Godzilla vs Biollante

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

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

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

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

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.