Godzilla vs Mothra

Godzilla vs Mothra (1992)
Toho Studios
Director: Ōkawara Takao, Kawakita Kōichi (special effects)
Also known as: Godzilla and Mothra: The Battle for Earth (the US title, apparently meant to distinguish this film from Mothra vs Godzilla (1964), which had been marketed under a confusing variety of titles).

The film opens with a meteor landing in the Pacific Ocean. By chance, it explodes near where Godzilla's resting and wakes him up. (He clearly isn't still pinned down by the carcass of Mecha-King Ghidorah, but as we'll find out in the next instalment in the series, the Japanese military has already salvaged that. It's unclear how they managed to do that without also disturbing Godzilla, but let's not get bogged down in the technical details.) It wakes up something else, but we'll come back to that later. The impact also causes tidal waves and severe winds across the Pacific. One of the landmasses affected is Infant Island, which has been surveyed for development by the Marutomo Corporation; the storm exposes a large blue and yellow egg in the side of a mountain.

The next day, Fujito Takuya is arrested in Thailand after attempting to steal a gold statuette from an ancient, derelict temple. (The scene in which this happens is essentially an Indiana Jones parody sketch.) He’s a divorced former archaeologist who has turned to a life of crime. He’s visited a month later by a party consisting of Dobashi, the government official previously seen in Godzilla vs King Ghidorah (1991), Andō Kenji, a burly but warm-hearted employee of the Marutomo Corporation, and Tezuka Masako, Takuya’s ex-wife. In exchange for securing his release from the Thai prison, they recruit him for a mission jointly backed by the Japanese government, Marutomo and Japan’s National Environment Planning Bureau. (We see Dobashi discussing the mission with the director of the NEPB in the very next scene. It’s not explicitly stated, but it seems likely that Masako represents the NEPB on the mission itself.) Takuya, Masako and Andō are to land on Infant Island and investigate some interesting features that have shown up on satellite images following the previous month’s meteor strike. Marutomo want to protect their investment; the NEPB are concerned about the possible environmental implications.

The Infant Island seen here is a synthesis of the lush, tropical island seen in Mothra (1961) and the barren nuclear test site seen in Mothra vs Godzilla. It’s now explicitly an Indonesian island (which at least offers cover for the use of Indonesian lyrics in the classic Mothra song). It has a jungle for the heroes to walk through, a dilapidated rope and wood bridge for them to cross and a crystal blue river for them to fall into, but it also has areas of bare rock for them to lament over. In this case, the rocky patches are the result of corporate exploitation rather than nuclear testing. There's a cave, a bit like the meeting place in Mothra vs Godzilla, that shows ancient paintings of giant moth creatures fighting, and beyond this there's a clearing where the heroes meet two pixie-like characters who speak in unison.

To all intents and purposes, these are the Shobijin as seen in numerous Showa era films, but the name "Shobijin" isn't used here. Instead, they call themselves the Cosmos. (This is, mind you, the first time they've named themselves on screen. They still don't use individual names.) As usual, they speak in Japanese but sing their songs in other languages. They have a psychic connection with Mothra, but they don't speak directly for her in quite the same way the Shobijin did. They seem to be the only humanoid residents of Infant Island. (Although we can infer that regular-sized humans used to live here from the human-height cave paintings and the human-scale rope bridge. Presumably they all left or were relocated before the Marutomo Corporation moved in.)

The Cosmos tell their visitors that their people once lived in harmony with Mothra, the guardian of the Earth, but it all went wrong 12,000 years ago when they developed a network of machines to control the weather. (And what the Cosmos say does seem to suggest that it was the Cosmos, not an ancient group of scientifically advanced humans, that did this. This opens up the idea of the twins being not a mystical extension of Mothra, but the last surviving members of a broader, technological civilisation of little people. The Mothra trilogy of the late 90s will hint again at this by giving the twins a third, antagonistic sibling with a cybernetic pet.) The Earth itself responded to this transgression by creating Battra, an aggressive counterpart to Mothra. Battra destroyed the machinery and toppled the Cosmos' civilisation, Mothra defeated Battra, then Mothra and the surviving Cosmos retreated to Infant Island. The Cosmos are worried that Battra might return and attack humanity in the present day.

Battra is the other creature on the ocean floor that's been woken up by the meteor impact. Despite being a similar entity to Mothra, he's generally referred to as male. He's mostly black with yellow patterns on his body (the Cosmos initially describe him as a "black Mothra"). He resembles a caterpillar, but very spiky and with red eyes and a large yellow horn on his head. When he reaches land, he burrows into it and resurfaces in parts of Japan, causing indiscriminate destruction. He can fire what looks like purple lightning from his eyes and horn. Like Mothra, he's impervious to artillery fire. Unlike Mothra, he won’t pupate but will simply transform in a flash into his imago form, which has three smaller horns on its head in place of the larger caterpillar horn. (He doesn't resemble a bat – according to secondary sources, the name "Battra" is meant to suggest "Battle Mothra".) As an adult, he will continue to fire colourful lightning at his opponents.

Our heroes decide to take the Cosmos and Mothra's egg to Japan, but Godzilla and Battra are both apparently drawn towards the egg. It hatches, and a three-way fight breaks out in the middle of the ocean between Godzilla and the two larvae. As on previous occasions, Mothra tries to slow Godzilla down by firing her cocoon material at him – he reacts as if he's been stung, and his skin steams on contact with the stuff. The battle ends when Godzilla and Battra disappear beneath the waves, still fighting each other, while Mothra returns home. The humans continue on to Japan with the Cosmos.

Predictably, the unscrupulous head of the Marutomo Corporation sees the Cosmos as a potential advertising gimmick and locks them up, whereupon they sing the Mothra summoning song and Mothra arrives to attack Tokyo. The JSDF send in the tanks to defend the city against the giant larva. The head of Marutomo is unconcerned by the destruction – he rants that it will give him the opportunity to rebuild the city. Takuya manages to steal the Cosmos from the Marutomo building, intending to sell them for his own gain, but Masako intercepts him and helps the Cosmos to calm Mothra down. Wounded by tank fire, Mothra prepares to pupate. To the horror of the officials who are monitoring the situation, she chooses the seat of Japan's government, the National Diet Building, as the site for her cocoon.

Meanwhile, Godzilla burrows through the Earth’s mantle to re-emerge through Mt Fuji, causing an eruption and a severe earthquake. Out at sea, Battra resurfaces and spontaneously transforms from larva to imago, while Mothra quickly hatches out of her cocoon. The three kaiju converge for a moonlit battle at a theme park in Yokohama. (This is in fact Yokohama Cosmo World, which opened in August 1990. During the fight, the daikaiju destroy the park’s central attraction, the “Cosmo Clock 21” Ferris wheel, which was for a brief time the world’s tallest Ferris wheel. It’s just possible the choice of this location influenced the decision to rename the Shobijin the “Cosmos”.)

In her imago form, Mothra looks much the same as during the Shōwa era, although her body and wings look a lot fluffier. She sprays a lot of gold glitter around when she emerges from the cocoon, but this seems to be a harmless sparkly visual effect, not her familiar wing scale attack. She does also fire off her wing scales while fighting Godzilla – the Cosmos say that this is her most powerful weapon, although here, as ever, it's not explained. The scales act like disruptive chaff against Godzilla's atomic breath. She also fires energy beams from her antennae and wings, which is a new development.

Mothra eventually persuades Battra to team up with her against Godzilla, and together they overcome him and airlift him out to sea. As they fly off, Battra dies of his wounds and Mothra is obliged to drop both monsters into the water. She circles the area and the Mothra sun symbol glows on the surface of the water, which is presumably meant to suggest some kind of magical act of sealing Godzilla in place.

In a final twist, the Cosmos reveal that Battra was supposed to defend the Earth against a meteor strike in 1999. Mothra has promised to take on this mission, and so she and the Cosmos fly off into space to divert the meteor. They’re waved off by Takuya, Masako and their daughter, who have reconciled, as well as Andō, who has told his boss where to stick it, Dobashi and the staff of the National Environment Planning Bureau.

Following on from the previous movie’s fresh take on King Ghidorah, Mothra is the second kaiju to make a comeback in Godzilla’s new cinematic series. The new twist on the premise is that she has a more aggressive counterpart, Battra, who’s also tasked with defending Earth but is less concerned about defending humanity. The movie was a big hit – the highest grossing Godzilla film Toho had ever made, and that title wasn’t taken from it until Shin Godzilla (2016) came along. When Toho put Godzilla on hiatus to make way for TriStar Pictures’ 1998 USA-made effort, they turned their attention back to Mothra and gave her her own trilogy of movies, aimed at a younger audience, in the late 90s.

There's an obvious environmental theme to Godzilla vs Mothra – you might notice that the employees of an ecological agency feature prominently among the human cast. Battra is explicitly the embodiment of the planet's revenge for the environmental damage people cause when they don't keep their technology in check. We see the harm done by the Marutomo Company not only on Infant Island but also on mainland Japan, where a crowd protests their deforestation of the land around Mt Fuji. The scriptwriter certainly didn't miss any opportunity to drum the message home in the dialogue.

But the message is garbled. Mothra and Battra are both guardians of the Earth, one peaceful and the other aggressive, except that they're also violently opposed to one another – the Earth kind of does and doesn't want to wipe us out. Battra's mission is to take those hominids down a peg or two, which Godzilla was already doing, also in response to irresponsible human actions, but Battra ends up seeing Godzilla as the greater threat. Battra's mission is also to sort out a meteor that's due in 1999, so it's kind of lucky it was woken up by the meteor that strikes at the start of this movie. And that meteor is also potentially an expression of the Earth's vengeance, as are earthquakes and volcanic activity, probably.

There are a couple of familiar faces here. Odaka Megumi returns as Saegusa Miki, although she feels shoehorned in here as an employee of the National Environment Planning Bureau. It’s certainly an odd career sidestep for the character. Her only plot function as Miki is to help psychically locate the Cosmos when they're summoning Mothra to Tokyo. Takarada Akira plays the bureau's director – he was the male romantic lead in the original Godzilla (1954) and was last seen in a Godzilla movie in 1966. Kobayashi Akiji reprises his minor role of Dobashi, the man from the Ministry, from the previous movie. He’s in more scenes this time, grimacing and wringing his hands during Mothra’s assault on Tokyo. It kind of looks like the writers were building him up to be a regular comic relief character in the Heisei Godzilla series, but in fact this is his last appearance in the franchise.

Once again, the “Toho Cinderella Audition” plays its part in the casting. The duo playing the Cosmos, Imamura Keiko and Osawa Sayaka, were both prize winners in the third contest, held in 1991. Remember how Mothra (1961) and Mothra vs Godzilla showed us that the natural instinct of a businessman, when faced with the supernatural wonder of the Shobijin, was to capture them and exploit them on the stage? It's almost too good to be true that Toho, having locked these young women into studio contracts, should show them off in this specific role. I doubt anyone at Toho intended it as any kind of self-aware statement, but still...

The effects work here is pretty good. The composite work is mostly effective, notably around the Cosmos and shots of the JSDF in action, although there are bumpy moments. The miniatures look better around the Mothra and Battra larvae than they do around Godzilla, no doubt due to the relative sizes of the kaiju when portrayed by stunt actors in costumes. Staging the final battle at night helps to hide some of the shortcomings of the studio set – and this is a trick the effects team will continue to use during the rest of the Heisei series – but some aerial shots of Toyko at night behind the flying Mothra and Battra really help sell the illusion. At the other end of the film, the location footage for the scenes set on Infant Island is beautiful and blends seamlessly with the studio material to give the island a sense of place and scale it never had in the 1960s.

Godzilla vs King Ghidorah

Godzilla vs King Ghidorah (1991)
Toho Studios
Director: Ōmori Kazuki, Kawakita Kōichi (special effects)

Godzilla vs Biollante (1989) had done well enough at the box office to justify the continuation of what was becoming a new series of Godzilla films, but it hadn’t built on the success of The Return of Godzilla (1984). In order to boost the series’ popularity, rather than create more original daikaiju like Biollante, the filmmakers decided to bring back some of the best-known old monsters but with a twist for the new audience. The first of these returning foes was perennial favourite King Ghidorah. In all his previous appearances in the 60s and 70s, Ghidorah had been the pawn of alien invaders. The Heisei series hadn’t yet gone so far as to introduce aliens, and rather than take that step the writers chose instead to bring Ghidorah in through the far more reasonable narrative device of time travel.

This is the first and (to date) the only Godzilla movie to involve time travel. Warning: contains non-linearity!

The film’s pre-title sequence is set in the year 2204 in the Sea of Okhotsk. A pair of unseen observers discuss video footage of a dragon-like creature lying on the sea bed. One of the observers explains to the other that this is King Ghidorah, who fought Godzilla in the late 20th century. The full significance of this scene won’t become clear until much later.

Cut to Tokyo in 1992. Crowds of people watch agog as a UFO flies over the city at night. The next day, journalist Terasawa Kenichirō gets a call from the editor of Super Mystery Magazine inviting him to write up the incident. Terasawa came to the magazine’s attention after writing a famous book about ESP, but he wants to move into more serious journalism. His eye is caught by a small newspaper article about an employee of the Dinosaur World museum who claims to have seen a real dinosaur. This is Ikehata, a veteran of the Second World War who was stationed on Ragos Island in the Marshall Islands in February 1944. (Note: the Anglo subtitles say “Lagos”, an on-screen map with English lettering says “Ragos”. It’s a fictional island either way. I’m not 100% confident in the subtitles on this movie, so on this occasion, I’ve decided to back the map.) Pinned down by American forces, his garrison was successfully evacuated after a dinosaur suddenly appeared and drove off the Americans. Although he concedes to Terasawa that the dinosaur was probably just defending its territory, he believes it will appear again to defend Japan in what he considers are troubled times.

Japanese officials, in consultation with the telepathic Godzilla expert Saegusa Miki, review the available satellite images of the UFO’s activity. It seems to have first appeared over the site where Godzilla, weakened by a bacterial anti-nuke weapon, has been recovering underwater since his battle with Biollante. It’s disappeared somewhere near Mt Fuji. The JSDF find it on the ground after two of their helicopters are shot down.

Terasawa confides in his editor his suspicion that Ikehata’s dinosaur is in fact Godzilla – Ragos Island was among those affected by America’s H-bomb tests in the 50s. She later sends him to interview Shindō Yasuaki, the head of the Teiyo Group corporation. As well as owning Dinosaur World, Shindō was the major in charge of the Japanese garrison on Ragos in 1944. Although he initially laughs off Terasawa’s questions, he’s eventually persuaded to give Terasawa and his editor some photographs he took of the dinosaur, which he hasn’t shown to anyone else since.

The occupants of the UFO request a meeting with the Japanese authorities. Dobashi, a senior security official, and Fujio, the nation’s top physicist, turn up for the rendez-vous and are met by three humans who introduce themselves as Wilson, Grenchiko and Emmy Kano. (Names which broadly suggest a coalition of Americans, Russians and Japanese?) They’ve been sent back in time from the year 2204 by the Earth Union in a craft that they call “Mother”, but which Dobashi and Fujio would call a time machine. (And when he says this, Wilson says both the name “Mother” and the phrase “time machine” in English.) At an arranged meeting with the Prime Minister, they explain that an attack by Godzilla in the 21st century will lead to the radioactive contamination and complete evacuation of Japan. To prevent this, they propose to travel further back to the site of the pre-nuclear Godzilla’s sighting in 1944 and teleport him away from the island, so that he won’t be exposed to the H-bomb tests and will never become Godzilla. They’ve got the details of their plan from a book about Godzilla’s origins that Terasawa is, in 1992, still only beginning to research. They’ve already scanned the comatose Godzilla and confirmed Terasawa’s theory to within a small margin of error.

Emmy Kano will conduct the mission in Mother’s scout ship alongside the visitors’ android, M11. In addition, they offer to take three observers from 1992 with them: Terasawa, Saegusa Miki and Professor Mazaki, a paleontologist that Terasawa has been consulting. They explain that they can’t take a more obviously qualified observer such as Shindō with them, as two versions of the same person can’t co-exist in the same time period. Also along for the ride are Emmy’s three Dorats, ridiculously cute genetically engineered animals the size of a cat but with dragon-like rear legs and wings. Emmy claims they’re a popular variety of household pet in the 23rd century.

The team arrive in 1944 as planned but have to sit tight while an American battleship shells them. M11 scouts the island and confirms the presence of Shindō’s garrison. (While he does this, he moves in a form of high-speed-but-slow-motion that’s reminiscent of The Six Million Dollar Man (1973-78) but – probably unintentionally – much funnier.) The next day, they witness the dinosaur’s appearance and see it massacring the American troops on the island, although it’s wounded by artillery fire from the battleship. They fast forward a week and, once the Japanese soldiers have been evacuated, they transport the immobile, wounded dinosaur from the island to the middle of the Bering Strait. (Bad news, 23rd century folks: the Americans tested nuclear weapons up there too.) Unseen by any of the others, Emmy shoos the Dorats out of the ship before they timewarp back to 1992.

On their return, the team are told that Godzilla has disappeared as planned but King Ghidorah has appeared in his place. (It’s unclear whether this is meant to be Ghidorah’s first attack on Japan – everyone already seems to know his name, but they act as though this is the first time they’ve seen him. Funnily enough, they also seem to have no trouble remembering Godzilla, so he obviously hasn’t entirely vanished from history.) King Ghidorah looks much like the Shōwa era version, a three-headed and two-tailed yellow wyvern, but a bit more golden and shiny. He flies into Kyūshū and works his way north, destroying everything in his path. Miki guesses that Emmy left the Dorats behind in 1944 so that they could be exposed to the radiation of the Bikini Atoll tests and fused together to form King Ghidorah.

Privately, Emmy confronts Wilson and Grenchiko about their plan to direct Ghidorah across Japan and destroy everything except Tokyo, which they intend to take under their patronage. She thought they would only threaten Japan with Ghidorah, not wipe it out. She sneaks away and visits Terasawa at his home, where she tells him that what they’d told the Prime Minister earlier was a lie. In the 21st century, Japan becomes so economically powerful that it can buy up entire continents, while America, the Soviet Union and China have renounced all nuclear weapons and are no longer superpowers. (And she does audibly say “Soviet” even though the Soviet Union was already collapsing while this film was being made. This might imply that the filmmakers weren’t as confident as some American pundits about the USSR’s demise, or that they could imagine it reforming at a later date. As I write this in 2024, that doesn’t seem as outlandish as it once did. Or it might merely suggest that the time travellers didn’t do their homework thoroughly enough.) The Earth Union that’s sent the three visitors back to 1992 in a stolen time machine isn’t some kind of world government but an international activist group resisting Japan’s domination of the world. Their plan is to prevent Japan’s rise to power through coercion.

Having received Wilson’s and Grenchiko’s demands and desperate to find something they can use against King Ghidorah, the Japanese government moots using nuclear material to turn the relocated dinosaur in the Bering Sea into a new Godzilla. Shindō reveals that the Teiyo Group – which Emmy claims will be the world’s most powerful corporation in the 23rd century – has its own nuclear submarine, which it keeps moored outside Japanese waters. He offers to send it to fire missiles loaded with Japan's nuclear waste into the dinosaur. Miki, however, intuits that Godzilla has remained active this whole time. Terasawa finds an old news report of a nuclear submarine that sank in the Bering and was never recovered, which could already have mutated the kaiju. The government sends the sub anyway, and it’s destroyed en route by Godzilla who later surfaces (to a lovely, cheerful flourish of harp music) in the sea near Japan. He looks like he did in Godzilla vs Biollante, but bigger – either this is another, different individual or the energy from Shindō’s submarine has rapidly advanced his growth.

Wilson and Grenchiko send M11 to capture Emmy and bring her back to Mother, which he does after a brief car chase. They then leave her alone to repair M11’s damaged skin, and she takes the opportunity to reprogram the android. The fighter jets of the JASDF are powerless against King Ghidorah, but the reappearance of Godzilla rattles Wilson and Grenchiko and they send Ghidorah to fight Godzilla. Ghidorah seems to be winning, but when Emmy, M11 and Terasawa sabotage Mother’s computer systems, the visitors’ control over Ghidorah is broken and Godzilla gains the upper hand. He blasts off the middle one of Ghidorah’s three heads and his left wing, and Ghidorah crashes into the sea. Emmy and the others storm Mother’s bridge, but Wilson and Grenchiko are unconcerned – this new, larger Godzilla will destroy Japan after all, just as they’d originally claimed, and when Mother’s failsafe system kicks in they’ll be automatically returned to the 23rd century. Our heroes retreat to the scout ship, escape and teleport Mother into the path of Godzilla, who destroys it and the villains with his atomic breath. But Godzilla is soon laying waste to Sapporo and marching towards Tokyo.

We now replay the opening scene, as Emmy and M11 return to 2204 and, with the help of a submarine pilot, retrieve the still-living body of King Ghidorah from the sea floor. Their plan is to turn it into a cyborg that they can take back to 1992 and use to save Japan from Godzilla.

Tokyo is evacuated ahead of Godzilla’s attack, but Shindō chooses to stay in his corporate skyscraper. He believes he has a special bond with the kaiju after the events of 1944, and as Godzilla’s head draws level with his office window, Shindō seems to believe they’re having a moment. But Godzilla blasts him and knocks over his office building. It’s at this moment that the cyborg King Ghidorah – let’s call him Mecha-King Ghidorah – materialises in the sky over Tokyo. His central head, both wings and his upper torso have been replaced with robotic parts, and Mother’s scout ship forms a cockpit at the base of his mechanical neck from which Emmy pilots him, with M11 running the operating system. After a pitched battle, Godzilla downs Mecha-King Ghidorah, but the cyborg has one more trick up its sleeve – a set of electrified metal clamps that latch onto Godzilla’s limbs and waist. Mecha-King Ghidorah lifts off with Godzilla in tow and flies him out to sea, and the pair sink beneath the waves. Godzilla is very much alive, but seemingly trapped. Emmy escapes in the scout ship and returns once more to the 23rd century after revealing that she’s Terasawa’s descendant.

The first thing I think I ought to do here is try to make sense of the time travel plot. This will be a bit spoilery, but also potentially dull for anyone who can watch this movie, shrug and not care how much sense it makes. So if it matters to you, click the button below, but if not, please just read on.

On the face of it, I think it just about works. Although the time travellers don’t succeed in removing Godzilla from the picture entirely, they do create King Ghidorah, and Wilson and Grenchiko don’t seem too concerned whether present-day Japan is destroyed by Ghidorah or by a newly super-charged Godzilla (or both!) just so long as it’s destroyed. All three are agreed that the future they’re familiar with, in which Japan owns most of the world, must be averted, although they differ on the method. When Emmy pops back/forward to 2204 to retrieve what’s left of Ghidorah, her submariner friend describes Japan as having been destroyed after a period of naïve prosperity. (“That poor nation,” he says, in much the way that someone who’s joined a coalition of people resisting being subjugated by that nation probably wouldn’t.) The implication is that the mission to change history has succeeded: Japan is no longer the continent-buying imperial leviathan that rose to global dominance in the 21st century and is instead a radioactive wasteland. The lie the travellers told their hosts earlier in the movie has become historical fact. Possibly Emmy will be returning to something else again after the movie’s end, something between the two polar extremes described to us.

The big question is whether the travellers have changed anything in the Heisei series Godzilla’s personal timeline or simply reinforced it. The events of Godzilla (1954) will play an important part later in the series, but there’s no reason to suppose that would be affected by the interference here – everyone still knows who and what Godzilla is, and it’s kind of a given that the original Godzilla is distinct from any subsequent Godzillas given how the 1954 movie ends. We’d simply have to assume that there were multiple proto-Godzillas lurking around the Marshall Islands after World War Two, not just the one relocated by the travellers, which is possibly something the characters haven’t considered. (Let’s not forget that their primary source of historical research is the potboiler Terasawa hasn’t written yet.) What complicates matters is that everyone – not just Miki and Terasawa, who plausibly might remember the “original” timeline because they travelled to 1944 with Emmy, but the contemporary Japanese officials who stayed behind – remembers where Heisei Godzilla ended up after the events of Godzilla vs Biollante and notices that he isn’t there any more. (A reference to Godzilla vs Biollante in a later film also suggests those events haven’t been erased, although it might equally just be a continuity error.) Importantly, we’re not given any visual sign that Godzilla has winked out of existence at that point, we’re just told he’s disappeared, and it feels like he could just as easily have woken up and wandered off while no one was paying attention. We’re also not given a date for the newspaper clipping Terasawa finds about the nuclear submarine disaster that presumably caused Heisei Godzilla’s mutation (unless there’s a date printed on the paper that I can’t read). If it happened earlier than 1984, it could have led to Godzilla appearing and the events of the previous two movies unfolding just as we saw. The travellers’ attempt to erase Heisei Godzilla from history might have been the very thing that brought him into existence in the first place. The only question then is whether we’re supposed to understand that Godzilla being larger and more aggressive when he reappears in 1992 is because his origin story has been rewritten or due to an almost instant growth spurt when he destroys Shindō’s submarine. For the sake of simplicity and consistency with the other available evidence, I vote for the “instant growth spurt” hypothesis.

This is one of those Godzilla movies that sets off some people’s Nationalism Alarms. After all, it does moot the possibility of Japanese global domination in the future, and the villains want to prevent that, so maybe – depending on exactly how you interpret the temporal convolutions of the plot (or, dare I say it, on how closely you’re paying attention) – the film is saying that it’s a good thing? But there’s no suggestion of a resurgent Japanese military empire. Rather, what’s hinted at is a world in which Japan dominates the world economically, and specifically Japanese business interests. It’s not so much a nationalist dream, more the kind of dystopia beloved of cyberpunk novelists, in which capitalism has gone into overdrive and nations as we once knew them have given way to the rule of transnational corporations. It’s just phrased rather awkwardly.

The key figure here isn’t any of the time travellers, but Shindō Yasuaki. A major in the Imperial Japanese Army in 1944 and the chairman of the Teiyo Group in 1992 – which we’re told is the most powerful organisation in the world in 2204 – he thus bridges Japan’s militaristic past and its objectionable potential future. He’s practically a James Bond villain already – he has his own nuclear submarine, for goodness’ sake. (And for bonus points, he’s played by Tsuchiya Yoshio, the Controller of Planet X in Invasion of Astro-Monster (1965).) He thinks he’s special enough to stare Godzilla in the face and get away with it during the kaiju’s rampage through Tokyo. Godzilla, who is presented as both an existential threat to Japan and, according to Shindō’s old comrade Ikehata, potentially its saviour, doesn’t think nearly so highly of Shindō. I think we can take that as a rejection of the future Shindō represents.

If we’re looking for a message in Godzilla vs King Ghidorah, it might be this: that wanting to change Japan's past, and specifically the bits between 1939 and 1954, won't solve today's problems. The Prime Minister jumps at the chance to thwart Godzilla, who once served as a reminder of how America subdued Japan during the war, but that hope is frustrated. Godzilla is still there – he’s always there. If it hadn’t been one thing, the film seems to say, it would have been another thing and we’d be in the same fix today. Japan’s future appears to be in flux, but its past is something the characters just have to come to terms with.

The issue of revisiting Japan's past would have been a topical one in 1991. Akihito, latterly referred to as the Emperor Heisei, had only recently acceded to the throne. One of his earliest public acts, during a state visit by Chinese Premier Li Peng in April 1989, was to express his remorse for the wrongs that Japan had previously committed against China. This was the first of many conciliatory statements from Akihito towards Japan's neighbour nations. It may look to us like a half-hearted almost-apology, but two things make it remarkable. Firstly, the revised Constitution of Japan drawn up under the post-war American occupation limits the Emperor's position to that of a purely ceremonial figurehead. Even commenting publicly on political matters in this way is more than many people would have expected of him. Secondly, some of those wrongs, notably including the 1937 invasion of China and the Second Sino-Japanese War, had occurred during the reign of Akihito's own father Hirohito, the Emperor Shōwa. Akihito's statement of remorse came just two months after Hirohito’s state funeral.

At a less introspective level, the theme of changing history in Godzilla vs King Ghidorah is appropriate given the fluid nature of the political landscape at that time. 1990 had seen the first secessions of former member states of the Soviet Union, with many more to follow in 1991, as well as the treaties that formalised the reunification of Germany. The USSR would be officially dissolved less than two weeks after the cinematic debut of this movie. In the basin of the Persian Gulf, Iraq invaded Kuwait in late 1990. The USA, which might have been hoping for an era of peace after “winning” the Cold War, ended up leading a military campaign against Iraq in early 1991 to shore up the political stability of the region, and incidentally protect its oil import interests. The volatility of Japan's own future in Godzilla vs King Ghidorah – raised high or brought low by forces beyond the understanding of the contemporary characters – may reflect anxiety over this real-world political turmoil.

Tremors

Tremors (1990)
No Frills Productions / Pacific Western Productions / Universal Pictures
Director: Ron Underwood

Meanwhile, in America...

Earl Bassett and Valentine “Val” McKee are itinerant workers, trading under “V + E Odd Jobs”, living hand to mouth in a remote part of Nevada. They’ve settled into a routine of assignments in and around the small town of Perfection (“Est. 1902, Pop. 14”). In the nearby desert, graduate student Rhonda LeBeck is conducting a seismological survey. (Although oddly, her seismographs are stamped with “Property of M.S.U.” which would seem to suggest the university of a state beginning with “M”. The nearest, Montana, is two states north, and all the other candidates are over in the eastern half of the country.) Having heard about her arrival, Val is keen to meet her but disappointed to discover that she isn’t his physical type. Rhonda asks Val and Earl to check whether there’s been any drilling or other activity in the area as her seismographs are showing some unusual readings that don’t match the records of previous years.

Hoping to escape to bigger and better things, the pair pack up their belongings and drive off to Bixby, a larger town in the next valley over. They don’t get very far, though, before they spot an elderly resident of Perfection, Edgar Deems, clinging to the upper part of an electricity pylon and holding a rifle. He proves to be dead; they take his body back to Perfection, where the town doctor determines the cause of death to be dehydration, suggesting Edgar had climbed the pylon and then just sat there for two or more days. On their second attempt to leave, Val and Earl drive past the farmstead of Old Fred, whose sheep have all been mutilated. Fred himself has been pulled into the ground and killed. They return once more to Perfection and try to call the police from the phone in Walter Chang’s general store, but the line is dead. Another attack, this time on two road workers, has cut the line and caused a rockslide across the only road out of the valley. When Val and Earl discover this on their final drive out, they nearly end up stranded because of what seems to be a mechanical problem with their truck. As they find when they park up again outside Chang’s store, something resembling a large snake has coiled around the truck’s rear axle and was evidently trying to hold their truck back at the site of the slide. It's dead, having been torn away from the rest of some larger creature. Chang buys this remarkable specimen from the boys and is soon charging his neighbours to have their photo taken with it.

Burt and Heather Gummer, a local survivalist couple, try to organise the rest of the town into responding to the crisis. All are agreed that getting help from Bixby is a priority, and Chang provides a couple of horses so that Val and Earl can ride over. On the way, they pass the doctor’s place and are led, by the sound of the radio, to find his car buried end up beneath the ground. As they continue on, they themselves are attacked by the culprit. It’s a creature that resembles a bloated, spiny worm, perhaps as much as ten metres in length, with a large beak-like mouth that hinges open to reveal several prehensile tongues, each with its own snapping maw. The thing that wrapped itself around their rear axle earlier was just one of these tongues. The horses are killed, but Val and Earl are able to outrun the creature as far as an aqueduct, where it runs head first into the interior side of a concrete wall and dies. Rhonda, who has been working on the far side of the aqueduct, helps the boys to excavate the creature. Together they hypothesise that, having no eyes, it hunts by tracking vibrations and uses its spines to push itself at high speed through the ground. Rhonda’s seismograph readings suggest that there are three more in the vicinity. As they all head for her truck, they’re attacked by another of the creatures and take refuge on a large boulder, which the creature is unable to burrow through, climb up or overturn. They wait overnight for it to leave, but it proves extremely patient. They eventually escape by using some nearby construction debris to pole-vault from boulder to boulder and onto Rhonda’s truck.

By plotting the sites of the attacks so far on a map of the valley, Val determines that the monsters are heading towards the town. Chang – who insists that as the first people to encounter the creatures, they have the right to name them – dubs them “Graboids”. The Graboids converge on the store, killing Chang and forcing the others to climb up onto the roof. Burt and Heather have gone to their home to arm themselves and, not having yet been told that the creatures hunt by vibration, switch on an ammunition cartridge cleaning machine that attracts one of the Graboids. It bursts through the wall of their basement rec room, but with dozens of firearms readily to hand including an elephant gun, the Gummers are able to hold the Graboid at bay and eventually kill it. The other two Graboids, meanwhile, begin to undermine the foundations of the town’s buildings and drag down another resident. Unable to stay put, the survivors manage to get onto a tracked digger and trailer and head for the mountains, picking up the Gummers on the way. Before they can get to the mountains, however, the digger falls into a pit trap dug by the Graboids, which have raced ahead and lain in wait. The party scare the creatures off briefly with one of several pipe bombs the Gummers have prepared and run for the nearest pile of boulders.

Penned in by the remaining two creatures, the survivors devise a plan to “fish” for them by pelting the ground with small stones then throwing a pipe bomb at them. One Graboid falls for the trick, swallows the bomb and is killed. The other spits the bomb back at the boulders, driving the survivors to take cover and leaving Val, Earl and Rhonda at risk on the soil. Finding himself holding a pipe bomb, Val runs for a nearby cliff edge with Earl and Rhonda in pursuit. The last Graboid gives chase. With the bomb’s fuse lit, Val throws it just past the approaching Graboid, and the blast drives it straight past the fugitives and through the side of the cliff to its death on the ground below.

Later, Val and Earl again discuss their plan to relocate to Bixby, while Rhonda prepares for some high-profile research into the Graboids. Val is too awkward to declare his feelings for Rhonda, but with a little persuasion from Earl, he kisses her.

Tremors arrives too late to ride the coattails of the remake of King Kong (1976) or Jaws (1975), which it more closely resembles, and ahead of Jurassic Park (1993) and the late 1990s / early 2000s wave of smart-alecky CGI-enabled monster movies that will follow after. Tonally, it feels separate from all of these – it’s less cynical, less knowing and winking, more innocent. Nice, even. It’s an unassuming love letter to the American creature features of the 50s, with the added polish of some outstanding practical special effects and a healthy dash of modernity.

In plot terms, that modernity can be seen in the refusal to give the viewer pat explanations for where the Graboids come from. We know from a map glimpsed halfway through the movie that the little town of Perfection is in Nevada, but no mention is made of the Nevada Test Site, America’s most thoroughly used domestic nuclear testing ground, or the famous Area 51 USAF facility, beloved of UFO fanatics, both of which are located further south near Las Vegas. Are the Graboids the product of radioactive mutation? Some kind of escaped government experiment? An alien life form? A 50s monster movie would undoubtedly give us one of these answers. Here, the characters moot all of these possibilities but, in the absence of any clues, they don’t arrive at a conclusion. And honestly, it makes no difference to them where the creatures have come from – their only interest in the matter is not being killed by them. This gives the otherwise unreal proceedings a veneer of realism.

Having a monstrous threat lurking literally beneath the surface of rural America looks absolutely like an invitation to look for deeper meanings. (Granted – and I don’t think it’s unfair of me to say this – self-awareness isn’t exactly Hollywood’s forte.) But do the Graboids symbolise anything? I honestly can’t see it. Is it small-town racism? And yet the two BIPOC characters are accepted without question or comment by the other characters. Miguel admittedly doesn’t get much to say or do and feels like a passenger for most of the movie. Walter Chang has a far more substantial part, and although he doesn’t make it all the way through the movie, he certainly gets the best death scene (and the actor certainly makes the most of it). His presence is a straightforward reflection of the influx of Chinese mine workers into Nevada in the 19th century. Well then: do the Graboids symbolise small-town conservatism more generally? And yet historically Nevada’s political representation, in state and federally, has been quite balanced between Republicans and Democrats, and socially it’s among the more liberal American states. I’d be hard pressed to argue that the Graboids symbolise any particular aspect or conflict in any of the lead characters’ psyches. I think I’d have to conclude that it really is just the writers having a bit of fun with the idea of sharks in the desert – a grown-up, open-air game of “the floor is lava”.

(Of course, it’s just possible Frank Herbert’s novel Dune (1965) was an influence – giant, burrowing, worm-like creatures that hunt by following vibrations. The way the Graboids’ jaws hinge open hints more at the 1984 film adaptation than at the novel itself.)

The modernity in the lead characters is, I think, obvious. Female scientists appear fairly regularly in 50s creature features, but as assistants to male scientists (see, for example, It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955) or Tarantula (1955)) or their daughters (as in Them! (1954)), and they typically end up merely providing a love interest for the butch, uniformed hero. Rhonda is allowed to take centre stage in Tremors as the only scientist in the movie – the other characters can’t help but look to her for answers. She defies the young horndog Val’s expectations by being a capable woman and not sexualised eye candy, although granted she does end up in a clinch with him. (According to bonus material on the Blu ray release, this moment was added to the end of the movie in response to the test audience’s feedback. The original script ended on another realist, but dissatisfying, note in having the pair awkwardly go their separate ways without expressing their feelings for each other.) Val and Earl, meanwhile, far from being bullish authority figures, are humble itinerant handymen, simple working-class men. And they’re scripted with delightful maturity – Val gives frequent flashes of vulnerability underneath the bluster, and Earl, behind his gruffness and his “pardon my French” old-fashionedness, shows clear affection and admiration for the youngsters he keeps company with.

Among the lead cast, surely the most recognisable is Kevin Bacon, of the proverbial six degrees of separation. He’d been acting in films for over a decade, with his big break as a leading actor coming in dance movie Footloose (1984). He came to Tremors off the back of parenthood comedy She’s Having a Baby (1988) and Hollywood satire The Big Picture (1989) and would shortly afterwards appear in the “Brat Pack” horror fantasy Flatliners (1990). Bacon’s career has been a succession of reinventions and comebacks, and his casting as Val in this comedy-horror movie looks like quite a smooth transition between the genres of his preceding and successive roles. Fred Ward, playing Earl, was two decades into a steady film career that has consisted mostly of smaller character parts. Rhonda was Finn Carter’s second cinematic role and, judging from her IMDb listing, quite likely her best; she’s had a much more successful career in television. Oddly, probably the biggest household name in America at the time Tremors was released would have been Michael Gross, cast as maniacal survivalist Burt Gummer after seven years playing the father in the smash hit sitcom Family Ties (1982-89). There are a couple of notable guest stars among the secondary characters: Victor Wong (Egg Shen in Big Trouble in Little China (1986)) as storekeeper Walter Chang and country singer Reba McEntire, in the first of what would become a string of occasional forays into acting, as Burt’s wife Heather.

Tremors wasn’t written specifically for 1990. Scriptwriters Brent Maddock and SS Wilson had had the idea knocking about for years; they started to get traction for it in the mid-80s, after the huge success of their film Short Circuit (1986), in which a military robot gains sentience, develops a cute personality and liberates itself from its creators. But 1990 feels like the right time for Tremors just the same. The rise of the Solidarność workers’ resistance movement in Poland had triggered uprisings in countries across Eastern Europe in late 1989 that signalled the imminent collapse of the Soviet Union. The Berlin Wall fell just weeks before the film was released in cinemas. American political economist Francis Fukuyama prematurely, and with absolutely staggering cultural narcissism, proclaimed “The End of History”. At any rate, people were talking about having “won” the Cold War and, for at least a year (with the first Gulf War breaking out in earnest in January 1991), the American populace had every reason to feel good about themselves and the world at large. The good humour, small-town folksiness and simple heroism of Tremors chime very nicely with this moment.

So it’s a shame the film didn’t perform better at the box office. The filmmakers have suggested that inadequate marketing was to blame. American cinemas had already seen Ghostbusters (1984) and Gremlins (1984), so it’s not like the distributors should have been confused by a film blending elements of light fantasy horror and comedy. And yet the trailer for Tremors is undeniably poor. (If Universal Pictures could only have compared notes with Columbia and Warner Bros...) Happily, the film found a cult following on home media, which led to a string of sequels that are apparently still going. Fred Ward came back for Tremors 2: Aftershocks (1996) but left it at that; Michael Gross has appeared in every single one of them. I’d say Aftershocks is worth a look, but it’s already a case of diminishing returns, and good luck to you if you decide to try the later instalments of the franchise.

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.