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 (1989) 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.