Parodies

Big Man Japan (2007)
Shochiku Co., Ltd.
Director: Matsumoto Hitoshi, Hyakutake Tomo (special effects)
Also discussed: Monster X Strikes Back: Attack the G8 Summit (2008), Geharha: The Dark- and Long-Haired Monster (2009).


As this blog starts to cover films released within the last 15 years, I thought it was worth reiterating that these essays will include plot spoilers, and probably not only in the summary sections. Read on at your own risk!


As Godzilla rolled over and went back to sleep and Gamera took his final bow, a spate of self-mocking Japanese special effects films stepped up to fill the gap. What can I say, it was the late 2000s, suddenly everything was “ironic” (and not in the Alanis Morissette way). This isn’t to say humour was a new thing for kaiju eiga – there’d been openly comedic movies before (King Kong vs Godzilla (1962), Dogora (1964), arguably the Tri-Star Godzilla (1998) and Godzilla Final Wars (2004)), plenty of funny moments in mostly straight movies and more than enough movies that left themselves open to mockery. But this was something different – an attempt to mine comedy out of the movies’ premises and tropes themselves.

I should just note up front that these movies have been less widely distributed in English-speaking markets than the average kaiju eiga, and interested readers may struggle to find copies. They do sometimes pop up on YouTube, and even if they’ve been uploaded without Anglo subtitles, YouTube does at least offer an attempt at simultaneous on-screen translation. I’ve used a variety of sources, subtitled and Youtubetitled, and made extensive use of Google Translate in getting what sense I can out of any on-screen Japanese text.

What seems to have opened the floodgates (pun intended) was Sinking of Japan (2006) and its immediate parody, The World Sinks Except Japan (2006). Sinking of Japan was a new adaptation by Toho of a popular 1973 novel by author Komatsu Sakyō that they’d previously adapted as Submersion of Japan (1973). (Note: the Japanese titles of both films and the book are identical – as with the Godzilla movies, I’ve used Toho’s preferred Anglo titles here. Further note: the 1973 movie was released in America with substantial edits and new scenes of actor Lorne Greene as Tidal Wave (1975).) The premise of the story is that a series of massive tectonic upsets causes Japan to sink into the Pacific Ocean and millions of Japanese people find out who their friends are as they try to secure flights out of the country and asylum overseas. The independent production The World Sinks Except Japan, funnily enough, was based on the literary parody of the book, a short story by Tsutsui Yasutaka also published in 1973. I can’t say how similar the full-length film is to the short story, having seen only highlights of one and not read the other, but I’m going to guess it’s a loose adaptation. Although it featured no kaiju (barring a low-grade TV show within the movie), the scenes of geological disaster showed the capabilities of the CGI technology then available to the makers of low budget comedies. It could only be a matter of time before someone produced a full-length parody kaiju movie.

Sure enough, the very next year the Shochiku film studio produced a film that was released to overseas festivals as Big Man Japan.

I would assume Big Man Japan isn’t literally concerned with the state of kaiju eiga in 2007. It’s more likely just a shorthand for late 20th century Japanese culture falling away in the rear-view mirror, and the film is offering a broader comment on how Japan sees itself heading into the 21st century. The outlook seems bleak. The world of Big Man Japan is one that’s been drained of all wonder. The freakiest creatures invade Japan’s cities and are (usually, just about) repelled by a stick-wielding giant in purple underpants, and not only does this not command people’s attention, it can’t even justify a 2am TV spot. Even the guards at the Dainihonjin operational sites don’t seem particularly to care about what they’re doing – the solitary gatekeeper at the first site turns the cameraman away on general principle, but at the second site he’s allowed full access, because why not. Even the Shintō priest conducting the ceremony that precedes Daisatō’s transformation is fine with stopping halfway through and taking it from the top again for the camera’s benefit. At one point, sitting in Daisatō’s living room, the cameraman gets him to clarify that what he fights are “kaiju” – up to then, and for most of the movie, he and the other characters just say “ju”. These aren’t seen as “weird beasts” anymore, just plain “beasts”, no more noteworthy than Daisatō’s cat. They’re merely a nuisance – and so, it would seem, is Daisatō.

This is a tragic comedy about the downtrodden “little guy”, notwithstanding the “little guy” in this case is physically huge. It’s interesting to compare the movie with Hancock (2008), which did something similar a year later with the tropes of the American superhero. In that film, the protagonist shares many superficial traits with Superman, the generic archetype – super-strong, bulletproof, can fly, mysterious origins, wades into emergency situations and “solves” them with excessive shows of force. But he’s an alcoholic living in a trailer park who has to deny himself all meaningful human contact in order to survive. It could be taken as an expression of national self-doubt at a turning point in modern history, and so could Big Man Japan.

The ending, bewildering as it is, could be taken several ways. (Assuming, that is, that you don’t just want to dismiss it as the final absurd straw.) It certainly doesn’t offer a simple conclusion to the film. We might imagine that Daisatō will be redeemed by a final victory, or that at least he’ll learn some important life lesson – but then that wouldn’t be an honest follow-on from what’s gone before. Instead he gets a thorough beating and then stands impotently by while someone else saves the day. Despite having a superpower, he’s ultimately powerless. We might, alternatively, expect that the appearance of his grandfather at the big showdown is going to lead to a cross-generational team-up and some kind of heart-warming family moment. The film has spent a fair bit of time prior to this showing us that Daisatō has a genuinely loving relationship with his grandfather, perhaps the last family member or friend who hasn’t run out on him or screwed him over. Surely there’ll be some kind of payoff to that? But no, the film rejects that option too. The older generation, it seems, doesn’t have the answers (or in this case, the fighting moves) needed to resolve the younger generation’s problems.

Perhaps it’s a metafictional thing. The low production values make the final scene stand out against the rest of the film, but that wasn’t any more “real”, it was just a different kind of fake. The documentary style of most of the film is fraudulent precisely because it’s trying to imitate reality (and let’s not get started on the degree to which documentary or “reality” TV is staged). The Dainihonjin fight scenes are rendered with what, in 2007 and since, looks like second-rate CGI, crawling along the floor of the uncanny valley. It helps to make the rogue monsters unsettling as well as laughable, properly weird, but it’s just as obviously false as the rubber costumes the Super Justice family turn up in. And they’re just as unsettlingly weird in their own way. They seem to inhabit a plane of reality that belongs in a 1960s TV studio. We’ve heard Daisatō pining for the days when his grandfather was kept busy by weekly kaiju attacks, he enjoyed respect and his adventures were broadcast on prime time TV – in other words, the 1960s and 70s when the pulp superhero output of Tsuburaya Productions and their rivals ruled the airwaves. There’s more than a touch of Ultraman about Super Justice and his relatives. Perhaps this is a way of telling Daisatō (and us) to be careful what he wishes for – those “good old days” weren’t as glamourous as he imagines.

Or maybe there’s a political angle. After all, Super Justice may have the look and the trappings of Ultraman, but he’s explicitly an “American Hero” – an on-screen caption tells us so, in large, unmistakeable katakana characters. (Just in case the nuclear family, the way they greet Daisatō with a loud, slow “Nice to meet you!” in accented English, the red-white-and-blue colour scheme and the stripe and star motifs on the costumes didn’t give it away.) Maybe this is a belated comment on Japan’s involvement in America’s “coalition of the willing” in Iraq, or Japan’s broader relationship with America at this time, with Daisatō pressured into supporting the family’s excessively violent antics even though he’s clearly surplus to requirements.

But one way or another, the ending of this film provokes thought and comment. It might be the most interesting part of Big Man Japan – I’ve certainly found it easier to write about than the rest of the film. Honestly, that’s Big Man Japan’s failing, as cinema and as comedy – plot out its moments of interest, weirdness, humour or just anything happening, and you’ve got an exponential curve upwards. It takes 20 minutes to get to a point where you’re not just watching a social dropout describe how drab his life is. This movie asks a lot of the viewer on the way in, but it does reward patience with... something. There’s something substantial here, even if it’s hard to pin down exactly what that is.


Which is more than can be said for Monster X Strikes Back: Attack the G8 Summit.

The “Monster X” in question isn’t the one that appeared in Godzilla: Final Wars (2004) – it’s Guilala, The X from Outer Space (1967), the one Shōwa era daikaiju Shochiku owned the rights to. Kawasaki Minoru, the director behind The World Sinks Except Japan, hooked up with Shochiku to make this knockabout kaiju farce.

Where Big Man Japan was open to interpretation and even, dare I say it, sophisticated, Monster X Strikes Back is obvious and crude. There are some clear similarities with World Sinks – the two movies have several actors in common, notably those playing the American, Russian and North Korean heads of state; there’s the surprise reveal of Kim Jong Il as a punchline; and the focus of the humour is more on the characters than on the special effects scenes. Monster X bolsters its effects budget by reusing the scenes of Guilala’s attacks from the 1967 film, which may inspire laughter but weren’t made with it in mind, although the new scenes – achieved with good old-fashioned costumes and props, mind you – were obviously meant to be funny. Probably the funniest moment in the movie for kaiju fans is the Gamera-spoofing bit where a random kid pops up in the briefing room and tells everyone what the monster should be called.

The use of the “foreign” characters in Monster X, at least as far as I can tell, differs from that in World Sinks. World Sinks seems to be concerned with xenophobia as a theme, as once-powerful people are forced to abase themselves in the hope of winning favour with a Japanese people who are at once happy to exploit their guests and suspicious of them. Monster X only seems interested in playing with national stereotypes – the bland British leader who goes along with whatever the American leader says, the devious Russian leader, the food-obsessed Italian leader, the French leader who beds his translator because it’s simply what his people would expect of him. The only impersonations as such are those of the then-current and previous Japanese Prime Ministers, and credit where it’s due, they’re on the nose. I don’t think the script attempts any deeper political commentary than that. The parody version of the liberal Koizumi Junichirō is explicitly an impostor and not the real politician, so I don’t think there’s any statement intended in the reveal that he’s Kim Jong Il in disguise. There’s certainly no mention made of the conservative Abe Shinzō’s repeated denials of Japan’s war crimes (60 years after the fact and 20 years after the Emperor started apologising for them...), but who knows, perhaps it’s significant that the parody version is sidelined for much of the film because he’s literally full of shit.


And then, in 2009, NHK television broadcast the 20-minute skit Geharha: The Dark- and Long-Haired Monster. Fun fact: the writer, Miura Jun, was one of the pundits who appeared in the “talking heads” scene in Monster X Strikes Back.

Geharha is a checklist of kaiju eiga tropes: the opening scene of a boat under attack, the deranged survivor, the mysticism, the fantasy superweapon, the trite messages tacked onto the denouement. It’s purely concerned with sending up the kaiju genre, and it does it with precision and obvious love. On top of this, it features a classic motif of Japanese horror fiction in Geharha’s hair. The international boom in J-Horror cinema, which was subsiding by this point, had given the world plenty of examples of vengeful ghosts with long, dark hair, notably in the Ringu (1998) and Ju-On (2002) cinematic franchises. In a less prominent example, Exte (2007), the victims are actually killed by haunted hair extensions. But this wasn’t a recent thing – the anthology film Kwaidan (1964), based on folk stories transcribed by Lafcadio Hearn at the turn of the 20th century, included the tale of an unfaithful husband being attacked by a disembodied head of hair.

Geharha lands all its jokes, boasts some surprisingly good special effects and doesn’t outstay its welcome. They say brevity is the soul of wit, and at a trim 20 minutes, Geharha illustrates that point very well.

Gamera the Brave

Gamera the Brave (2006)
Kadokawa Herald Pictures, Inc.
Director: Tasaki Ryuta, Kaneko Isao (special effects)
Also known as: The Japanese title seems to suggest “the brave” doesn’t refer to Gamera at all, but rather the child characters. Perhaps a colon in the Anglo title would have helped. Still, Gamera the Brave is what we’ve got.


In 2002, Tokuma Shoten sold their interest in Daiei Film to a rival publishing company, Kadokawa Shoten. Kadokawa’s new film-making subsidiary went through a few mergers and name changes over the years – during the year in which this film was released, it was called Kadokawa Herald Pictures following the parent company’s acquisition of Nippon Herald Films. With kaiju anniversary celebrations in the air, Kadokawa decided to mark Gamera’s 40th birthday (in 2005) with a new film, although the release ended up being delayed until the following year. They dusted off their Daiei assets, found an unused draft storyline for what had become Gamera: The Guardian of the Universe (1995) and handed it to scriptwriter Tatsui Yukari and director Tasaki Ryuta, who used it as the basis for a child-friendly story more in keeping with the Gamera movies of old.

You can just about see the common ancestry between Gamera the Brave and Gamera: The Guardian of the Universe. A young protagonist has a special connection to Gamera through a mysterious, glowing stone; as Gamera confronts his kaiju opponent in a climactic fight, the protagonist insists on rushing into the battleground with the stone to offer moral and supernatural support. This is, however, a very different but equally well executed development of that basic premise. One major difference is that here, the Japanese authorities don’t treat Gamera as a threat but are already aware of him from past encounters and want to exploit him in the present crisis. We only see that part of the story glancingly, when it intrudes on Toru’s world. The government official chasing Gamera is depicted as self-important, over-demanding and short-sighted in his decision-making – he’s not meant to be our hero. He’s oblivious to the relationship between Gamera and Toru, but that’s the real story as far as this film is concerned.

Although Gamera the Brave thankfully refrains from assaulting us with the “Gamera March”, it is very much a return to the Shōwa era idea of Gamera as a friend to children. The relay race of children in Nagoya getting the stone to Toru is an uplifting scene, although no explanation is offered. I think the implication is that they all instinctively want to help Gamera and somehow know where to go and what to do to achieve that, but that would be a bit weak and schmaltzy. The alternative, I suppose, is that Gamera’s telepathically directing them somehow, which seems a bit too sinister for this film.

It feels like quite a sharp turn after an hour and a quarter with very little schmaltz in it. The film deals honestly with Toru’s bereavement, as he initially refuses to engage with it then displaces his feelings onto Gamera/Toto as a support animal while his father, whose own emotional struggle is both obvious and largely hidden from us, tries to keep an eye on his son and put on a brave face for his customers. None of this ever comes across as maudlin or melodramatic. Gamera the Brave is a surprisingly effective – and affecting – tale of a child coming to terms with mortality, loss and grief. Gamera/Toto, as the emblem of hope and new life that Toru nurtures, and Zedus, a never-explained source of sudden and arbitrary death, are simple but potent symbols of the forces at work in Toru’s psyche as he grapples with his mother’s passing and the possibility that his friend Mai might die in hospital. The principal actors Tomioka Ryō (Toru), Tsuda Kanji (Kosuke) and Kaho (Mai) all do a tremendous job in bringing this story to life.

Supporting this are some fine special effects, with an accomplished blend of costumes, digital compositing, mattes and miniatures. There are some novelties in the monster fight scenes – the Shima Pearl Bridge is used well in the first confrontation between Gamera and Zedus, while the final showdown includes an athletic Zedus somersaulting off one building to catapult Gamera, who’s been clinging to his tail, into another building. The cinematography’s lovely too – the transition from 1973 to 2006 as Kosuke stares out across the bay is a standout moment.

This is a little gem of a kaiju movie that I think is too easily overshadowed by Kaneko’s 1990s Gamera trilogy, which tends to get all the attention from kaiju fans who prefer their movies to be brash, edgy or both. It meets the brief of simultaneously taking Gamera back to basics and bringing him into the 21st century. It’s a shame this is (at time of writing) the last full-length Gamera film, but it’s a high note to go out on.

Godzilla Final Wars

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Godzilla: Tokyo SOS

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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