Gamera: The Guardian of the Universe

Gamera: The Guardian of the Universe (1995)
Daiei Film Co, Ltd
Director: Kaneko Shūsuke, Higuchi Shinji (special effects)

A note on the title: This isn’t exactly an “Also known as” – there’s no debate about the film’s Anglo title, but there is some difference of opinion over the punctuation. Very helpfully, the on-screen title caption for the film includes an Anglo version in tiny lettering underneath the Japanese. The colon is barely visible, but it’s definitely there (and slightly easier to spot on the Blu-ray than it was on earlier formats). Other sources use titles with a comma, or with no punctuation at all, or even with punctuation but without the first “the”.

Kusanagi Naoya, an insurance investigator, is assigned to look into a shipping company’s claim that one of their craft was damaged by a mysterious floating island somewhere east of the Philippines. The ship was carrying a cargo of plutonium to Japan, which happily wasn’t affected by the incident. One of the shipping company’s officers, Yonemori Yoshinari, persuades Kusanagi to take him along on the investigation.

Inspector Osako Tsutomu of the Nagasaki Police is investigating the disappearance of a university professor on Himegami Island (note: this island is fictional). Because the professor was drawn there by reports of an unknown bird species, Inspector Osako consults Dr Nagamine Mayumi, an ornithologist at Fukuoka Municipal Zoo the professor had been in contact with. The two go to the island with a police escort and find a ruined village and a very large pile of guano that contains the professor’s fountain pen and glasses. The “bird”, which has evidently eaten everyone on the island, is a large, dragon-like creature with a dark reddish hide, a long neck and a wedge-shaped head. Concerned about what might happen if it travels to mainland Japan, Osako and Nagamine follow it in the police helicopter and try to distract it from attacking a neighbouring island. Nagamine takes some photos of it and notices that it recoils from the flash on her camera. As it returns to Himegami, she sees another two circling above the island.

Kusanagi’s team finds the wandering island near the Ryūkyū Islands. The surface is studded with magatama, comma-shaped beads about the size of a squash ball, and they find and excavate a large upright stone in the middle of the island with ancient writing carved into it. Just as Yonemori is examining the inscription on the stone, the island begins to break up and something large emerges from the rock and moves through the water towards the mainland. Yonemori takes a helicopter to warn the Japanese authorities about the approaching object.

A delegate from the government, with instructions to capture the flying creatures alive for study, asks Nagamine to come up with a plan for him. She suggests baiting a baseball stadium in Fukuoka with a pallet of raw meat and using JSDF helicopters to herd the creatures there. Once they’re in the stadium, they can be trapped by closing the roof, dazzled with the floodlights and knocked out with tranquiliser guns. One of the creatures escapes the trap, but the other two are sedated and caged.

The creature that got away heads for the coast but is intercepted by the object from the island, which turns out to be a gigantic, bipedal turtle with tusks. (It’s very much the familiar Gamera but with better movement and a 1990s polish. It has the smooth, rounded look that tells us it’s friendly.) It kills the flying creature by swatting it into an oil refinery, then pushes its way through Fukuoka to get to the stadium, where it starts to tear the roof open. The JSDF are constitutionally powerless to intervene without the government’s explicit sign-off. The two creatures inside the stadium escape from their cages by producing some kind of sonic beam from their mouths that shears through the metal bars. They then fly straight past the turtle, which takes flight itself by withdrawing into its shell, firing rockets out of its limb-holes and whirling into the sky like a Catherine Wheel.

At Kusanagi’s house, he and Yonemori look over what they found at sea. Photographs of the stone show that the inscription was in a language similar to that of the ancient Etruscans. (Alas, what we see on-screen are Anglo-Saxon runes and not Etruscan lettering at all. The printed-out transcription and translation that Kusanagi hands to Yonemori, conversely, shows that it’s meant to be read as Icelandic, also not an ancient Mediterranean language. Still, Gamera the Giant Monster (1965) made the same hash of Mediterranean legend and countries in the Arctic Circle in its Gamera origin story.) It talks about Gamera, the last hope, rising to defeat Gyaos, the shadow of evil. The magatama are made of an unfamiliar coppery metal. Kusanagi wonders if it might be orichalcum, which his daughter Asagi recognises as a legendary metal used in Atlantis. (As described in Plato’s Critias. Asagi and one of her schoolfriends were seen chatting about mythical lost continents earlier in the movie, so we know she’ll have read up on this stuff. Apparently her dad has too.) Most of the magatama recovered from the island have been taken away for safekeeping, but Yonemori has retained one to give to Asagi. It gives off an orange glow in her hand. Kusanagi suggests that the turtle, with its unlikely capabilities, could have been created somehow by a vanished civilisation that gave rise to the story of Atlantis and similar legends around the world. Yonemori wonders if the turtle might have been drawn to his company’s cargo ship to feed somehow on radiation from the plutonium. He guesses that the stone tablet was naming the turtle, Gamera, and the flying creatures, Gyaos.

The government grants the JSDF permission to attack Gamera but still wants the Gyaos captured. Nagamine has made a return visit to Himegami Island and found the cannibalised remains of the Gyaos’ fellow hatchlings, which have provided genetic material for study. The creatures seem to have been conceived 10,000 years ago and are all born female. The possibility that the Gyaos might be unable to reproduce only makes Nagamine’s government contact keener to capture them because of their rarity. Later, investigating another sighting of the two remaining Gyaos, Nagamine and a local child are saved from being eaten when Gamera appears and blasts one of the creatures with a fireball from his mouth. The last Gyaos wounds Gamera with her sonic beam (and, as in the Shōwa era movies, Gamera’s blood is green) and the two kaiju fly off. Yonemori concludes that, contrary to what the government believes, Gamera is not hostile.

The JSDF shoots Gamera down with missiles over Mt Fuji while he’s pursuing the last Gyaos. Asagi, who is now wearing her magatama as a necklace, has a wound on her hand that matches Gamera’s and is concerned by a news report that they plan to send tanks in and finish him off. She finds a taxi driver reckless enough to take her close to Mt Fuji to watch the confrontation. Under attack from the tanks and Gyaos, Gamera seems to draw enough strength from Asagi to escape, but once again she develops spontaneous injuries that mirror his. She’s hospitalised and later taken home by Kusanagi, where she sleeps while Gamera recuperates.

Nagamine and Yonemori meet with the scientist who’s been analysing the Gyaos tissue sample. He tells them that Gyaos’ DNA includes male and female genetic information, which suggests that she could reproduce asexually. The economy of the DNA, with only one chromosome pair with the blended characteristics of several other animals and no functional waste, further suggests that Gyaos, like Gamera, is an artificial life form. Nagamine speculates that the “Atlantean” civilisation made a fatal mistake in creating Gyaos, then created Gamera to destroy Gyaos, but too late to save themselves. The Gyaos eggs might have lain dormant for thousands of years, then been revived by the rapid changes in the climate caused by human industry. Meanwhile, the adult Gyaos has grown substantially and made her way to Tokyo, where she seizes a train carriage and eats the occupants. The government reconsiders its stance on Gyaos.

The JSDF sets up a mobile HQ in an office block in Tokyo’s Minato Ward overlooking a park where Gyaos is sleeping. Nagamine suggesting attacking Gyaos during the day, since her activity so far has been nocturnal. But the creature has grown shield plates over her eyes that allow her to fly in daylight. She draws the JSDF’s missiles into colliding with the Tokyo Tower, then nests on the tower’s observation deck. Everyone within six miles of the tower is ordered to evacuate so that the military can attack with full force the next morning. The resulting exodus clogs the roads and rail network, while the airport is closed for fear that aircraft might attract Gyaos’ attention.

Asagi wakes up and she and her father join Nagamine and Yonemori at the JSDF’s mobile HQ. Gamera has recovered and burrowed his way to Minato Ward, where he bursts out of the ground and destroys Gyaos’ nest with a fireball. The eggs Gyaos has laid all fall to the ground and break. Gyaos and Gamera fight through the streets, then in the air as Gamera tries to slam Gyaos into the ground. Asagi and the others track the fight in a helicopter so that Asagi, connected supernaturally to Gamera through her magatama, can give him her support. All appears lost when Gamera crashes into an oil refinery which promptly explodes. But, drawing strength from Asagi, Gamera absorbs the flames and obliterates Gyaos with a fireball. He heals Asagi’s wounds and breaks off the connection between them before wading out to sea. Nagamine worries that other Gyaos eggs might hatch elsewhere in the world, but Asagi is confident that Gamera will return when he’s needed.

You’d hardly know this came from the same film company that produced Gamera Super Monster (1980). Much of the credit belongs to the directors.

Kaneko Shūsuke started out as a director of high-budget “pink” movies for Nikkatsu, but switched to making more mainstream films for other studios in the late 80s. Several of his films have a genre element – notably for Anglo audiences, he was one of the directors on Brian Yuzna’s horror anthology movie Necronomicon (1993). He brings a good pace and dynamic shooting to the non-effects scenes.

But what really sets Guardian apart from Toho’s contemporary output is the effects work directed by Higuchi Shinji. A fan turned pro, he worked in the modelling team on The Return of Godzilla (1984), then directed a feature-length kaiju parody the following year that brought him into the orbit of the student startup Daicon Film. Daicon reformed in 1985 as Gainax, with Higuchi as a key contributor to the breakthrough anime successes of co-founder Anno Hideaki. (Anno and Higuchi would much later collaborate on Shin Godzilla (2014) – but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.) With this background, Higuchi not only had a fannish eye for what would appeal to the audience but already had practical experience of trying some of it.

And it puts the Heisei Godzilla movies to shame, with all of their wide, distant shots of kaiju battles and close-up shots at Godzilla’s own eye level. Guardian takes the camera down to street level, putting us right in the middle of the destruction and incidentally showing off the effects team’s finest miniature work. While it’s down there, the camera shoots up from underneath the kaiju, giving them a sense of scale the Toho movies have been lacking lately. The absolute masterstroke for me is the shot of Gyaos’ head slamming into an office block during the climactic fight, filmed from inside an immaculately furnished miniature office. All of this helps to tie the improbable fantasy action back to the viewer’s everyday experience and make it feel more real than the escapades of G-Force and Little Godzilla. And yet the directors have an eye for beauty too – just look at that shot of Gyaos nesting on the truncated Tokyo Tower at sunset.

On another note of (relative) realism, Guardian acknowledges that in a situation like this, the JSDF wouldn’t be able to simply wheel out the sci-fi weaponry and would have to file the paperwork asking for permission to do anything more than react. The idea of the Japanese government making the wrong call and only getting in the way of those better suited to handle the crisis is believable and a refreshing thing to see in kaiju eiga (and an early preview of Higuchi’s and Anno’s take on Godzilla 20 years later – but again, I’m getting ahead of myself).

Granted, in all their close-ups the Gyaos heads are very, very obviously hand puppets. I find this delightful rather than a deal-breaker. On the bright side, they’re not the rigid props familiar to us from the Shōwa era Gamera movies.

Guardian does make a few references back to Gamera vs Gyaos (1967), its most obvious forebear. We see Gyaos eating the commuters out of a train carriage, wounding Gamera’s forelimb in their first major confrontation, cutting off her own foot to evade Gamera. We see her sonic beam stuttering out after the final showdown, just as it cut off when Gyaos was dumped into a volcano in Gamera vs Gyaos, although it makes a bit less sense here given Gyaos’ head has just been blown off. Wisely, Guardian doesn’t pick up on the original Gyaos’ never-explained ability to incapacitate Gamera by producing a fire-retardant powder from its wings. Just to keep us guessing, the script plays on the young Gyaos’ photosensitivity, as in the 1967 movie, but surprises us by revealing that the fully-grown adult Gyaos isn’t vulnerable to sunlight.

The plot point of the protagonist having a glowing magatama that gives them mystical powers and a link to their larger-than-life protector looks like it’s been borrowed from Toho’s Yamato Takeru (1994). Then again, as there’s only eight months between the release dates of those films, I should probably give the benefit of the doubt.

It’s clear, mind you, that the makers of Guardian have been taking notes from Toho’s recent output. Strong female characters to appeal to the predominant cinema audience in 90s Japan? Asagi plays the obvious counterpart to Toho’s Saegusa Miki, as the young woman with a psychic link to the heroic kaiju. Unlike Miki, she’s not beholden to the political or military hierarchy of an anti-Gamera strike force, so can more plausibly be her own person, and a surrogate for the viewer, in between the big kaiju fights. (In classic Gamera terms, she’s standing in for all those smartarse kids who took centre stage in the Shōwa era movies. As the “Guardian of the Universe”, Gamera is no longer a “friend to all children” but rather a friend to all humanity. The nearest we get to a nod to the old era is when Gamera stalls Gyaos to let Yonemori and Nagamine get a small child off a bridge halfway through the film.) Dr Nagamine, meanwhile, is a professional, independent woman who becomes the national authority on Gyaos. She runs rings around Inspector Osako and stands her ground against her government liaison, even reprimanding him when he becomes too deplorable to bow to. Even today, this film stands up well in its presentation of its female characters.

For that matter, not only is this one of those rare kaiju eiga with an explicitly female monster, it’s the first movie to cast a female stunt actor as the monster. Kameyama Yūmi plays Gyaos in the fight against Gamera through the streets of central Tokyo. She even gets a non-kaiju cameo as a newsreader.

There’s a romantic subplot between Nagamine and Yonemori, and it at least feels more natural than anything in Godzilla vs SpaceGodzilla (1994) – the scene in which he heroically rushes in to help her and a small child get off an imperilled bridge goes some way towards setting it up. And pleasingly, it doesn’t end up defining either character’s involvement in the plot. It falls down, cheesy dialogue notwithstanding, simply because Ihara Tsuyoshi’s performance as Yonemori is so rigid – Nakayama Shinobu is doing all the heavy lifting as Nagamine. She absolutely carries her scenes in this movie. We’ll see Nakayama again later in this movie series. Hotaru Yukijirō turns in a solid performance as the comedic cop Osako – we’ll see him again too. (Interested parties can spot him in the recent (2024) adaptation of James Clavell’s Shōgun (1975), playing the late taikō Nakamura.) We won’t see Onodera Akira again, although he gives perhaps the most competent male performance as Asagi’s father. I suppose this is where I should repeat the one fact that most people who know about this movie are likely to already know, that Fujitani Ayako, who plays Asagi, is the daughter of former action movie hero and current Putin apologist Steven Seagal. She does a commendable job in her film debut.

In all respects, this film blows the Heisei Godzilla movies out of the water. I don’t know that it’s about anything particularly in the way the earlier Heisei Godzillas are. It’s also not a straight-up cash-in in the way the Shōwa Gamera series was. It’s more of a digestion of and response to four decades of kaiju eiga through the lens of a media savvy fan. Its purpose is simply to make Gamera – Gamera! of all characters! – believable and interesting for a 90s audience, and I think it succeeds admirably. It’s only a pity that Godzilla was about to take a break and wouldn’t stick around to rise to the challenge.

Godzilla vs SpaceGodzilla

Godzilla vs SpaceGodzilla (1994)
Toho Studios
Director: Yamashita Kenshō, Kawakita Kōichi (special effects)

A spiky, crystalline object flies through space. It launches balls of energy ahead of it, which crash to Earth on an island in the South Pacific. Strange rings of pulsing crystals soon form in the craters.

At the United Nations Godzilla Countermeasures Center (UNGCC) building, Saegusa Miki is quizzed about the proposed Project T. (It appears her friends from the old psychic studies institute have been brought in-house to form the UNGCC’s own Psychic Centre, and she’s been put in charge. She’s also sporting a rather severe haircut and a pair of earrings that show Mothra’s sun emblem.) She’s dismissive of Project T, which proposes to implant a device in Godzilla’s head to allow him to be controlled telepathically. The project’s supervisors, Doctors Ōkubo and Gondō, tell her that if she won’t participate, they’ll choose a telepath from among her protégés. The only other option is Project MOGERA, which aims to kill Godzilla outright. A little later, in the grounds of the UNGCC, she’s visited by a projection of Mothra’s fairies, the Cosmos. They warn her that Mothra (who, you may recall, is travelling through space following the end of the last-but-one film) has spotted a hostile daikaiju that is approaching Earth and only Godzilla can stop it – she must prevent Godzilla being killed. Miki agrees to take part in Project T.

In the South Pacific, two G-Force officers, Lieutenants Shinjō and Satō, arrive on the island we saw earlier, which an on-screen caption tells us is called Bāsu Island. (Some sources Anglicise this as “Baas Island”, others go with “Birth Island”.) They’re met by Major Yūki, who’s supposed to help them prepare to enact Project T but who is making his own plans to kill Godzilla. The island is the home to Godzilla’s child, who has grown a bit since the last film. He isn’t “Baby” any more – the characters all refer to him as “Chibi Godzilla” (or “Little Godzilla”). He no longer looks like a miniature Godzillasaurus, but instead has a rounded, plasticky body and face with exaggeratedly large eyes and a cartoonish grin. Godzilla can be expected to visit the island from time to time, and Yūki has been planting tear gas mines along the beach to disorient him when he does, so that the Project T device can be attached to his head. Yūki’s own plan, when this happens, is to fire bullets full of blood coagulant into the weak spot under Godzilla’s armpit in the hope of killing him.

The other UNGCC initiative, Project MOGERA, is under Colonel Asō’s supervision. An on-screen caption (in English!) spells out the acronym: Mobile Operation Godzilla Expert Robot Aero-type. This is the successor to Mechagodzilla, a mecha that separates into two pilotable vehicles, one that flies and one with tank treads and an enormous drill bit on the front. It’s described as the ultimate anti-Godzilla weapon, although it looks like it’s been built from Mechagodzilla’s offcuts.

(Some sources add in a “Universal” to make “MOGUERA”, which I suppose reinforces the pronunciation of the hard “G” for Anglo audiences, but that’s not what appears on-screen. It’s actually not an acronym, but a backronym: it’s a sly reference to the space adventure The Mysterians (1957), in which alien invaders deployed a bipedal drilling machine called Mogera, a name derived from the Japanese word for “mole”.)

The UNGCC Council is shown some footage from NASA of an interstellar research station being pierced and destroyed by gigantic crystalline barbs. G-Force is soon tracking the culprit, the tumbling object seen in the pre-credits. It’s more obvious now that it has some kind of creature resembling Godzilla embedded in its underside. The UNGCC decides to send MOGERA into space to intercept it and advances Project T to deal with Godzilla. A helicopter flies Miki and the two scientists to the island where, soon enough, they have the chance to put their plan into effect. Yūki misses his shot at Godzilla’s armpit, but Shinjō successfully fires the Project T implant into the back of Godzilla’s neck. Miki is able to direct Godzilla to walk slowly along the beach for a while using a machine to amplify her telepathic control, but his will proves too strong and Ōkubo shorts out the machine by trying to force it. Godzilla heads inland, but before he can reach Little Godzilla, the space creature lands on the island.

The creature has left MOGERA damaged and drifting in a rock-filled patch of space that’s presumably meant to be the asteroid belt. Most of its crystal mass disappears on landing. It resembles Godzilla, but with crystals embedded across its head, back and tail. A massive crystal sticks up from each shoulder. It has little tusks on either side of its mouth, rather suggestive of Biollante from four films ago. Little Godzilla seems to mistake it for the real Godzilla, but it attacks him, drawing power from the craters into its shoulder crystals and firing it back out of its mouth. It’s able to generate an energy shield to defend itself against Godzilla’s breath, and can levitate in order to strafe Godzilla from the air, at which point it reverts to its original form. It leaves Little Godzilla trapped under the crystals in one of the craters and flies away. Despondent, Godzilla trudges back into the ocean.

Declaring Project T a failure, Ōkubo flies back to Japan with Gondō and Yūki. Miki elects to stay on the island to keep an eye out for Godzilla’s return, and Shinjō persuades Satō to stay as well. At UNGCC HQ, Dr Gondō presents her finding that the space monster shares Godzilla’s distinctive cellular structure. The creature is therefore dubbed “SpaceGodzilla”. (The assembled executives and top brass seem less than entirely impressed. The name incorporates the English word “space” rather than the Japanese word for space, “uchū”. Presumably this is to emphasise the alienness and monstrosity of the creature. You can hear the Japanese word in earlier scenes when the characters refer to it as “the space monster”, “uchū-kaijū”.) Gondō hypothesises that samples of Godzilla’s cells that found their way into space – either as part of Biollante or piggybacking on Mothra – were transported across the universe, merged with some crystalline life form and hyper-evolved through a series of credibility-stretching astronomical events to form SpaceGodzilla. (Personally I favour the Biollante hypothesis, partly because of those little tusks and partly because it allows a little more time for all of this to have happened.)

Miki is abducted from the island during the night. Gondō brings the helicopter to take Shinjō and Satō back to Japan, where they learn that Dr Ōkubo is behind the kidnapping. Ōkubo is working for a criminal gang and, having sabotaged Project T, plans to secretly use the technology and Miki’s brainwaves to control Godzilla for personal gain. Yūki, Shinjō and Satō storm the warehouse the gang are hiding in; one of the gangsters tries to use Miki as a human shield, but is foiled when she demonstrates a previously unseen talent for telekinesis. The heroes get out just before SpaceGodzilla, which has flown in across Sapporo and Yamagata, swoops overhead and destroys the warehouse with Ōkubo and the equipment inside. (Incidentally, Sapporo’s in the north of Japan and Yamagata is more or less central, which suggests SpaceGodzilla has taken a very circuitous route around from its point of origin in the South Pacific.)

SpaceGodzilla bypasses Tokyo and passes over Kōbe before settling in Fukuoka, in the south of Japan. G-Force has recovered and repaired MOGERA (or maybe they had a spare one tucked away, it’s really not clear) and plans to deploy it against SpaceGodzilla again. Colonel Asō has shoulder-tapped Yūki to lead the vehicle’s new crew, although he only just makes it back in time after Miki’s rescue. Before the launch, Yūki and Gondō share a moment over their common bond: Yūki wants revenge on Godzilla for the death in Godzilla vs Biollante (1989) of his best friend Colonel Gondō, who just happens to have been Dr Gondō’s brother.

In Fukuoka, SpaceGodzilla has transformed the city’s harbour area into a field of gigantic crystals and made its fortress around the Fukuoka Tower (a seaside observation tower completed in 1989). Godzilla is approaching from the opposite end of Kyūshū, while MOGERA flies in from the north. Yūki diverts MOGERA to attack Godzilla, but is knocked out by Shinjō and Satō, the other two pilots on board, who put the vehicle back on course. Unfortunately, MOGERA’s weapons prove ineffective against SpaceGodzilla and the crew barely manage to retreat out of harm’s way. Godzilla arrives and takes a pasting, with SpaceGodzilla levitating him and slamming him into a building, then launching several large crystals at him. Unable to blast SpaceGodzilla itself, Godzilla attacks the surrounding crystals, while the MOGERA crew observe that SpaceGodzilla has been drawing its power from these in conjunction with the Fukuoka Tower. They undermine the tower, allowing Godzilla to get past SpaceGodzilla’s shield and topple it, then attack SpaceGodzilla directly again. This time, with SpaceGodzilla’s energy source cut off, they’re able to destroy its shoulder crystals, but SpaceGodzilla lashes out and critically damages MOGERA. Yūki sends Shinjō and Satō off in the vehicle’s escape pod, but stays behind in the hope of finally shooting Godzilla.

Shinjō and Satō emerge from the escape pod at the edge of the battlefield and are met by Miki and Gondō. They head back in to rescue Yūki, who has become trapped in the wreckage of MOGERA. With SpaceGodzilla weakened and his own atomic breath apparently supercharged by all the energy floating around, Godzilla is able to destroy SpaceGodzilla – and most of Fukuoka. As SpaceGodzilla evaporates, it releases some sparkly business that, again, is reminiscent of Godzilla vs Biollante. Yūki declares that he’s OK with Godzilla after all. Gondō suggests that Earth could be threatened by more space kaiju while Godzilla’s cells are still littering the universe (which is possibly the most laboured anti-pollution moral in any Godzilla movie). Miki uses her telekinetic ability to remove the Project T control device from Godzilla’s neck. While Yūki and Gondō go to get a drink, Miki shares a telepathic vision with Shinjō of Little Godzilla, who is free again back on the island, happily blowing atomic bubbles.

Coming on the heels of Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla II (1993), Godzilla vs SpaceGodzilla looks like a strained attempt to strike box office gold again by sticking other words in front of Godzilla’s name. And it did make its money back, although reportedly its budget suffered from the fact that Toho hadn’t made back the very large amount they’d spent on Yamato Takeru (1994). The directing covers up at least some of the shortfall. Credit to the creative team for trying a new adversary again after three films of old favourites, but the repeated callbacks to Godzilla vs Biollante only draw attention to the unoriginality of having it be an antagonistic clone of Godzilla.

I’m hard pressed to think of anything else driving this movie other than “let’s put Space in the name”, though. The space programme shenanigans in The Return of Godzilla (1984) looked plausibly like a comment on Ronald Reagan’s infamous “Star Wars” orbital weapons project. Here they look like an arbitrary return to the kind of alternate world science fantasy we used to see in the Shōwa era films. All of a sudden, NASA has an interstellar research facility and Japan is capable of launching a very unaerodynamic mecha into orbit and sending it all the way out to the asteroid belt in what might be a few hours or a few days, depending on how we calculate the internal continuity of the movie. (And then somehow finding and retrieving it, again in a matter of days, unless they really did build a spare one as I suggested above.) Perhaps we should infer that all of this has been made possible by the further exploitation of Mecha-King Ghidorah’s hardware? But it’ll never be followed up on, so I suppose we’re welcome to rationalise it in whatever way we see fit.

We also see the upshot of bringing Godzilla’s child’s design more into line with the “new Minilla” concept Toho had originally wanted. All pretence at plausibility is gone – he doesn’t have the puffy, “busakawa” look of Minilla, but he does look uncannily like the dragons in the Taito video arcade game Bubble Bobble (1986). I wonder if having him blow bubbles instead of smoke rings at the end of the movie was a deliberate reference. As the last of the Heisei Godzilla series’ references to Shōwa era kaiju, it strikes a bum note.

The film disappoints in other ways too. The special effects budget clearly couldn’t stretch to a transition between kaiju SpaceGodzilla on the ground and spiky meteor SpaceGodzilla in the air – we just cut away from one form and cut back to the other. There’s an extremely odd comedy scene of a couple of salarymen in a coin-op arcade in Sapporo just before SpaceGodzilla flies overhead that disrupts the flow of the story. I’ve looked the two actors up on IMDb and can’t see any other film or TV series that they were in together, so it looks like this wasn’t a cheeky shoutout to a contemporary cultural phenomenon – it’s just a weird scene that’s jammed in where it doesn’t belong. Also jammed in are the romantic subplots between Miki and Shinjō and between Yūki and Gondō. “Subplots” probably isn’t the right word – there’s not really enough substance to them for that. There’s a scene where the men are about to pilot MOGERA into battle and the women see them off when you realise the scriptwriters actually mean it, and it simply doesn’t land.

It was around this time that pre-production formally began on TriStar’s American take on Godzilla. They’d acquired the rights back in 1992, but had taken a while (and would take a while longer) to get the project moving. Toho had retained the right to continue making their own Godzilla films, but decided that now was the time to wrap up the series and make way for Hollywood’s big-budget reimagining. In his next cinematic appearance, Godzilla would have to die.

Yamato Takeru

Yamato Takeru (1994)
Toho Studios
Director: Ōkawara Takao, Kawakita Kōichi (special effects)
Also known as: Orochi, the Eight-Headed Dragon (the American direct-to-video title).

Readers may recall that back in 1959, Toho Studios filmed a lavish adaptation of the legend of Prince Yamato Takeru. This film featured superstar actor Mifune Toshirō and a substantial dose of nationalism and was marketed in a celebratory way as the studio’s thousandth production. It included some of the foundational stories of Shintō mythology by way of plot background, hence its original title, The Birth of Japan, and its English language title, The Three Treasures, both of which put the focus of the audience onto those origin stories.

In fact, you might want to take another look at the blog entry for that film, just to remind yourself of all the details of the story. And then forget all about them.

Yamato Takeru is a very different adaptation. The title, for a start, throws the focus back onto the hero of the main narrative – The Three Treasures was a hero-driven adventure movie too, but Yamato Takeru makes it more personally about the prince. Meanwhile, the Anglo title, Orochi, the Eight-Headed Dragon, emphasises for the benefit of American fans of Godzilla that this is a movie with a giant monster in it. In fact, this is quite a kaiju-heavy movie, boasting two new creations in prominent set pieces as well as the legendary Yamata no Orochi in a much expanded role.

I can’t find any suggestion that this was marketed as a big celebratory film or prestige production for Toho. If it had been filmed in 1992 as planned, it could have marked the studio’s 60th anniversary, but script rewrites pushed it back by two years. Nor are there any casting coups on a par with Mifune, although we’ll look at the lead cast after the plot synopsis. This appears simply to have been a fantasy action blockbuster, not some kind of grand cultural statement but a bit of lurid entertainment.

Before we start on the plot, it’s worth just reminding ourselves about the famous “three treasures”, also sometimes referred to as the crown jewels of Japan. These are the bronze mirror Yata no Kagami, the sword Kusanagi no Tsurugi and the magatama, or comma-shaped stone bead, Yasakani no Magatama. According to legend, all three of these were given by the sun god Amaterasu to the grandfather of the first Emperor of Yamato. At least one of them, the sword, also passed through the hands of Yamato Takeru – it’s because of his exploits that the sword has its present name, the “Grass-Cutting Sword”, prior to which it was called Ame no Murakumo no Tsurugi, the “Heavenly Sword of Gathering Clouds”. Watch out for the echoes of these three sacred objects in the synopsis that follows.

The film opens with a male voiceover in English describing the void that preceded the creation of the universe. This gives way to a female voiceover in Japanese describing the birth of the Shintō gods and, eventually, the creation of Japan by Izanami and Izanagi. This is all delivered over astronomical imagery that seems to relate it to the Big Bang, the appearance of the stars and the formation of the Sun and the Earth.

(The use of the different narrators and languages is obviously a deliberate choice, but I’m damned if I know what the significance of it is.)

Several thousand years later...

Twin sons are born to the Emperor Keikō, the 12th Emperor of the Yamato dynasty, and his wife. (We’re never told about any other wives or any other sons. This is bad news for the 13th Emperor, who doesn’t seem to exist in this film’s continuity.) The younger son, Ousu, is immediately targeted by the Emperor’s advisor Tsukinoya, who tells the Emperor that twins are unlucky and the younger twin especially so. No one knows where Tsukinoya came from, but he magically made it rain this one time so the Emperor trusts him, even though he’s very, very blatantly evil. He secretly serves Tsukuyomi, a god who’s been locked inside a structure made of ice or some other crystalline substance that looks like a UFO and is currently floating through space. Having persuaded the Emperor to order Ousu’s death, he takes the baby in a basket to the top of a high cliff and drops it over the edge. Baby Ousu is saved by the White Bird of Heaven, the messenger of the sun god Amaterasu (although it’s a very metallic bird – the Steel Peacock of Heaven might be a more appropriate name). The White Bird catches the basket and drops it off at the Ise Shrine, where the Emperor’s sister Princess Yamato is the head priestess of Amaterasu, and she raises Ousu herself.

We fast forward ten years. Ousu is taught Shintō doctrine by his aunt and combat skills by his two mentors (and, let’s be honest, comedy sidekicks), Seiryu, an older man with a magic rope, and Genbu, a middle-aged man with a spear. We hear Princess Yamato telling Ousu about the three gods who were born to Izanagi after he returned from the underworld. She claims these are the three most important of all the gods (so pay attention, this might be important later) – Amaterasu, the god of the heavens; Susanoo, the god of the seas; and Tsukuyomi, the god of the underworld.

(Tsukuyomi is more commonly presented as the god of the Moon, the counterpart to Amaterasu’s Sun. I can’t find anything other than this film that connects him to the Shintō underworld, or that suggests he’s evil. The fact that he’s the Moon god will, however, have a bearing on developments later in this film.)

There’s a cave in the woods that Ousu is forbidden to enter. One night he enters it and discovers that it’s a kind of portal into a strange otherworld. He finds himself in a stone chamber dominated by a large statue of a bull-headed humanoid holding a mirror and a sword. There’s also a sword sticking up out of a cubic stone in the middle of the room, which he tries to remove but can’t. A voice ostensibly coming from the statue tells him that one day he will hold three “lights” (or perhaps... Three Treasures?) and on that day, he will become a warrior of the gods. He’s expelled from the chamber and wakes up holding a jade magatama. He takes to wearing the magatama as a pendant.

Fast forward again. Ousu is now an adult, and the Emperor has been persuaded by his wife to pardon him and summon him back to the Imperial court. When Tsukinoya magically attacks him in his room, his magatama glows and his face contorts, taking on a more demonic look, and he’s suddenly able to defend himself against Tsukinoya by firing green energy blasts out of his eyes. The Emperor is only told that Ousu has attacked Tsukinoya, and reprimands him for causing trouble. Later, his mother sickens and dies and his brother Ōusu blames him. Ōusu attacks Ousu with a sword and Ousu is obliged to defend himself by again using the power of his magatama. This apparently leaves Ōusu dead, and Ousu is blamed for the deaths of his mother and his brother.

(Tsukinoya later claims to have killed both of them; it’s not a stretch to accept that he cursed Ousu’s mother, but in the brother’s case I think we have to assume Ousu’s laser eye attack wasn’t fatal and Tsukinoya finished him off while no one was looking.)

To get rid of the troublesome Ousu, the Emperor sends him off alone on an apparent suicide mission to subdue the neighbouring Kumaso territory. His two sidekicks/mentors join him along the way. They pause at a shrine that seems to be affiliated to the one at Ise, and here they meet Oto-tachibana. (Ousu will end up habitually referring to her simply as “Oto”.) She’s a priestess at the shrine, but she attacks the travellers, believing them to be responsible for the recent theft of the shrine’s holy mirror. To be clear, she attacks them with a combination of throwing knives and wuxia-style flying kung fu. She also has magical powers – by grunting something that sounds suspiciously like “Om!” and throwing a couple of hand gestures, she can launch fireballs from her hands. (She’s very much not the delicate damsel of The Three Treasures, but a kick-ass action hero in her own right.) Once the misunderstanding is cleared up, the head priestess of the shrine tells the travellers about the missing mirror, which is tied to a prophesy about the White Bird of Heaven saving the world. When the three travellers head out the next morning, Oto asks to join them. She’s wearing the battle costume of Amaterasu (!) which has been handed down across the generations at the shrine and which includes a red jerkin and leather skirt, forearm braces and a very fetching pair of knee-length boots.

Our heroes arrive within sight of the Kumaso palace, apparently built on the slopes of an active volcano, where preparations are underway for a party. Only women are being allowed into the palace grounds. Oto gains entry to the palace and scouts around, but she’s discovered by Kumaso (not one of the Kumaso brothers – there’s only one Kumaso in this film) and, after a brief fight, is captured and prepared for sacrifice to the volcano god Kumaso-gami. Meanwhile, the other three have scaled the palace walls and Ousu has gone undercover as a female dancer at that evening’s banquet. In this film, Kumaso does notice the veiled Ousu glaring at him and calls him out. Seiryu and Genbu hold off Kumaso’s soldiers while the two battle it out. Ousu kills the lone Kumaso after a lengthy sword fight, during which Kumaso dubs him Yamato Takeru.

The prince and his pals then race to rescue Oto from a scene strangely reminiscent of King Kong (1933), and they all fight Kumaso-gami. Kumaso-gami is a cheap suitmation Balrog. Through the magic of special effects – an early example in Japanese cinema of CGI morphing – its hands become weapons, first a bow and arrows and then a large sword. It also grows stony skeletal wings during the fight. It has a third eye, a feature which is echoed in the emblem on the armour Kumaso was wearing. Yamato Takeru eventually blows it up with his magatama-powered green laser eyes. The shrine’s holy mirror immediately manifests in his hands – Oto speculates that the whole business might have been set up by Amaterasu all along.

Despite his success, the Emperor still won't forgive Yamato Takeru. He’s summoned away from the court by Princess Yamato, who warns him that the evil god Tsukuyomi is returning. She’s been fending off magical attacks on the Ise Shrine using the holy flints of Amaterasu (which were gifted to the prince and served another purpose in The Three Treasures). She tells Yamato Takeru the tale of Yamata no Orochi, which on this occasion involves Tsukuyomi taking on the form of the eight-headed dragon and trying to destroy Earth to spite Amaterasu. (This is illustrated with some scenes of Orochi superimposed on footage of volcanic eruptions, as well as an extremely badly staged effects shot in which Orochi descends from space towards Earth and casts a very crisp shadow on what is obviously a painted flat. The rest of the tale is depicted in a series of stone friezes, including a UFO and astronomical imagery.) Susanoo defeats Orochi and pulls a sword out of its tail, as we might expect, then Izanagi imprisons Tsukuyomi in ice and casts him into space. Princess Yamato asks the prince to bring her the Orochi sword, Ame no Murakumo no Tsurugi, from the palace so that she can seal it away in the shrine and thwart Tsukuyomi.

(Note the complete turnaround from The Three Treasures, in which the princess gave Yamato Takeru the sword and claimed it had been sent to her from the palace. We won’t see it cutting any grass in this film either.)

Yamato Takeru steals the sword and is chased from the palace by the Emperor’s guards, but he gives them the slip. Oto catches up with him and the pair walk along the coast towards the shrine. As they do so, Tsukinoya raises a storm and a sea monster to attack them. It’s unnamed in the film, but secondary sources name the kaiju “Kaishin Mūba” – “Kaishin” translates as “Sea-God”, and “Mūba” seems to just be a proper name. The Kaishin is a reptilian creature with pointy teeth, glowing yellow eyes, a lot of tentacles and fins all round its head and down its back and arms. It also has a third eye, from which it can fire a green energy beam. It snatches Yamato Takeru with a tentacle and tries to drown him. Oto rescues him but is dragged down herself – Yamato Takeru watches as she and the kaiju magically disintegrate. As he mourns Oto on the beach, Yamato Takeru is attacked by Tsukinoya and both men are fatally wounded in the struggle. Tsukinoya lives long enough to take the sword and send it to the Moon. As he dies, it’s revealed that he was one of Orochi’s giant fangs masquerading as a man all along.

Tsukuyomi has arrived on the Moon, broken out of his ice UFO and manifested some armour. Receiving the sword seems to give him a considerable power-up, represented by a lot of electrical crackling in the style of He-Man (1983-85). He creates a stony palace on the Moon and starts to rain fireballs down on Earth.

Yamato Takeru wakes up in the strange otherworld where he first acquired his magatama. This time, there’s a humanoid figure sitting on the statue’s lap, wearing a metallic bull mask and holding a sword. He calls himself Bull-Head, lord of the underworld.

(What he says sounds like “Gozu Daino”, which looks like a reference to the mythological figure of Gozu. Usually partnered with the horse-headed Mezu, ox-headed Gozu is an usher of hell brought into Japanese folklore from Chinese Buddhism. Spoiler alert – this character isn’t really Gozu.)

To test Yamato Takeru, the figure draws a sword and launches himself at him. Yamato Takeru soon loses his own sword but is able to get to the sword he’d previously seen in the middle of the chamber and, in a very Arthurian moment, pull it from its stone. It glows green and hums just like Luke Skywalker’s light sabre. A bolt of energy from the sword splits the figure’s bull mask and he reveals himself to actually be the god Susanoo. The sword that Yamato Takeru has now laid claim to is Orochi no Karasai no Tsurugi, the only sword that can defeat Tsukuyomi.

(Well... the actors pretty definitely say “Karasai”, and online secondary sources back that up. But it would make an awful lot more sense if they were actually saying “Karasabi”. The History of Japan website says that Orochi no Karasabi is one of the recorded names of the sword Susanoo used to kill Yamata no Orochi, before pulling the other sword out of its tail. I can’t find a source to back that up – the Nihon Shoki uses one of the other names, and the Kojiki doesn’t seem to name that sword at all – but I’ll take it on trust. Google Translate tells me that “Orochi no Karasabi” means “The Great Snake’s Beginnings”. It says that “Orochi no Karasai” means “The Great Snake’s Spicy Vegetables”. Possibly there’s another interpretation I don’t know about. Possibly Susanoo said “Karasabi” but swallowed the “b”.)

Susanoo tells Yamato Takeru he and Oto, born at the same time, were put on Earth to kill Tsukuyomi. The strange power Yamato Takeru has been wielding, which lets him shoot lasers out of his eyes and makes his face turn all demonic, is in fact Susanoo's "wild spirit". What’s more, Oto contains the spirit of Amaterasu (which might explain her fireball powers). Susanoo sends Yamato Takeru and Oto back to the world of the living, and they materialise inside Tsukuyomi’s palace on the Moon. After some swordplay, Yamato Takeru defeats Tsukuyomi with a combination of his “wild power”, the sword and Amaterasu’s mirror. Tsukuyomi disintegrates and his palace collapses, but he reappears in the form of Yamata no Orochi.

Orochi has red skin, the expected number of necks, a large body and one large foot visible on either side. The body is pretty obviously moving forward on wheels. (This might be a comedown for kaiju connoisseurs after the manoeuvrability of King Ghidorah, but then again Ghidorah only had three heads – Orochi needs something bigger and less flexible to support eight of them. And hey, this is still more of Orochi than we saw in The Three Treasures.) Its heads look similar in shape to Ghidorah's, but quite a bit more spiny. Each of them breathes out an honest-to-goodness jet of fire. It has no wings. It seems to have a tail, but only the one.

Yamato Takeru and Oto are cornered on the lunar surface, but all of a sudden the White Bird of Heaven appears. Our heroes spend some time on its back, attacking Orochi from the air. When the tide turns and they’re flung into space, Yamato Takeru’s magatama, the mirror and the sword begin to glow – the “three lights” he was told he would possess. He and Oto merge somehow to become the promised “warrior of the gods”, which turns out to be a rather chubby mecha. It has the same metallic look as the White Bird and some obvious sun imagery on its helmet. It’s able to manifest a pair of golden wings, a force shield decorated with mystic symbols, a big sword and a spear at will. Once Orochi is destroyed, the giant mecha separates back out into the White Bird, Yamato Takeru and Oto. They find Tsukuyomi still alive but unconscious. In voiceover only, Susanoo tells Yamato Takeru to seal Tsukuyomi's essence inside his magatama and throw it into space. Why not just kill him if he's evil, asks Oto. Susanoo replies that Tsukuyomi will bring joy to humanity next time he returns, because "gods are like that". (If ever a voiceover shrugged, this one does.) The defeat of Tsukuyomi is reflected in the passing of a solar eclipse back in Japan (a very literal interaction of the Sun and Moon). Yamato Takeru and Oto fly home on the White Bird of Heaven and presumably live happily ever after.

The Three Treasures embellished the legend of Yamato Takeru, and one of those embellishments is picked up here: the inclusion of a villain the audience can boo, an advisor to the Emperor who connives against the prince. There, the advisor was an uncle of the Emperor’s younger sons trying to manoeuvre his relatives onto the throne. Here, the other sons are pruned from the plot and so, instead of being an ambitious political manipulator, the villain becomes a sorcerer who serves the film’s supernatural antagonist. He thus also serves the overall shift of tone from the plausibly historical to the whimsically fantastic. This mutation of the legend is a bit like how the British legends of Robin Hood or King Arthur have been added to and changed over the centuries, as well as the tonal shifts of successive film and TV adaptations. If Toho ever makes a third film adaptation of the legend, it’ll be interesting to see if the insertion of Tsukuyomi or any of the other fantasy elements are carried over into that.

And fantasy is very much the order of the day here. As a folkloric adaptation, Yamato Takeru is much more Robin of Sherwood (1984-86) than Arthur of the Britons (1972-73). I think it might be best understood in the context of the occasional American fantasy films of the previous decade, such as Legend (1985), which also ends with a supernatural villain banished but not entirely defeated; Ladyhawke (1985), which also ends with a dramatic shot of a solar eclipse; or Willow (1988), an ensemble adventure which I think most closely matches the tone of this film. (And like those movies, it seemed like a good idea but didn’t perform well at the box office.) It also owes something to the popular fantasy-tinged science fiction cinema of earlier years. The Star Wars (1977) optical effects business in the sword fights is obvious to the point of shamelessness. I think there’s also a clear debt to Superman (1978) in the title visuals and in Tsukuyomi’s crystal UFO. (Sadly, his lunar castle is no Fortress of Solitude.) Closer to home, the metallic look of Amaterasu’s messenger bird and the gods’ warrior champion suggests an attempt to appeal to fans of the mecha-heavy boys’-own variety of anime. All the “gods as alien astronauts” stuff fits neatly alongside the similar ethos of Princess from the Moon (1987) and the von Dänikenism of some of the later Shōwa era Godzilla movies – it was a tried and tested trope, the filmmakers had every reason to believe it would work this time too.

Meanwhile, the militarism is played down. That the prince is sent to subdue the Kumaso territory all on his own (with the help of the three companions he meets along the way) might look like a cost-saving measure, but it’s closer to the original legend. There’s no suggestion in the Kojiki that the Emperor sent him off with an army, although he does seem to have had a household entourage with him, and the entire final battle in The Three Treasures was invented for that film.

The Three Treasures, surprisingly given the Anglo title under which Toho marketed it, downplayed its presentation of Japan’s crown jewels to the point that you’d only spot two of them if you knew your Shintō mythology and knew to look for them. The sword Kusanagi no Tsurugi, pulled by Susanoo from the tail of Yamata no Orochi, was the only one of the three that really featured in the movie. Yamato Takeru makes a great deal out of the “three lights” the prince will wield on the day he transforms into the Michelin Gundam, and you’d be forgiven for thinking these ought to be the famous three objects. And at first glance they do appear to be, but it’s more complicated than that. The mirror from Amaterasu’s shrine is presumably still in Yamato Takeru’s possession after he returns to Earth, so that seems to be a lock. We do see Yamato Takeru picking up the Kusanagi no Tsurugi after the big fight, while Tsukuyomi is lying inert on the ground – I don’t think he’s holding it on the journey home, but it’s plausible that he took it back. But it wasn’t one of the “three lights” – that was the other sword, the one the prince took from Susanoo. And the magatama, which is absolutely central to the plot, ends up tumbling away into space, so it clearly isn’t meant to be the Yasakani no Magatama. Granted, the Yasakani no Magatama is supposed to be sacred to Amaterasu while the prince’s magatama in the movie was a conduit for Susanoo’s power, so it would have been a stretch in any case to identify it with the Imperial treasure.

The expansion of Oto-tachibana’s role from the intermittent love interest who drowns herself to appease the gods to a kick-ass female lead who survives the movie is another significant change to the legend that I hope will influence future adaptations. I’d note again that women were the source of a substantial proportion of Japanese box office takings in the 90s, and this change to the text is in line with the foregrounding of strong female characters in the contemporary Godzilla movies. Toho would have wanted to make their fantasy blockbuster as marketable as possible. They also presumably wanted to get the most out of their lead actress, who deserved nothing less.

Yamato Takeru doesn’t boast a big name superstar in the way The Three Treasures did, but it could be considered a vehicle for two bankable stars. Both of them were about a decade into their film careers and had already starred in fantasy films for Toho, and both are on good form here. Prince Ousu, a.k.a. Yamato Takeru, is played by Takashima Masahiro, who played the Pteranodon enthusiast, G-Force dropout and "goofball" hero Aoki in Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla (1993) and would go on to appear in the next and last film in the Heisei Godzilla series. The priestess/princess Oto-tachibana is played by Sawaguchi Yasuko, who was also the only speaking female actor in The Return of Godzilla (1984) and Princess Kaguya in Princess from the Moon (1987). Among the other cast, watch out for Abe Hiroshi, playing Tsukuyomi, who will go on to play a villainous role in a later Godzilla movie.

All in all, this film is a classic 90s mix of the spectacular and the cheap-looking. (I say “cheap-looking”, knowing that it actually went over budget.) The CGI, still cutting edge at the time, has dated a bit. It’s most obvious in the fight scene with Kumaso-gami but subtler in scenes like the build-up to the heroes’ transformation in the climactic battle, and I’m sure there are other instances so subtle that I haven’t spotted them. I’m not entirely sure whether some of the visual effects were computer generated or classic optical effects. The shot of Yamata no Orochi approaching Earth in the related tale of olden times is astonishingly bad, but the practical kaiju effects in the rest of the movie are executed well. The music is cheerfully bombastic, with one catchy cue that’s reused on every single fight scene – it’s a bit like the stock music used in dramatic scenes in Star Trek (1966-69). There’s no very good reason why I should like this movie more than The Three Treasures, but I do. Quite apart from being an hour shorter and thus not outstaying its welcome, it’s just more fun.

Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla II

Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla II (1993)
Toho Studios
Director: Ōkawara Takao, Kawakita Kōichi (special effects)
Also known as: Well... The title’s really just Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla, but it’s known in Anglo markets as Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla II to distinguish it from the 1974 film of the same name. The “II” doesn’t have any other significance – it’s not a sequel to the earlier film. Japanese viewers won’t have this problem, because this film’s on-screen title includes the English “VS” whereas the 1974 film’s title features the kanji character 対.

In 1992, following the events of Godzilla vs King Ghidorah (1991), the United Nations Godzilla Countermeasures Center (UNGCC) is established in Japan. Fast forward to 1994 (thus maintaining the “just around the corner” timeframe established by having set Godzilla vs King Ghidorah in 1992).

The UNGCC building's design includes four large towers and an awful lot of glass in what looks like a deliberate come-on to Godzilla. There seem to be a lot of American staff on site, and the operational lingua franca of the UNGCC is English. The staff of the UNGCC includes a military detachment, G-Force, under the command of Colonel Asō and a robotics division led by Dr Asimov. (The reference in the name is purely superficial – don't worry, Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla II will not require you to ponder the philosophical niceties and logical quandaries of working with robots.) Saegusa Miki is also attached to the UNGCC – Asō is empowered to appoint her to Mechagodzilla's crew in the movie's final battle.

The UNGCC's first major invention was Garuda, a flying gunship, but this was rejected as ineffective against Godzilla and is now regarded as a joke or a curiosity. Its pilot, Aoki Kazuma, continues to work on it in secret, even after he's redeployed to the G-Force infantry and then, when he flunks out of the training regime, put on car park duty.

Instead, the UNGCC has been focusing on Mechagodzilla, which it's built using materials and techniques reverse engineered from the remains of Mecha-King Ghidorah. Mechagodzilla looks like a robotic version of Godzilla, even though it seems as though such elements as the tail and spines would be a wasteful use of resources. (It also roars, and there's certainly no reason for that.) It's powered by radioactive helium-3, which surprisingly doesn’t seem to worry anyone. It's launched from an underground bunker and propelled through the air by chemical rockets. It fires beam weapons from its eyes and mouth, missiles from its shoulders and hips, and harpoons from its forearms that act as a gigantic taser. Its secret weapon is another beam weapon, referred to as the Plasma Grenade, concealed in its torso – a synthetic diamond coating on Mechagodzilla's exterior absorbs energy from Godzilla's radioactive breath and channels it to the Plasma Grenade so that it can be thrown right back at Godzilla. Prolonged use of the beam weapons causes Mechagodzilla to overheat, to the extent that it will visibly start melting during the big final showdown. The crew board it via an elevator, but are able to get out later through an escape hatch in its cockpit.

Mechagodzilla is deployed on its maiden mission when Godzilla attacks Kyoto. What's drawn Godzilla to Kyoto is the egg. Let's back up a bit and talk about the egg.

A Japanese research team is called to Adonoa Island, an island in the Bering Sea that's been exploited by a consortium of Japanese and Russian oil companies. The excavation has unearthed a nearly intact pteranodon fossil and two eggs, one of which has already hatched. The research team load the unhatched egg into their helicopter and pitch camp for the night. They're soon attacked by Rodan. The expedition leader recognises and names him, although he claims – as Dr Kashiwagi did in Rodan (1956) – that this is a well-known scientific name for a species of gigantic pteranodon. One of the other team members observes that there’s a nuclear waste dumping ground nearby that could account for Rodan’s mutation. (Or, although no one says it, it could equally well be explained by the same nuclear calamity that mutated Heisei Godzilla after his relocation to the Bering Strait in Godzilla vs King Ghidorah.) Rodan is a large, yellowish pterosaur with teeth, which should mark him out as a pterodactyl rather than a pteranodon. Instead of a crest, he has three long horns protruding from the back of his head – that's one horn more than his Shōwa era predecessor had.

Rodan destroys the campsite, but the research team are spared his further attentions when Godzilla suddenly emerges from the sea nearby and the two kaiju clash. There are some electric sparks during their close combat – it’s not entirely clear whether these are generated by Rodan or Godzilla, and it’s not clear what their significance is. Rodan puts up a good fight, strafing Godzilla repeatedly and pecking at his opponent's eyes, but it’s an unequal match and Rodan is brutally put down. Meanwhile, the research team take the opportunity to get into their helicopter and leave with the egg.

The egg is taken to a scientific institute in Kyoto. The team studying it finds several scraps of prehistoric plant matter attached to its shell, and bizarrely these turn out to have psychic properties. Saegusa Miki gets hold of a sample and takes it to her friends at the psychic research centre. (It’s moved offices since its appearance in Godzilla vs Biollante and is no longer labelled the “Japan Psyonics Center” in English. Google Translate suggests the new signage names it as the “Mental Development Centre”.) The psychics are able to translate the plant's emanations into music. This music causes the egg to hatch, but to everyone’s astonishment it's not a pteranodon but a Godzillasaurus. (That is to say, it’s a dinosaur of the same species seen in the 1944 scenes in Godzilla vs King Ghidorah. – it’s what Godzilla used to be before he was exposed to atomic radiation.) The scientists decide to name it Baby. Baby is a docile and timid creature, like a roughly human-sized upright newt. His eyes glow red when he's scared, and he imprints on one of the scientists, Gojō Azusa, as a surrogate mother.

How did Baby Godzilla get into Rodan's nest? The lead scientist posits that Godzilla left the egg there like some kind of kaiju cuckoo, because he was unable to look after it himself. (Godzilla will be quick enough to take his child back at the end of the movie, though.)

Godzilla is drawn towards the newly hatched Baby, and Mechagodzilla is deployed to stop him reaching Kyoto. Things go well until Mechagodzilla uses its forearm harpoons to taser Godzilla, and Godzilla is somehow able to reverse the flow of the current and short circuit Mechagodzilla. (This hints at the never-explained affinity for electricity Godzilla showed in some films of the Shōwa era, notably including the 1974 Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla.) With Mechagodzilla immobile, Godzilla marches on to Kyoto but is unable to find Baby because the scientists have hidden him away in a basement level of the institute. Godzilla lashes out for a while, then disappears into Osaka Bay.

After Mechagodzilla's first defeat in combat against Godzilla, Aoki corners Dr Asimov and suggests upgrading it by combining it with the neglected Garuda. It proves surprisingly easy to integrate the two vehicles – both the hardware and the control systems – and Aoki finds himself back in favour as Garuda’s pilot. The two are modified to act separately or together as needed, Garuda attaching to Mechagodzilla's upper back and draping its gigantic maser cannons over Mechagodzilla's shoulders to form what the pilots refer to as Super Mechagodzilla.

The UNGCC takes an understandable interest in Baby. While he’s in UNGCC custody, the children from the psychic research facility visit him and sing the prehistoric plant song to him. Far from calming him down, it seems to enrage him, making him throw himself against the bars of his enclosure. Miki hypothesises that the music gives him strength in some way. Although no one knows it, far away in the Bering Strait Rodan has also somehow been energised by the song. Revived from the comatose state Godzilla left him in, he undergoes some kind of regenerative process which causes him to glow and turn bright red. He also acquires the strange ability to make buildings spontaneously combust when he flies over them.

A study of Baby reveals that he has a secondary brain at the base of his spine, an anatomical feature that Godzilla presumably shares. G-Force develops a plan to use Mechagodzilla, in combination with Garuda, to burn out Godzilla's secondary brain, leaving him paralysed from the waist down and easier to destroy. They also propose to use Baby as bait, which means a protective Rodan complicates matters by showing up first.

Rodan gives Garuda and Mechagodzilla a battering; Mechagodzilla succeeds in mortally wounding Rodan, but it's in no shape to take on Godzilla when he finally arrives. The pilots eventually manage to get the two machines upright and joined together, and Super Mechagodzilla succeeds in its mission to immobilise Godzilla. It's at this point that Rodan, spurred on by Baby's cries of distress, heaves himself over to where Godzilla's lying, drapes himself over Godzilla's back and somehow transfers his energy into Godzilla. Even the human characters remark that this doesn't make any sense, but there it is – Rodan evaporates in a magical, glowing cloud, and Godzilla's secondary brain regenerates, allowing him to leap back into action with a stronger, and much redder, atomic breath ray than before.

(That's right – the kaiju join together to create something stronger, just like the machines did! No one refers to the revived Godzilla as "Super Godzilla", though.)

Godzilla blasts Super Mechagodzilla with his supercharged breath, causing it to first melt and then blow up. Thankfully it doesn't spread its radioactive helium-3 fuel everywhere and the crew are all completely fine. Godzilla then heads away with Baby in tow. The End.

Following the successful makeovers of King Ghidorah and Mothra, we get a veritable cavalcade of reimagined kaiju in this movie. Firstly and most obviously, Mechagodzilla. Introduced as an alien weapon in the 1970s movies, here it becomes a symbol of the futility of humanity's attempts to solve natural problems with military hardware. This is more or less what it'll continue to stand for from now on. (Spoiler alert: it won’t reappear in the Heisei series, but we will see Mechagodzilla again in the 2000s.) Godzilla and Rodan clearly mirror and triumph over Mechagodzilla and Garuda. There's even a bit of guff at the end about life winning out over "artificial life", just in case the viewers weren’t paying attention.

Rodan is an unexpected bonus, although he seems to only be here to complicate the plot. The other, perhaps less obvious comeback kid is the new Son of Godzilla. Baby is a hell of an improvement on Minilla, not least because he actually looks like he might plausibly be related to Godzilla. Apparently this didn’t go over too well with some of the senior executives at Toho who seriously wanted to see Minilla back on cinema screens in 1993. Feedback was given and the design of Godzilla’s child was modified for the next instalment in the franchise. We’ll see how well that worked out in due course.

But never mind all that toot, what about the revelation that Baby Godzilla has two dads?!

All right, for the sake of being cheeky, I've made an assumption about Rodan's surrogate relationship to Baby. The research team on the island guesses that Rodan hatched from Baby's sibling egg, but that's never explicitly confirmed and remains supposition. When secondary sources comment on this element of the plot (and many don't), they accept it without question, but I think it's equally possible that Rodan is the parent. Godzilla left his egg in Rodan's nest with the expectation that something else would brood it for him, which implies there was a live Rodan parent around at the time. We're probably supposed to believe the pteranodon fossil was the Rodan parent, but that's been dead for whole geological ages and it's just too ridiculous to accept that connection. The island's location in the Bering Sea lines up with where this specific Godzilla was moved to by the villains in Godzilla vs King Ghidorah, and his subsequent mutation might be the kind of thing that would lead him to abandon his egg, which I think suggests a window of 1944 to 1984. Although the live Rodan we see is an adult, it might have hatched recently from the other egg - the hatchlings in Rodan aged to maturity in just a matter of days. But Rodan doesn't treat Baby's egg - or Baby - as a competitor for resources, which is the natural behaviour I would have expected from two hatchlings in the same nest. He consistently shows the kind of defensive or protective behaviour I'd expect from the nest parent.

(There is a third possibility... When we saw two Rodans together in the 1956 film, they were a mating pair. Maybe Rodan is taking such an interest in the egg because he expects a female Rodan to hatch from it? And he never actually sees Baby, who's stuck in a shipping container for most of the final showdown, so he wouldn't necessarily realise his mistake. But then again, he does respond to Baby's non-Rodan-like call for help at the end, at which point he very deliberately sides with Godzilla at the cost of his own existence. On balance, this feels like a less plausible interpretation than the other two.)

The evidence we're given on screen – the pteranodon fossil, the prehistoric psychic lichen on Baby's egg, the neat connection between the island's location and this specific Godzilla and the 1940s – is contradictory and won't stand up on its own. And either interpretation, parent or sibling, requires us to make some broad assumptions about how long Godzillasaurus or Rodan eggs might take to hatch, or how long they might be able to remain dormant. I just don't think there's a definitive answer to be had. I'm pretty certain the scriptwriter intended Rodan to be a surrogate sibling, but I find the idea of him as a surrogate parent more compelling.

And if that means Baby Godzilla has two dads, well... I'm not the fool who decided all kaiju should be male by default, am I?

Besides, it ties in better with the theme of parenting that lurks in the background of this movie. Aoki, in his more obnoxious moments, joshes Gojō about the two of them raising her gigantic surrogate child, and although she initially rebuffs his advances, she certainly reciprocates Baby's affection. Godzilla, who's been an absentee father to his egg, shows eyelash-fluttering warmth towards his child at the movie's end, and this development sets up substantial parts of the two remaining films in the Heisei series. The scenes of Rodan battling Godzilla for custody of Baby (I mean, look, how else can I possibly phrase this?) and making the ultimate sacrifice for his reptilian found family seem like they might be a part of this same theme.

There are a couple of familiar faces among the cast, in addition to the expected return of Odaka Megumi as Miki. Sahara Kenji has plenty of time on screen as Segawa Takayuki, the Secretary of the UNGCC. He appeared as an unnamed Defence agency official in Godzilla vs King Ghidorah – is Segawa perhaps meant to be the same character? He’ll reprise the role in the next Godzilla movie. Takashima Tadao – the hero Sakurai in King Kong vs Godzilla (1962) and last seen in a Godzilla movie in 1967 – cameos as the director of the psychic research centre. His son, Takashima Masahiro, plays the lead male role of Aoki, and we’ll be seeing him in other roles soon enough. Aoki tags along with Miki when she visits the psychic research centre, and there’s a cheeky moment between father and son when the director looks Aoki over and makes a disparaging remark about him. Blink and you’ll miss a casting in-joke when Miki looks in on a class being taught by two women who speak in unison. The teachers are played by Imamura Keiko and Osawa Sayaka, who played Mothra’s fairies in the previous movie. Among the less familiar faces, pay close attention to Colonel Asō, who is played by Nakao Akira. Asō, the gruff old soldier who seems to view Godzilla as his personal Nemesis, will return in the remaining two Heisei series Godzilla movies. He’s probably the second most important character in this series of films (excluding kaiju) after Miki.

This is a pretty good-looking film. Although practical effects are, as ever, used for the action scenes, the title sequence makes some use of computer imagery to show us the assembly process for Mechagodzilla. The composite shots featuring Mechagodzilla in its hangar are sensational, the composite shots of Godzilla rampaging through Japan merely OK. Once again, the big showdown happens at night in an urban arena, but this time it's all too obviously a model set in a studio. All is forgiven with the sheer adorableness of Baby Godzilla, though. On the acting front, Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla II blesses us with some of the all-time worst American performances in any Godzilla movie. (Aoki’s pretty awful too, but that’s just how the character’s written – Takashima does a fine job with the part he’s been given.) But in terms of world-building, it’s nice to see a film address how the international community might practically respond to Godzilla’s existence and to get a good look inside the workings of the UNGCC. Overall, I’d certainly rank this among the better Toho Godzilla movies.