in what looks like a call back to the
“good old days” after the more adventurous casting of the last few movies.
Koizumi Hiroshi appears in his last '70s Godzilla film as the sympathetic
Professor Wakura – hardly more than a guest appearance, but don’t worry, he’ll
be back. Playing the other sympathetic scientist character and the much
beefier role, Professor Miyajima, is Akihiko "Dr Serizawa" Hirata. He
will be back in the next Godzilla film, and so will Sahara Kenji, who
can be briefly seen here as the captain of the Queen Coral handing the
shisa statuette in its box back to Keisuke. Mutsumi Gorō is new to the
Godzilla franchise, but he’ll be back next week too. Although his character,
the alien leader, dies here, Mutsumi will be back in the next film playing a
practically identical character.
Godzilla vs Megalon (1973) Toho Studios Director: Fukuda Jun,
Nakano Teruyoshi (special effects)
A nuclear test in the Aleutian Islands causes reverberations further south
in the Pacific. Monster Island is badly hit by seismic activity, with
Anguirus falling into a crack in the ground and Godzilla left agog at the
mayhem unfolding around him. (Anguirus, in his extremely brief non-stock
appearance, looks much as before. Godzilla now looks even more cartoonish
and is emoting in a very human way.)
The aftershocks are felt in Japan too. Ibuki Gorō, an electronics whiz, is
enjoying a lakeside picnic with his younger brother Roku and his friend
Jinkawa Hiroshi when disaster strikes. Strange flashes of light flare up
from under the lake, which quickly drains away through a fissure in the
lake bed. Hiroshi drives them home while the radio news ties the tremors
back to the nuclear test and Gorō ponders whether modern civilisation will
go the same way as the mythical lands of Lemuria and Mu. At Gorō’s snazzy,
modernist house, the friends disturb two intruders who attack them and
escape. Hiroshi tries to follow them in his car but they give him the
slip. Gorō and Roku find that their home has been ransacked but nothing
seems to have been taken. The intruders have, however, left a scattering
of red sand on the floor next to Gorō’s experimental robot. Hiroshi takes
it away for testing and learns that it came from a stratum of rock 30
miles underground – it’s only found in one other place on the surface, at
Easter Island. Hiroshi takes a moment to fill Gorō in on Easter Island’s
famous mo’ai statues, which he absurdly claims are three million years
old. Gorō follows this by demonstrating his newly completed robot, which
he decides to call Jet Jaguar.
Jet Jaguar is humanoid, sheathed in a motley of silver and primary
colours. It has an extremely pointy, swept-back head, which looks a bit
like a bicycle helmet. It has wide shaded “eyes” and a grille for a
“mouth” that looks like the world’s cheesiest grin. Built-in cameras and
proximity sensors allow it to walk around Gorō’s lab without bumping to
anything or anyone. As we’ll discover later, it can also fly, which it
does by raising its arms and simply levitating into the air. When it
flies, a pair of antennae fold out from its pointy head.
Meanwhile, Roku is riding around the neighbourhood on a tiny motorbike
when he’s kidnapped by the two intruders. They force him to get them into
Gorō’s house, subdue everyone with knockout gas and contact Seatopia to
report their success.
Seatopia is a fabulous subterranean realm combining ancient architecture
and hi-tech computer equipment. A statue resembling the mo’ai features
prominently in an excavated cavern temple, so Seatopia is tied back to the
conversation about Easter Island as well as the earlier one about ancient,
mythical kingdoms that have sunk beneath the waves. It’s ruled over by a
man who isn’t named on screen, but ancillary sources refer to him as
Emperor or King Antonio, so let’s call him that. Antonio is a blond
Caucasian man with a moustache and adventurous dress sense. There’s a
technician in Seatopia (but only one!) who wears a modern formal jacket,
most of the population seem to favour plain white robes and the priesthood
like to cavort in white bikinis and transparent raincoats. Antonio,
however, has chosen to wear a very abrupt white toga, clasped at one
shoulder and belted at the waist, white leggings and knee-length white PVC
boots. He also wears a metallic circlet with what looks like the head of a
Japanese rhinoceros beetle positioned above his brow – the significance of
this will soon become clear. Like many American actors before him, he has
obviously been recorded speaking in English and dubbed over later by a
Japanese actor. To punish the surface-dwellers for damaging his kingdom
with their underground nuclear tests, he unleashes the vengeance of
Megalon, Seatopia’s ancient guardian.
Megalon (in Japanese, just “Megalo”, the Greek word for “big”) is an
enormous bipedal creature with scaly skin and the head of a Japanese
rhinoceros beetle. (That’s right – Antonio’s circlet has Megalon’s face on
it.) Its forearms are two halves of a gigantic excavating drill. The
barbed spine sticking out of its forehead lights up when it gets excited.
In combat, this spine will fire a kind of heat ray that causes tanks to
spontaneously combust. In case that isn’t enough, Megalon also spits
grenades at its foes. It has beetle-like wings which it opens when flying,
yet it seems to actually fly through some kind of rocket propulsion. On
the surface, it tends to bounce around rather than walking.
Hiroshi wakes up tied to a chair in Gorō’s lab with one of the intruders.
The Seatopian agent has taken control of Jet Jaguar and sent it off to the
lake that was drained earlier. The other agent has hired a couple of truck
drivers who are now taking Gorō and Roku to the lake as well, in a
container on the back of the truck. The container is to be lowered into
the fissure in the lake bed, from where an elevator will take it down to
Seatopia so that Gorō can build an army of Jet Jaguars for them. Hiroshi
escapes and drives off to the lake, pursued by two more Seatopian agents
on a motorbike and in a car. Meanwhile, Megalon burrows up from beneath
the lake and the agent at the lab directs Jet Jaguar to lead Megalon on a
campaign of destruction towards Tokyo. The JSDF deploy their usual array
of mobile artillery to intercept it.
Disturbed by a news report about Megalon and by their passenger pulling a
gun on them, the truck drivers throw the Seatopian agent out of the cab
and decide to drop their container off the nearest bridge. Just as they’re
about to, Megalon appears behind a nearby dam. Hiroshi arrives and the
unscrupulous pair wallop him and steal his car to escape the kaiju. As
Hiroshi wrestles with the truck’s controls, Megalon breaks through the dam
and knocks the container off the back of the truck, sending it flying over
a hill. For a miracle, Gorō and Roku are unharmed. Hiroshi runs off after
them while Megalon continues on its rampage.
The JSDF are able to stall Megalon but not stop it. Gorō reveals that he’s
wearing a pendant that houses the backup control mechanism for Jet Jaguar,
although it will only work at close range. Flown into the fray in a
helicopter, Gorō succeeds in taking back control of the robot and sends it
off to Monster Island to fetch Godzilla. When he’s advised of this turn of
events, Antonio orders his technician to contact the M Space Hunter Nebula
and request the use of Gigan. (This is extremely weird. How does Seatopia
have the aliens from Godzilla vs Gigan (1972) on speed dial – are
they old allies? Do they have a common cause in trying to wipe out life on
Earth’s surface? Were they secretly collaborating behind the scenes of the
previous movie?)
Jet Jaguar lands on Monster Island, right in front of Godzilla, and
communicates with him using a combination of Mellotron-like electronic
warbles and hand signals. Bizarrely, Godzilla seems to understand the
message and responds with his own gestures and roaring. Jet Jaguar flies
away and Godzilla swims off in pursuit.
Gorō and Roku storm their home and rout the Seatopian agent, but too late
to do anything to stop Megalon completely destroying Tokyo. Jet Jaguar
reports in before flying off of its own accord – Gorō says he programmed
it to act independently in emergencies, but its behaviour suggests it’s
now rewriting its own program. Jet Jaguar goes to confront Megalon, and
reveals the astonishing new ability to grow from human size to kaiju size.
The pair fight on equal terms until Gigan shows up. Jet Jaguar looks to be
done for, but Godzilla arrives in the nick of time. (He’s now taken to
striking martial arts poses, just like Jet Jaguar and the two villainous
kaiju.) After a prolonged tag team battle, Gigan flies away in retreat.
Jet Jaguar and Godzilla continue to mercilessly pound Megalon (with
Godzilla skating along on his tail to deliver some sliding kicks in what
may be the second most commented on thing he does after “flying” in
Godzilla vs Hedorah (1971)) until the bug-headed baddie flees back
underground. Antonio orders that all portals to the surface be sealed, and
Seatopia is buried away again under the lake bed. Jet Jaguar shakes
Godzilla’s hand before he heads home to Monster Island, then shrinks back
down to its original height. It’s a simple automaton once more, although
Gorō wonders if it’s just biding its time until the next time the world is
threatened.
This film opens with a throwaway reference to a second underground nuclear
weapons test in the Aleutian Islands in the early 1970s. There’d already been
three such tests by this time, two of them in the 60s, so possibly the
intended meaning is a fictional test that would be the second in the 70s but
the fourth in total. America had carried out the tests on the volcanic island
of Amchitka, notwithstanding the presence of Aleut populations on other
islands in the archipelago and the fact that it was a designated wildlife
reserve. The site was chosen partly because it was nice and far away from most
of mainland America and partly because it was within dick-swinging distance of
mainland Russia. Testing in this geologically unstable area also gave the US
Atomic Energy Commission some hints on how they might detect other nations’
underground nuclear tests using seismological equipment. The US, the USSR and
the UK had signed a treaty banning atmospheric, underwater and orbital nuclear
tests in 1963, so underground tests were of great interest to the signatories.
The “Cannikin” test, conducted in November 1971, was America’s largest ever
underground nuclear test, forcing the ground up by six metres and registering
7.0 on the Richter scale. Public concern and protests over the test, in the
wake of the previous detonation in 1969, had led to the formation of the
activist organisation that would eventually become Greenpeace. There was a lot
of concern, particularly in Canada, that detonating nuclear weapons under
Amchitka might cause further earthquakes and tsunamis across the Pacific.
Although these effects were not observed, this is presumably the basis for the
seismic devastation of Monster Island at the start of
Godzilla vs Megalon.
Not that the movie is particularly interested in this. The nuclear test is
merely a contrivance to get Seatopia into the story, and Seatopia only exists
as the launchpad for Megalon. Monster Island, which seems to be on the brink
of crumbling into the sea in the pre-title scene, appears unscathed later in
the movie and no mention is ever made of its partial destruction. The
Seatopians have a genuine grievance against the world above them, since
underground nuclear tests have reportedly ruined a third of their kingdom
(which we don’t see), but they’re immediately presented as antagonists without
a shred of nuance. In their few scenes, the Seatopian agents above ground
commit some thuggish acts of violence and participate in a couple of car
chases, while King Antonio stands around in an underfurnished temple set or an
incongruous, computerised control room and barks orders to his underlings. The
rest of Seatopian society and culture is represented by that shoehorned-in
mo’ai statue, a temple dance that looks like one of those “exotic” Pacific
Island scenes of old but performed by women in bikinis and raincoats, and an
establishing shot of the kingdom that looks like a piece of first draft
concept art. The entire point of the movie is the big monster fight, as
evidenced by how drawn out it is and how abruptly the story wraps up once the
director judges enough time has elapsed.
In short, this is a bad film. The story sits alongside those of
Latitude Zero (1969) and Space Amoeba (1970) as one of Toho’s
laziest, nothing but a peg on which to hang an extremely gratuitous kaiju
bust-up. It’s a cynical exercise in nothing more than keeping a Champion
Festival audience of kids diverted for an hour and a quarter.
The reuse of old footage is becoming more obvious, too. It’s easier to spot
when you watch these films in rapid succession, no doubt, but just the change
in lighting should clue viewers in to the old shots of JSDF vehicles mustering
that have been dropped in here. The scene of seismic activity on Monster
Island at the start is illustrated with shots of yellowish gas breaking out
across the island, as seen in Destroy All Monsters (1968). There are no
prizes for spotting the reused shots of Gigan manifesting in space and
clashing with Godzilla in the big fight, particularly when he crashes into a
building and a bridge that weren’t there in the wide shots with Megalon. Most
outrageously – and I could almost praise the filmmakers for their brazenness
here – it’s clear that the heat ray from Megalon’s horn has been made to look
like yellow lightning only so that, in the scene of him attacking Tokyo, they
can repurpose some old effects shots of buildings being destroyed by King
Ghidorah’s death ray.
Let’s cut back to Seatopia’s mo’ai and Gorō and Hiroshi’s conversations about
Easter Island. The real mo’ai were carved out of volcanic rock by the people
of Rapa Nui (a.k.a. Easter Island) between 500 and 800 years ago (and
certainly not the three million years ago that Hiroshi claims). They’re
believed to represent the ancestors of Rapa Nui watching over their
descendants, and although exactly how they were transported from their quarry
and erected on the other side of the island remains unknown, there are some
plausible hypotheses about how it could have been done. There’s also a much
less plausible hypothesis that it was the work of aliens, popularised by the
Swiss author Erich von Däniken. Von Däniken’s oeuvre consists of a combination
of alien-inflected reinterpretations of religious and folkloric artefacts and
speculations that ancient feats of engineering must have required alien
intervention, or at least the use of alien technology and scientific knowhow.
Both these elements rest on questionable ethnocentric assumptions: the first,
that figurative images of the human form that don’t fit European artistic
expectations must represent something else beyond the artist’s comprehension,
and the second, that pre-industrial non-European peoples couldn’t have been
smart enough to develop their own scientific or mathematic skills. The mo’ai
fall into both categories in von Däniken’s musings and were discussed in his
1968 debut, translated into English as Chariots of the Gods?
Von Däniken wasn’t the first pseud to speculate along these lines, but he may
have been the most successful. Chariots of the Gods? was a runaway
bestseller and, despite contemporary rebuttals and accusations of both
plagiarism and fraud, it’s remained in circulation. We know that the
paranormal and the pseudoscientific were already popular in Japan from plot
elements in Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (1964), and I’m sure von
Däniken’s ideas, whether translated directly or relayed through local media,
would have found an audience there. This could explain the mentions in
Godzilla vs Megalon not only of the mo’ai, but of the myths of Lemuria
and Mu as well, and consequently for the depiction of the quasi-Atlantean
realm of Seatopia and the large (but curiously metallic) mo’ai standing in its
main temple. Von Däniken’s juxtaposition of the ancient and the alien might
even account for the extraordinary fact that Seatopia has a hotline to the
nebula next door and can call in the extraterrestrial kaiju Gigan when it
suits them.
More recently, there’s been a craze for imitative “moyai” pumice statues in
Japan, but that didn’t start until the end of the 1970s, somewhat too late to
be relevant to this film.
Jet Jaguar has an interesting history. It looks like another attempt to win
over the kids by imitating Ultraman (original series 1966-67) – as if
the kitchen sink cyborg designs of Gigan and now Megalon weren’t tribute
enough – and it surely is that, but it started out as a child’s winning entry
in a competition. Toho and Tsuburaya Productions had co-sponsored the contest,
to design a kaiju to appear in the next Godzilla movie, and the winning
creation was “Red Arōn”. This creature had claws, bat-like wings, an inhuman
face and a kind of jumpsuit. A prototype was created to be shown off on TV in
front of its child designer, and it’s at this point that someone decided to
colour in parts of the jumpsuit in an assortment of red, yellow and blue. This
recoloured torso is pretty much the only part of that prototype that was
retained in the final design of what became Jet Jaguar, now recast as a heroic
ally for Godzilla.
In terms of what it does on screen – striking poses during fights, stiffly and
artificially “flying”, altering its size in order to fight the kaiju on equal
terms – Jet Jaguar unmistakeably mimics Ultraman, but the late switch from
kaiju to robot suggests another influence: Mazinger Z. This hugely
popular manga series redefined the mecha story genre with a gigantic super
robot, still piloted by a human but with a visible personality of its own.
Mazinger Z first appeared in print in October 1972, with an animated TV
tie-in debuting in December 1972. The timeframe is tight, with
Godzilla vs Megalon premiering in March 1973, but I think that’s enough
time for the filmmakers to have latched onto the idea that super robots were
suddenly popular and for the designers to have incorporated at least one
superficial point of similarity into Jet Jaguar’s costume: like Jet Jaguar,
the robot Mazinger Z has a grille on its face that looks like a ridiculously
cheesy grin. And, since they celebrated manga in the previous year’s Godzilla
movie, we might fairly suppose either writer Sekizawa or director Fukuda, or
both, had their finger on the pulse of current developments in manga.
Is Godzilla vs Megalon another metafictional Godzilla movie? Everything
about Jet Jaguar seems to have been engineered to appeal to contemporary child
viewers, but does it hint at a child’s narrative point of view? (Can I somehow
argue that this film, too, is a literalisation of a daydream of one of the
characters?) This would give us an excuse for the ad hoc nature of much of the
plot, most notably the way the initial threat of the nuclear test in the
Aleutians is quickly forgotten, the way the Seatopians are just as quickly
forgotten later on, Jet Jaguar’s miraculous transformation into a giant
superhero and the logic-defying inclusion of Gigan. Let’s not forget, too,
that the presence of Monster Island necessarily raises questions about the
story’s internal fictionality. Godzilla himself behaves even less like a
destructive force of nature and more like the costumed wrestling characters on
TV than before. And the dramatic car chases – especially the one featuring an
entirely gratuitous motorbike – look like they’ve been imposed on the
narrative by someone with a mania for Toei’s tokusatsu series
Kamen Rider (original series 1971-73).
The only plausible culprit among the characters is Gorō’s schoolboy brother
Roku. (In this scenario, I’d suggest he hero-worships his brother’s friend Hiroshi,
given it’s Hiroshi who gets into all the showy chases with his flashy car.) He
certainly is quick to recognise Gigan, as unlikely as it is that he should – unless of course he's a Godzilla movie fan dictating the narrative.
Roku is played by Kawase Hiroyuki, who previously played little Ken in
Godzilla vs Hedorah (1971) – what more evidence do you need?
Kawase is almost but not quite the only familiar face in this movie. Playing
King Antonio of Seatopia, the disco dictator, is Robert Dunham. This is
Dunham’s first appearance in a Godzilla movie, but he can be seen at the
church towards the end of Mothra (1961) and he took a starring role in
the kaiju comedy heist movie Dogora (1964) as an international
insurance agent. Unlike other American actors employed by Toho, such as Nick
Adams (Invasion of Astro-Monster (1965)) or Russ Tamblyn (The War of the Gargantuas
(1966)), Dunham could speak fluent Japanese – he can be heard doing so
throughout Dogora. It’s baffling, then, that he should have been filmed
here delivering his lines in English, only to be dubbed over by another actor in Japanese and
then redubbed by someone else again for the movie’s US release. Not much
more baffling than anything else about Godzilla vs Megalon, though.