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.