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.