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.