Godzilla vs Gigan

Godzilla vs Gigan (1972)
Toho Studios
Director: Fukuda Jun, Nakano Teruyoshi (special effects)
Also known as: Godzilla on Monster Island (the title of the first American release).

Odaka Gengo, an aspiring young manga artist, is trying to sell his ideas for stories featuring original kaiju. One publisher told him to create new monsters that embody what kids hate the most. Accordingly, Gengo has come up with Shukra and Mamagon, kaiju themed around homework and strict mothers. (The exact phrase he uses is “kyōiku mama”, which was used to describe Godzilla’s parenting style in Son of Godzilla (1967).) Mamagon bears an uncanny resemblance to his girlfriend Tomoko.

He has no luck touting his sample pages around the publishers but lands a commission to design new creatures to draw the punters to Children’s Land, an amusement park under construction somewhere near Tokyo Bay. The main attraction at Children’s Land, already built and standing 50 metres tall, is the Godzilla Tower, so called because it looks like Godzilla. The park’s Director plans for the tower to house an educational exhibit on kaiju. His intention is for Children’s Land to promote world peace – evidently Gengo’s rather tame monsters will fit in nicely. Gengo asks the Director if he’ll be making replicas of any of the other inhabitants of Monster Island. (What he specifically says is “Kaijū-tō”, the name of the dreamland in All Monsters Attack (1969). And this is unlikely to be a mistake, given both All Monsters Attack and Godzilla vs Gigan were scripted by the same writer. “Kaijū-tō” now seems to be physically located somewhere within Japan’s coastal waters.) Notwithstanding he’s created a life-size dummy of one of the fiercest kaiju, the Director says that the denizens of Monster Island wouldn’t suit his vision of world peace at all. In fact, once work has been completed on Children’s Land, his organisation will (presumably very peacefully) destroy Monster Island and everything on it.

When Gengo visits the head office of the Children’s Land committee, a young woman runs out of the building and bumps into him before fleeing. The Director and four uniformly dressed henchmen emerge in pursuit of her; Gengo misdirects them before pocketing a tape reel the woman had dropped. In the committee’s office he meets the Chairman, who looks to be no more than a teenager. The Chairman is engrossed in calculating the orbital co-ordinates of the M Space Hunter Nebula. He freely discusses the stolen tape with Gengo, which he says is vital to his organisation’s plan to bring absolute peace to the world.

Later on, Gengo runs into the young woman again. She and a friend demand the tape from him, but when he faints, they take him back to his home. There they introduce themselves – her friend is Takasugi Shōsaku and she’s Shima Machiko. They’re investigating the disappearance of her brother, who was working at Children’s Land as a computer technician. His employers claim he simply hasn’t turned up for work in three days, but based on recent entries in his diary, Machiko believes he found out something sinister about two mysterious tapes and has been abducted. They listen to the stolen tape, which plays a medley of burbling electronic sounds.

Machiko’s brother is in fact being held captive inside the head of the Godzilla Tower, where the Chairman and Director have him working overtime to fix up their computers now that they’ve had to accelerate their plans. On the computers, they pick up the sound of the tape being played back, although it shuts off before they can trace it. The Chairman orders a change of program. He notes that, although the humans won’t understand the recording, the creatures on Monster Island will.

Sure enough, far away on Monster Island the electronic broadcast has woken up Godzilla and Anguirus. Godzilla orders Anguirus to go and check it out. (By which I mean, they have an actual conversation about it, with their words appearing in speech balloons. The sounds they make are their usual roars but distorted, as if they’re being scratched by a DJ or – more likely – shuttled back and forth on a reel-to-reel tape player. This happens again later in the film, although in most of their scenes, they roar in the normal way.)

Godzilla looks toothier than before, but also a bit more cartoonish. He also has a very obvious vertical seam down his front. Anguirus looks much as he did in Destroy All Monsters (1968), a bit plumper and more plasticky than in Godzilla Raids Again (1955). It turns out he’s a powerful swimmer.

Gengo noses around inside the Godzilla Tower and finds a cigarette lighter, which Machiko confirms is her brother’s. Machiko and Shōsaku learn that, although the organisation behind Children’s Land is headquartered in Switzerland, the Director and Chairman are both Japanese locals, a teacher and pupil named Mr Kubota and Sudō Fumio who died the previous year while mountain climbing. In their computer room inside the Godzilla Tower, the two impostors receive a message from the M Space Hunter Nebula telling them to prepare for visitors. On the coast, the JSDF quickly drives Anguirus away with a combination of artillery and maser tank fire.

The Director uses a bugged packet of cigarettes to track Gengo back to his home. He takes two henchmen, armed with sci-fi handguns, to confront the amateur investigators and retrieve the tape. Before they can shoot anyone, they’re sent packing by Tomoko, who’s an accomplished martial artist. With the second tape back in their hands, the Director and Chairman are able to summon two daikaiju from outer space. These manifest as bright lights that transform into polyhedral gems, then into the recognisable form of King Ghidorah and the unfamiliar form of Gigan. (It's unclear whether this bit of imagery is meant figuratively, or whether what we see is some unexplained means of interstellar transport used to send the daikaiju to Earth.)

Gigan (pronounced "Gaigan") is an alien cyborg monster, something like a cross between a lizard and a chicken, that looks like he's been designed by a committee. (He is both like and unlike Guilala in The X From Outer Space (1967).) He has a crest of horns running from the top of his head down his neck, two tusk-like hooks for hands and a single talon on the end of each foot. Three large golden fins sit in parallel on his back. A pair of spiny mandibles frames his beak. He has a single large red visor where his eyes should be – with the benefit of hindsight, we might say that it resembles the "eye" of the Cylons in Battlestar Galactica (1978-79). Contrary to the viewer's likely expectation (and to the promotional posters), it does not fire a laser beam. His most effective weapon is a row of spines running down the front of his torso, which can be made to vibrate and act something like a buzzsaw.

King Ghidorah no longer seems to be the top tier kaiju he used to be and now acts more like a sidekick to Gigan. Since he’s already under the control of this new, previously unseen species of alien, he presumably now lives in the M Space Hunter Nebula, wherever that actually is. The authorities on Earth recognise his chittering roar when they pick it up via radio while tracking him through space.

Gengo and Tomoko sneak into the Godzilla Tower at night to try to rescue Machiko’s brother, but are immediately captured. The Director monologues at them, revealing what the viewers have already guessed, that the staff of Children’s Land are aliens from the M Space Hunter Nebula. (Either they mean something different when they say “nebula” or they’ve come from another galaxy entirely, which raises a few questions around this film’s understanding of physics.) Their planet suffered an ecological collapse because of the reckless, polluting activities of its dominant humanoid life form. (This is illustrated with some shots of contemporary Japan that may remind the viewer of Godzilla vs Hedorah (1971).) They themselves are a species better suited to surviving in extreme conditions and their own civilisation thrived after their predecessors died out. They predict Earth will go the same way and have come to hasten the process and make a new home for themselves, since their own planet is nearing the end of its lifespan – this is what they mean when they talk about bringing peace to the world. They’ve disguised themselves as humans – the dialogue suggests this is some kind of projection or holography rather than a physical costume, although the aliens also apparently need to kill their captives in order to use their likenesses. In their true form they look more like human-sized cockroaches.

Ghidorah and Gigan arrive on Earth and, directed by signals broadcast from the aliens’ tapes, thoroughly trash Tokyo. The JSDF deploy ground and air forces but are powerless to stop them. Meanwhile, Anguirus has popped back to Monster Island to get Godzilla and the two of them make all speed towards Japan. (This is the other scene in which they “talk” to each other.) The four kaiju clash at an oil refinery near the coast and seem at first to be well matched. The aliens’ plan isn’t that the two space kaiju should kill Godzilla, however, but that they should lure him to the Children’s Land Godzilla Tower where the aliens will kill him using a powerful laser fired from the tower’s mouth.

While the Director and Chairman are preoccupied with this stage of their plan, Machiko and Shōsaku sneak back to the Godzilla Tower and, using a weather balloon and ropes, help the other three to escape. The Director furiously orders his minions to fire the tower’s laser weapon at their car, but fortunately they weren’t in it. Gengo has observed that the aliens are too reliant on their technology, unable to improvise and thus predictable. The friends go to the JSDF with what they know and, since attacking the monsters hasn’t worked so far, they propose getting back into the tower and attacking the aliens from within.

After a prolonged fight against Ghidorah and suffering a flesh wound from Gigan’s buzzsaw, Godzilla stumbles towards the Godzilla Tower, which he reacts to in apparent disbelief. The aliens’ laser knocks him down and he takes several direct hits. Anguirus tries to intervene but is also wounded by Gigan. The JSDF have meanwhile smuggled several boxes full of TNT into the Godzilla Tower’s main lift, and in front of these Gengo hangs a full-size line drawing of himself and his four friends posing with guns. (That’s incredibly fast work for such a large and accurate piece of artwork. It also raises some questions about just how perceptive the aliens are, that they might be fooled by a flat monochrome image.) Sure enough, when it reaches the control room, the aliens fire their handguns into the lift and set off all the TNT, destroying the Godzilla Tower. Even as he dies, the Chairman expresses his disbelief that his machines could have somehow failed him.

Although they’re no longer under the control of the aliens, Gigan and Ghidorah still take the opportunity to give Godzilla a brutal beating while he’s down. But Godzilla quickly recovers and, with some help from Anguirus, turns the tables on the space kaiju. Ghidorah and Gigan beat a hasty retreat, flying off out of sight. Gengo and his friends wave farewell to Godzilla and Anguirus as they swim back to Monster Island.

Godzilla vs Gigan looks like a return to straightforward slambang monster action after the metafictional antics of the previous two Godzilla movies. There’s no child protagonist, no dream sequences, no peculiar video effects intruding where we wouldn’t expect them to intrude. And yet it prominently features Monster Island, which was introduced by name just two films ago in All Monsters Attack as an explicitly fictional place. (Not to be confused with “Kaiju Land”, as seen in Destroy All Monsters – we’re decades too early for that, according to the timeline laid out in that movie. The montage of kaiju at home on the island that we’re shown the first time Monster Island is mentioned dates back to Destroy All Monsters, but was also used in All Monsters Attack where it became part of the remembered/dreamed fabric of Monster Island.) Even if we have reverted to telling stories within Godzilla’s own world, it looks like it might be the version of Godzilla’s world imagined by Ichirō rather than the pseudo-real world seen in earlier movies.

I say there’s no child protagonist, but there is another possible narrator if we want to look for one: Gengo. He thinks of his girlfriend Tomoko as a nagging mother because of the way she continually encourages him to find work, even using her as the basis for his own imagined kaiju “Mamagon”, which hints at a childlike point of view. Supporting the idea of Gengo as the author within the film, and the only real departure from conventional storytelling, are the two scenes in which Godzilla and Anguirus “talk” to each other. That their dialogue appears in speech balloons strongly suggests that Gengo, a manga artist, is literally putting words into their mouths. Perhaps the movie is his fanciful retelling of an experience with an exploitative employer?

It's interesting that manga should drive the plot of a Godzilla movie – with Gengo using his artistic skills to defeat the alien villains employing him – at a time when the movies were debuting alongside animated works in Toho’s imitation of Toei’s Manga Festival. Manga (literally “whimsical pictures”) has a centuries-long history but went through something of a boom in the 1950s and 60s. The release of Godzilla vs Gigan coincided with a period of revolution in the field of shōjo manga, aimed at younger female readers, with female creators finally taking the lead over male creators. Gengo’s stories, with their focus on kaiju action, would be more likely to fall into the category of shōnen manga, with a primarily young male audience.

I don’t think there’s a lot more to say about this movie, thematically. The topic of industrial pollution is briefly touched on. It’s suggested that the aliens are over-reliant on technology, although without much justification – what we see suggests that their fatal flaw is really a lack of imagination. Some dialogue is shoehorned into the final scene to present these ideas again in the form of simple messages for the audience.

In production terms, it’s a mixed bag. The “anything goes” look of Gigan suggests the designers were trying hard to capture the feel of an Ultraman monster. It’s striking, though. In its first appearance, in the scenes of Gigan and King Ghidorah flying through space and arriving on Earth, it’s painfully obvious that the two kaiju are rigid miniatures. (I would have said toys, but Toho’s visual effects technicians wouldn’t have had access to a Gigan toy before the movie had even been made... would they?) Once we switch to stunt actors in costumes, the level of quality starts to pick up. It also helps that the filmmakers have pulled the old Ifukube incidental music cues out of stock to beef up the action scenes. With a crazy-looking kaiju like Gigan, the peculiar, jazzy music used on Godzilla vs Hedorah would only have made the whole thing feel comedic.

There’s a story that Gigan’s name was a combination of the nickname of a popular singer-actor (Ishihara Yūjirō, who never recorded a film for Toho, was more associated with Nikkatsu and was supposedly known as “Nice Guy”) and “gan”, the Japanese word for “goose”. This sounds very similar to the old tale about Godzilla’s name (“Gojira”, a portmanteau of the words for “gorilla” and “whale”) having been the nickname of a physically large Toho employee, and if anything it sounds less plausible. The “Gojira” yarn was debunked in the 90s by Honda Ishirō’s widow, and I’m calling shenanigans on the “Guy-gan” story. I think it’s more likely to have simply been derived from the English word “gigantic”, but with the initial “G” hardened.

Finally, this is the second movie in a row in which, notably, the main cast have all been new to the Godzilla franchise, and hardly any of them will work on another Godzilla movie. This gives Godzilla vs Gigan a certain freshness, as it did for Godzilla vs Hedorah. Of Gigan’s leads, only Murai Kunio, playing Machiko’s kidnapped brother, will go on to appear in films of interest to this blog, playing authority figures in small roles in the 1980s and 2000s. Hedorah’s exception to the rule was Kawase Hiroyuki, the child actor playing little Ken – we’ll be seeing him again very soon...