Godzilla 2000: Millennium

Godzilla 2000: Millennium (1999)
Toho Studios
Director: Ōkawara Takao, Suzuki Kenji (special effects)
Also known as: The slightly re-edited American release was just called Godzilla 2000 (2000).

I’ll bet Toho were glad they retained the right to continue making their own Godzilla films when negotiating the terms for TriStar’s Godzilla (1998). Within a year and a half of the American movie’s release, they’d produced the first of a new wave of films that could be seen as reclaiming the daikaiju’s legacy and responding to the choices made by Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich. Although these all came out during the Heisei era, they’re generally referred to as the Millennium series to avoid confusion with the 1984-95 Heisei series.

The conceit of all but one of the Millennium series films is that each one ignores all the material that’s preceded it except for the original Godzilla (1954). (In practice, how much or how little each film will ignore will vary greatly.) Presenting a string of new takes on Godzilla might have been a way for Toho to show certain overseas film producers how they thought it should have been done. It seems, though, that it was really just a pivot from a planned series after Toho saw the underwhelming ticket sales for Godzilla 2000. Presenting a selection of reboots was an expedient way for them to try other approaches until they found one that worked for Japanese audiences. TriStar themselves undertook to distribute Godzilla 2000 to American cinemas, but ended up trimming and re-dubbing it to create another in the long line of American re-edits. Subsequent entries in the series received limited exposure, if any, in US cinemas.

Ichinose Yuki, a journalist, tags along with independent scientist Shinoda Yūji and his young daughter Io on a nocturnal expedition to track Godzilla. (We don’t initially know it’s Godzilla. Well... we do, because we’re watching a movie with his name in the title, but we’re a few scenes into the movie before anyone says “Godzilla”. All that’s clear from the first scene is that they’re tracking something that registers on seismographs, which implies a natural phenomenon.) Ichinose wants to get pictures of Godzilla to bargain her editor into giving her a job on a computer magazine; sadly, Godzilla’s radioactivity has the effect of ruining her film, so she ends up stuck on the assignment.

Godzilla comes ashore at fogbound Nemuro, up north in Hokkaidō. (In a possible callback to The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), there’s a close call with a lighthouse.) Shinoda, Io and Ichinose intercept him and barely escape with their lives, then witness him destroying a local power station. Shinoda theorises that Godzilla might somehow hate man-made energy sources.

Godzilla now has quite a flat, wide head, somewhat greenish skin and extremely pointy, spiny dorsal plates. He’s very snaggle-toothed. His breath ray is orange rather than blue and more fiery than before. His history is never explained in the movie, it’s just accepted that he’s a periodic hazard for Japan with a particular taste for power stations.

Katagiri Mitsuo, the head of the Crisis Control Intelligence Agency (CCI), is schmoozing at a corporate soirée when his subordinate Miyasaka Shirō informs him of the Nemuro incursion. (Presumably the CCI is a kind of quango with responsibility for giving the relevant government departments advance warning of any Godzilla-scale threats. It evidently has broad scope and a generous budget to conduct its own research, as we’ll see in a second. Katagiri is said to also be a deputy cabinet secretary, but at which ministry isn’t made clear.) Later, a submarine under the direction of Miyasaka is planting CCI “G-Sensors” in the ocean trench off Japan’s east coast when it finds a meteorite made of a highly magnetic substance. Katagiri thinks it could be exploited as a new, cleaner energy source and orders it raised. When the operation begins, however, it raises itself and floats impossibly – Miyasaka suggests it could be something alien.

Sent back out by her editor, Ichinose looks for Shinoda at the headquarters of the Godzilla Prediction Network (GPN). (Presumably this is back in the Tokyo area rather than Hokkaidō, given how quickly Shinoda is able to get to Godzilla’s next landing spot.) GPN HQ turns out to be an office in the back of a brewery warehouse – although Shinoda has access to a fair amount of hi-tech equipment, he’s clearly underfunded. The GPN does seem to include at least two other people, in Matsushima and Fukushima. Shinoda defers all the GPN’s business and admin activities to his daughter.

Godzilla approaches Tōkai, where there’s a nuclear power plant. The government orders the emergency deployment of the JSDF. Katagiri has the authority to order the reactor shut down as a precaution. He and Shinoda race there, Shinoda in his truck and Katagiri in a helicopter. Their relative positions are clear: Shinoda wants to study Godzilla because of what he might reveal about the development of life on Earth, Katagiri wants to destroy him because of all the expensive damage he causes. It’s revealed that Shinoda used to work alongside Miyasaka at the university lab where Katagiri recruited his CCI staff; had Shinoda not already resigned by then, he still would have refused any job offer from Katagiri because of their irreconcilable ideologies. Shinoda tries to warn Katagiri that Godzilla might attack other power sources in the area besides the nuclear plant.

General Takada, in charge of the JSDF response to Godzilla, is confident that his team can take Godzilla down with a new variety of high-penetration missile. A first wave of conventional missiles launched from fighter jets and tanks lures the aggressive Godzilla inland to where the special missiles are waiting for him. Although they break his skin, they unfortunately don’t injure him seriously, and only the distraction of an airstrike stops him from destroying the tanks. Meanwhile, Miyasaka has been shocked to watch the meteorite raise itself upright, levitate out of the water and eventually glide off towards Godzilla’s position. It scans Godzilla, then fires an energy beam at him, knocking him into the water. He retaliates, blasting the rock off what proves to be a metallic UFO. It flies away down the coast and parks itself once more in an upright position in the water. Miyasaka speculates that it’s solar powered and tilts to follow the sun – it could have been buried at the bottom of the ocean for millions of years before the CCI submarine’s searchlight reactivated it.

Shinoda is keen to study some of the scales that the missiles knocked off Godzilla, but needs access to the CCI’s more advanced equipment. He agrees to Katagiri’s condition that he turn over all the GPN’s data on Godzilla, although Io craftily ensures that the CCI receives only a dud copy of the data. Working together, Shinoda and Miyasaka discover that Godzilla’s skin tissues contain a factor that nearly instantly repairs any damage on the cellular level. Shinoda names this factor “Organiser G-1”. (The American re-edit changes this to the more literal “Regenerator G-1”.) He’s soon dreaming of the potential medical applications.

At sunrise, the UFO is re-energised and breaks free of the electromagnetic restraints the CCI and JSDF had optimistically placed on it. It flies over Tokyo’s Shinjuku district and lands on top of the Tokyo Opera City Tower, crushing the top few floors. (Opened in 1996, this building follows in the long tradition of prominent recent constructions to be destroyed in a Godzilla movie.) The surrounding area, including Ichinose’s publisher’s office, is evacuated. Commandeering the tower’s servers, the UFO hacks into all the computers in the neighbourhood and absorbs all the information it can. It also starts to lower the proportion of oxygen in the atmosphere around it. The CCI decides the best way to counter this threat is to plant bombs in the upper floors of the tower. However, Shinoda receives a phone call in the CCI control centre from Ichinose, who’s inside the tower’s server room trying to get the scoop on what specific information the UFO wants. Desperate to get her out before the bombs go off, Shinoda and Io race to the tower and get past the CCI’s guards with Miyasaka’s help. Once they’re there, though, Shinoda takes an interest in the data and stays behind while Io escorts Ichinose out. Katagiri refuses to postpone the detonation to save Shinoda’s life, despite Miyasaka’s protestations. The bombs fail to damage the UFO, which destroys the rest of the tower itself, having apparently got what it wanted.

Shinoda has, however, managed to get out with one of the server room’s computers. Just before it demolished the tower, the UFO broadcast the word “MILLENNIUM” (in English!) on all electronic displays in the area, followed by other words (in English and Japanese) such as “Earth”, “Alteration” and “Dominate”, giving some hint of its apocalyptic intentions. Shinoda shows that it plans to change Earth’s environment to suit an alien form of life, and that it’s particularly interested in Godzilla. With Godzilla’s “Organiser G-1”, it could regrow the physical forms of its original pilots. Godzilla chooses that very moment to wade ashore from Tokyo Bay. Miyasaka suggests turning off Tokyo’s power supply in the hope that he’ll leave again, but Shinoda and Katagiri agree that the object of Godzilla’s attention isn’t the city, but the UFO.

After a short but violent confrontation, the UFO gets the upper hand and samples Godzilla’s DNA, using it to create a gigantic alien organism that resembles a stingray perched on top of a cluster of tentacles. But the creature immediately stumbles and mutates, roaring as it does so. Shinoda guesses that Godzilla’s genetic information, which the aliens have absorbed along with the regenerative factor, is too much for them to control. Godzilla recovers and blasts the shell of the UFO, but is now confronted with an alien that increasingly resembles himself. (Ancillary material from Toho names this daikaiju “Orga”, although it’s never named in the film.) The two clash repeatedly, with the alien instantly healing any injuries Godzilla causes. Godzilla is finally able to destroy the creature by blasting it from within when it tries to swallow him whole. Pausing only to smite Katagiri in a strangely personal attack, Godzilla turns his attention to the city around him and goes on a celebratory rampage. The surviving heroes muse that humans themselves are responsible for the problem of Godzilla.

As is often the case, the new Godzilla movie riffs on a recent Hollywood blockbuster. Here it’s Twister (1996), following a plucky scientific team with their off-road vehicle and their ramshackle equipment as they race a better-funded rival to pursue and study a natural disaster. This may be significant, as Twister was the film that director Jan de Bont took on after he walked away from TriStar’s Godzilla project. We’d rather have seen de Bont’s take, Godzilla 2000 seems to say. That the kaiju antagonist is (initially, at least) a computer-generated image that tries to imitate Godzilla could also be a subtle dig against Godzilla (1998).

Of course, it could equally just be a knock-off of the end of Godzilla vs Biollante (1989), in which Godzilla defeated a foe mimicking his form by firing his atomic breath ray down its throat. Pale shadows of Godzilla can also be seen in Godzilla vs SpaceGodzilla (1994) and the three films thus far to feature Mechagodzilla (1974, 1975, 1993). This isn’t a new idea in these movies... but it does take on a new significance in the wake of the Devlin/Emmerich movie.

The nuclear plant that Godzilla attacks at Tōkai is, in fact, the oldest in Japan. In March 1997, there’d been a serious radiation leakage at an attached nuclear waste management facility, which might have had a bearing on its choice as a location in this movie. It only plays a minor role, though. A far worse incident happened at a nearby enrichment facility at the end of September 1999, only a couple of months before the movie’s release and almost certainly too late to have influenced the script. We’ll hear more about that in the next blog post.

There’s another reference to a nuclear power station, more (in)famous now than it was at the time, when Shinoda checks in with a colleague in Fukushima. It seems the GPN keeps an active watch over Godzilla’s most likely targets. Interesting, then, that the other GPN operative we hear from is based in Matsushima. There are a couple of towns of that name, but presumably this is the one down south in Kyūshū, which is home to a large coal power station. Shinoda firmly believes that Godzilla is interested in attacking other energy sources besides nuclear, an idea that really isn’t followed up on in this film, but which, again, will be explored further in the next film. I can’t find any indication of any large power stations in the Nemuro area, so what kind of facility Godzilla attacks there must remain a mystery.

The introduction of “Organiser G-1” and, with it, the suggestion that Godzilla is functionally immortal is quite a departure from earlier films. Hitherto, Godzilla has been resilient, certainly, but not invulnerable. The nearest any previous film has come to this is the broad suggestion in Godzilla vs Biollante that Godzilla’s cells hold some sort of regenerative factor and, at the other end of the rationality spectrum, Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla II (1993) resorting to mysticism to bring him back from the brink of death. A quarter of a century later, Godzilla Minus One (2024) will show a Godzilla with a similar super-healing ability, but without any explanation.

As far as the visuals go, the cinematography is far too dark in some crucial scenes, notably across the entire last half hour, making it difficult to follow what’s going on. The American re-edit goes some way towards mitigating this, turning the brightness up a bit as well as tightening up the pacing. The compositing is noticeably better than in the Heisei series movies, and director Ōkawara Takao seems to have got the memo about shooting from street level for greater impact, although that’s more in the earlier scenes. The climactic (and too damned dark) fight falls into much the same pattern as in previous films, with characters watching the events unfold from a nearby rooftop as if to deliberately justify the default use of kaiju-eye-level long shots.

Having all the lights go out in Nemuro as Godzilla wades in and crashes through the power lines is a nice touch, too often overlooked in similar scenes in the past. There are a handful of other moments I’d consider highlights of this film. One is the title caption scene, as a spooky moment in a fogbound lighthouse becomes the reveal of Godzilla carrying a ship past the window in his teeth. Another is Ichinose’s first encounter with Godzilla as Shinoda reverses his truck out of a tunnel with the kaiju in pursuit, plunging his feet through the tunnel roof. (But why on Earth did the effect of the windscreen shattering need to be realised with CGI?)

Old hands might notice two familiar faces among the cast. Shinoda is played by Murata Takehiro, who had a secondary role in Godzilla vs Mothra (1992) as Andō Kenji, the company man with a conscience. Apparently he got a lot of positive attention for that performance, and he proves to be a capable leading man here. And the villainous Katagiri is surely unmistakeable to anyone who’s seen Yamato Takeru (1994), in which he played the evil Moon god Tsukuyomi. He chews the scenery just as much here – in what might be the movie’s most bizarre moment, he seems to try to outroar Godzilla seconds before being swatted with a gigantic forelimb.

Gamera 3: Revenge of Iris

Gamera 3: Revenge of Iris (1999)
Daiei Film Co, Ltd
Director: Kaneko Shūsuke, Higuchi Shinji (special effects)
Also known as: Gamera 3: Awakening of Iris, based on the Japanese title, but most sources go with Revenge.

The on-screen title caption offers neither of these – instead it gives us “The Absolute Guardian of The Universe / Gamera3 / incomplete struggle” in English beneath some other stuff. A pre-credits caption at the end of the film also suggests “Gamera: 1999 / The Absolute Guardian of The Universe” in English only. I don’t think anyone uses that title.

Let’s try to decipher that other stuff on the title caption. There are some fiery graphics that may or may not hint at the three-ness of the film – with three horizontal lines in parallel, they could arguably be read as the relevant Japanese numeral. There’s the name “GAMERA” spelled out in Anglo-Saxon runes, reinforcing the linguistic mistake made in Gamera’s origin story as laid out in the first film. Finally, there’s kanji for the Japanese subtitle, but only the subtitle – the main “Gamera 3” bit is tucked away in the middle of the English language section.

One final observation: the poster for Gamera 3 includes the katakana letters spelling out the name “Iris” (pronounced “Irris”, not “Eye-ris”) above the relevant kanji, while the title caption only has the kanji. Google Translate renders these as “Evil God” (ja-shin). Presumably this is the usual thing of kanji having several possible pronunciations in Japanese. It does raise the question of whether Ayana’s family knowingly named their cat “Evil God”. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Although Gamera: The Guardian of the Universe (1995) and Gamera 2 (1996) had performed well financially and critically, there was a bit of a gap before Gamera 3 appeared. This wasn’t because the Daiei team were stepping back to give the TriStar Godzilla (1998) some space. Rather, they’d noticed a new appetite among Japanese audiences for horror, including among younger viewers. A 1995 TV adaptation of the novel Ringu (1991, “The Ring”) had gone over well, and the 1998 cinematic remake would spearhead the J-Horror boom. Early plans for the third Heisei Gamera movie were shelved and, with director Kaneko co-authoring the script, the tone of the movie shifted further away from child-friendliness and more towards horror. This worked well as far as the critics were concerned, but did nothing to help the movie’s box office performance. It was, after all, still only a kaiju movie.

It's 1999. Dr Nagamine Mayumi (whom we met in the first movie), an ornithologist and now the world’s foremost authority on the kaiju Gyaos, is investigating a new spate of Gyaos sightings in equatorial parts. Meanwhile, off the southernmost coast of Japan, a submersible discovers a stretch of the ocean floor paved with giant turtle shells – a Gamera graveyard.

Flashback to 1995. Hirasaka Ayana’s family are scrambling to evacuate their flat in Tokyo following the civil defence alerts about Gamera’s fight with the adult Gyaos. Ayana’s father has gone back into the apartment block to fetch her mother, who’s trying to coax the family cat, Iris, out of hiding. Waiting in the family car, Ayana watches in horror as Gamera crashes into the building and destroys it.

(Fun fact: this is not the rounded, more cuddly Gamera actually depicted in the first movie but the spinier, more nightmarish version as seen in the second movie.)

Four years later, Ayana and her little brother Satoru are living with relatives in Asuka, a village south of Kyoto. Ayana struggles with her aunt and uncle’s suggestion that she adopt their family name and with bullies at the provincial school. To protect her brother from the bullies, Ayana goes into the cave of a legendary monster the locals call Ryu-sei-cho and brings out the stone meant to seal it in place. According to Ayana’s cousin, the creature’s named after three Chinese constellations that roughly correspond to the Western constellation Hydra; ancient legends liken it to a red bird that’s opposed to a similarly legendary tortoise, which strongly implies it’s related to Gyaos.

In Tokyo, government secretary Asakura Mito and her sinister associate Kurata Shinya visit the marine insurance company from the first movie to view the ancient magatama they collected. (Kusanagi, the insurance investigator who collected them, is away in Washington, which is why we’ll be seeing his daughter Asagi again but not him.) All the magatama shattered after Gamera’s confrontation with Legion three years earlier. Asakura is keen to track Asagi down, and also makes contact with Nagamine at a meeting of the Monster Damage Control Committee, where she and the government minister she sparred with in the first movie are now consulted as experts.

Osako Tsutomu, former policeman and security guard and now a newspaper seller, is sleeping rough on the streets of Tokyo’s Shibuya district. He’s horrified to see two Gyaos and Gamera fly overhead one busy Friday night. Gamera pursues the two Gyaos ruthlessly and with no regard for collateral damage. The whole district is left ablaze and between 15,000 and 20,000 people are killed or injured. (Although Osako isn’t among them, as we’ll discover later.) The government mobilises the JSDF to eliminate Gamera.

Moribe Tatsunari – the son of the family who are purportedly the guardians of the cave and own the land it’s on, and a classmate of Ayana – has persuaded her to return the stone she moved, but the damage appears to be done. On a return visit, Ayana finds a metallic magatama, a bit like Gamera’s but dark blue, that glows in her hand. Tatsunari finds her still in the cave later that day, cradling a small, tentacled creature with a dragon-like head that’s hatched from a calcified egg. She’s named it Iris and plans to raise it, believing that they share a mutual hatred of Gamera and that Iris will be the instrument of her revenge for her parents’ death.

Kurata, who used to be known as a computer game designer, has sent Nagamine a copy of his latest work, a global environment simulation. One of the parameters of the program is mana, a reserve of mystical energy. The simulation shows that a global slump in mana coincided with the appearance of Gyaos in 1995, and a further slump is now underway. Meanwhile, the number of Gyaos sightings around the world increases, with Gamera variously reported as clashing with the kaiju and with the JSDF. Asagi, who’s returned to Japan from studying overseas, meets up with Nagamine and tells her about the importance of mana to cultures across the South Pacific. She believes that Gamera’s consumption of mana in order to defeat the unexpected threat of Legion has further upset an already unbalanced ecosystem, leading to the revival of more Gyaos. Despite this, she trusts Gamera to solve the problem.

As Iris grows, it ventures out of the cave and into the nearby woods, draining the life out of the creatures there. Ayana finds it and, apparently recognising its magatama around her neck, it attempts to absorb her. Alerted by a phone call from her cousin when she doesn’t return home that evening, Tatsunari goes to the cave and finds Ayana unconscious inside a cocoon. He cuts her free and she’s hospitalised. In her absence, Iris wrecks the village and dessicates half the inhabitants, including Ayana’s aunt, uncle and cousin. It’s soon grown into its full adult form, which looks more bipedal and armoured, but still has several tentacles with large barbs on the end. Bright lights shine from its torso and behind its spiny headpiece, where its eyes should be. It makes whale-like noises as it strides through the forest, impervious to the JSDF’s attempts to stop it. Eventually it takes flight, stretching its tentacles out and using membranes between them as wings.

Initially believing the reports of the attack to be another Gyaos sighting, Nagamine recruits Osako and goes to investigate. Analysis of the tissue samples she takes from the cave suggests Iris is genetically similar to Gyaos but something new. She sees Ayana sleeping in the hospital and calls Asagi to tell her about Ayana’s magatama. Asakura and Kurata also hear about Ayana’s magatama and, realising the similarity to the publicly known details of Asagi’s connection to Gamera, they arrange to have Ayana moved to their own facility in Kyoto. Kurata separately meets with Nagamine and leads her and Asagi to where Asakura is watching over Ayana. Kurata believes that the Gyaos are a necessary counterbalance to a decadent humanity and that Gamera, as a vessel for the planet’s mana but flawed by his connection to humanity, is only getting in the way. Iris, with its ability to fuse with Ayana and adapt, would be an even more effective opponent for both Gamera and humanity. Asakura, meanwhile, as a former shrine priestess, is motivated by her belief that she should be the one to fuse with and control Iris.

Iris flies towards Kyoto, where Ayana is, while the Japanese air force mistakenly fires on Gamera and prevents him from delaying it. The centre of Kyoto burns as Gamera belatedly catches up with Iris and attacks it with fireballs. Iris spears Gamera with its barbed tentacles and the two daikaiju crash into Kyoto’s main train station, where the protagonists have gathered. Asakura and Kurata are both killed by falling debris. Tatsunari, who has made his way to Kyoto with Osaka, is just in time to see Ayana unwillingly reabsorbed into Iris. Cocooned inside Iris’ torso, Ayana relives her memories and Iris’ and realises that the creature has only been reflecting and acting on her own trauma and bitterness all along.

Gamera tears Ayana out of Iris’ body, but Iris retaliates by impaling Gamera’s other hand and draining his energy through its tentacle. Gamera blasts his own hand off to stop the process. Iris launches a couple of fireballs at Gamera, but Gamera is able to use the energy to generate a phantom substitute for his severed hand, which he plunges into Iris’ chest, killing it at last.

Gamera hands Ayana to the others and seemingly revives her. (Nagamine spends a minute trying to resuscitate her, but she only wakes up when Gamera roars.) As reports come in of a swarm of Gyaos approaching Japan, the JSDF is ordered to switch its attention from Gamera to the Gyaos. The protagonists, Ayana included, watch admiringly as Gamera strides out across the apocalyptic ruins of Kyoto to fight the incoming Gyaos.

After the attempt at a more “realistic” take on giant monsters in Godzilla (1998), Gamera 3 delivers all the realism you actually need in a kaiju movie. It has its overtones of mysticism and pseudoscience and a sympathetic daikaiju with a personality, but it also takes the time to acknowledge that Gamera’s outsized acts of heroism cause thousands of incidental casualties, leave cities in ruins and may not please all the survivors. This is the kaiju not as a stern protector but as a well-intentioned (we hope) natural disaster.

It's also a pretty grim subversion of Gamera specifically, who used to be a friendly face to children everywhere. There’s a moment after the clash between Gamera and two Gyaos over Shibuya when we see a weeping mother hugging her child, who’s avoided being trampled on purely by chance but insists repeatedly that Gamera saved him; we pan out from there to see the city on fire. It’s probably the single darkest joke a kaiju movie’s ever made.

Having Gamera’s enemy this time be essentially payback for the accidental deaths he caused in an earlier movie is a great choice. It’s astonishing, unprecedented in a kaiju movie. Godzilla vs SpaceGodzilla (1994) toyed with this idea but threw it away on two secondary characters who changed their minds at the end of the movie with hardly any development. Gamera 3 puts its vengeful character front and centre. And Iris is an effective analogy for Ayana’s anger, causing plenty of destruction and collateral harm itself and threatening to consume Ayana entirely. The other thing Gamera 3 does that Toho never quite could is present a distorted mirror of a popular lead character (well, other than Godzilla himself). Godzilla vs Destoroyah (1995) teased but didn’t follow through on the idea of the telepath Meru as a less moral counterpart to Saegusa Miki. But there’s no mistaking the parallels between Asagi and Ayana, and no denying the dramatic efficacy. Once again, Daiei has belatedly schooled Toho.

Ayana is certainly a better human villain than Asakura and Kurata, who are too cartoonish. The motives for their villainy are never really explained clearly enough. We only know that they both want to see Iris win and Gamera fail, and even then probably not for the same reasons – he’s a nihilist and she’s some kind of cultist. At least Tezuka Tōru, playing Kurata, is having fun chewing the scenery. He can be seen behaving himself in a much smaller role as a government minister in Shin Godzilla (2016). Maeda Ai (Ayana) went on to greater things, mostly on TV, and cameos extremely briefly in a Godzilla movie four years down the line.

Once again, the special effects are exemplary for the genre, with a nice fusion of street-level action and monster business. Iris is more obviously computer generated than other contemporary daikaiju – well, how else to realise those tentacles? – which, by contrast, might make the CGI Gyaos a little subtler. One SFX moment I’d pick out as a favourite is the one in which, during the Shibuya battle, a Gyaos cuts through a skyscraper with its sonic beam but we only see it collapse as a reflection in a neighbouring skyscraper. As far as the turn to horror is concerned, there’s plenty of special prop business with the dessicated victims of Iris’ early attacks and an excellent jump scare when Ayana’s aunt flops out of the ceiling right in front of Dr Nagamine.

The end of the film was meant to be hopeful but is often read by critics and fans as downbeat, and no wonder, with the world apparently doomed to burn as the battleground for daikaiju who only notice we exist when it’s dramatically important. I’ve previously mentioned the unsubtle ecological subtext to those Heisei era Toho movies that feature Mothra, and the Heisei Gamera trilogy has gone harder on that subtext. It’s not as if awareness of ecological issues originated in the 1990s – people were talking about polar ice melting at least as far back as King Kong vs Godzilla (1962) – but it’s become one of society’s foremost concerns since then. Here again, Gamera 3 outdoes its American contemporaries for grim realism: Gamera may be humanity’s best hope for survival, but people are still going to die and cities are still going to burn. We can only console ourselves that it’s better (for us, at least) than the alternative.

GODZILLA

Godzilla (1998)
Centropolis Entertainment / Fried Films / Independent Pictures / TriStar Pictures
Director: Roland Emmerich
Also known as: Some people like to style it in all caps, as GODZILLA, presumably just because that’s what it looks like on the poster. It’s not well liked by the core Godzilla fan community, and some refer to it as GINO – Godzilla In Name Only. Which is harsh, but within a couple of years Toho would be saying the same thing in their actual films.

Four years came and went with no TriStar Godzilla movie. When they’d formally confirmed that pre-production was underway in 1994, the director attached to the project was Jan de Bont, a Dutch hotshot who’d made his directorial debut earlier that year with the summer phenomenon Speed (1994). He’d also been a cinematographer on such action milestones as Die Hard (1988) and The Hunt for Red October (1990), so he looked like a good choice for a muscular American take on Godzilla. He'd taken on board the substantial briefing document provided by Toho and had come up with a storyline that met with general approval. Unfortunately, the budget he presented was too rich for TriStar’s parent company, Sony, and he walked away from the project at the end of the year. Godzilla spent all of 1995 in Development Limbo.

In mid-1996, TriStar brought in the director/producer team of Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin. Emmerich and Devlin had scored a hit with Stargate (1994) and were about to enjoy even greater success with Independence Day (1996), both of which they’d also co-scripted. Their participation was conditional on them being allowed to ignore Toho’s document as well as the earlier scripts and handle the story and the kaiju in their own way. They would retain the idea of Godzilla being mutated by the fallout from nuclear weapons tests, but would steer clear of the more fantastic elements of de Bont’s storyline and instead present Godzilla in a way more grounded in reality, as a flesh-and-blood animal with its roots in the real world. The concept designs for this new Godzilla met with a frosty reception at a meeting with representatives of Toho, but they signed off on it nonetheless. TriStar greenlit Emmerich and Devlin’s script at the turn of 1997 and filming completed that year, in plenty of time for a summer blockbuster release in 1998. Marketing for the movie was extremely coy about what its titular star would look like...

The opening credits play over a grainy montage of historical nuclear test footage, supposedly set in French Polynesia, intercut with shots of iguanas and their eggs on beaches, again supposedly in French Polynesia. (Iguanas are native to the Americas, not the South Pacific – the largest native reptiles French Polynesia boasts are geckos and sea turtles.) In the present day, a Japanese tuna fishing vessel is sunk by a large animal with claws and a tail. The only survivor, the ship’s cook, is taken to a hospital in Tahiti, where he’s visited by a French man who asks him what he saw. He repeats the name “Gojira”.

(This is an obvious homage to the destruction of the Daigo Fukuryū Maru in Godzilla (1954), except that instead of being blasted with radioactive energy, the ship is mauled. Online sources claim the ship is called the Kobayashi Maru – it’s possible one of the crew might be saying this when he makes an emergency call over the ship’s radio, but it’s never clearly named on-screen. The name “Kobayashi Maru” in an American genre script would, of course, be a Star Trek reference. In the world of Star Trek, the civilian spaceship Kobayashi Maru is the subject of a training exercise for Starfleet officers. That the exercise is famously impossible to win could suggest some sort of comment here on global nuclear politics, but I think it’s more likely someone simply reached for the first ship name with “Maru” on the end that they could think of.)

Not much later, American biologist Nick Tatopoulos is airlifted out of Ukraine by helicopter and flown to Panama. There he’s introduced to paleontologist Dr Chapman, who simultaneously disparages him and lusts after him, and the ineffectual Dr Craven, who reports on the attack on the Japanese ship. Nick has been studying the long-term effects of radiation on earthworms in the grounds of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, but has been brought to Panama to investigate the traces of a much larger radioactive mutant. Those traces include a trail of three-toed footprints ten metres across and another mauled fishing ship in Jamaica. As Nick recovers organic samples from the wrecked ship, he’s watched by the French man who is posing as an insurance investigator. Soon after that, three fishing trawlers are pulled underwater off the Eastern seaboard of the USA. Dr Chapman suggests the creature responsible could be a species of dinosaur that’s survived, undiscovered, into the present era, but Nick believes, based on its radioactive spoor and its first sighting near Tahiti, that it’s the result of mutation caused by past French nuclear tests in the area.

In New York, Nick’s former college sweetheart Audrey Timmonds is working in the WIDF news office, hoping to get a break as a TV reporter and fending off the predatory advances of anchorman Charles Caiman. She’s having lunch at a diner with her married friends, fellow office admin Lucy Palotti and cameraman Victor Palotti, when the gigantic creature makes landfall and strides through the city, disrupting a re-election rally by the city’s Mayor Ebert and causing widespread damage. Victor manages to get close-up footage of the creature, which is used in Caiman’s report of the incident and the subsequent looting and evacuation of central New York.

This is where we get our first good look at the new Godzilla. It looks and moves a bit like the velociraptors in Jurassic Park (1993), albeit much larger and with an extremely overdeveloped lower jaw. It lacks the familiar row of large dorsal plates, although it has rows of smaller plates down either side of its back. It walks bipedally but hunched over. It moves deliberately in these early scenes, but is capable of greater speed and agility when threatened. Barring some human-scale effects shots, it’s entirely computer generated.

Audrey recognises Nick from coverage of his team arriving to investigate. She’s unable to get Caiman to take her seriously when she says she knows someone with inside information about the creature, but ends up using Caiman’s ID to get access to the evacuated area.

The French man and his team of four have also arrived in New York and planted a bug on Mayor Ebert, allowing them to eavesdrop on his briefing with Colonel Hicks. The creature has disappeared following its grand entrance – the response team believe it’s hiding in Manhattan and are keen to stop it roaming any further. Nick suggests baiting the creature into the open with fresh tuna, based on its previous targets. Sure enough, it bursts out of the sewers near Madison Square and heads for the fish, but makes a prompt getaway when the military open fire. (When it turns and roars at a brace of pursuing ground vehicles, they’re engulfed in flames, which is as close as this film gets to paying tribute to Godzilla’s classic atomic breath.) The city is further damaged by a combination of monster rampage and stray artillery.

Audrey finds Nick and follows him to a mobile operation centre where he pregnancy-tests a blood sample from the creature. (Notwithstanding the test is positive and Nick starts talking about asexual reproduction, he continues to refer to Godzilla as “he”.) Left alone in the tent, Audrey finds video footage of the Japanese sailor in Tahiti and the giant footprints in Panama, which she uses as the basis for a journalistic report that she hopes will secure her a better job at WIDF. However, Caiman records over her report and takes the credit for it, mangling the sailor’s repeated “Gojira” and renaming the creature “Godzilla”.

Nick is unable to persuade the army to devote resources to searching for a hypothetical nest of Godzilla eggs while they’re focussing on the adult creature. He’s also thrown out of the response team when the stolen video footage is broadcast. He’s almost immediately picked up by the French man, who introduces himself as Philippe Roche, an agent of the Direction Générale des Services Extérieures.

(The actual French overseas intelligence service is the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure – the scriptwriters got the acronym right, anyway. Although Philippe clearly says “Roche”, which is a plausible French surname, in the credits it’s given as “Roaché”, which isn’t. Colonel Hicks sees his insurance investigator ID and pronounces it “Roach”, which is a plausible insult from a bad-tempered American soldier. It’s almost certainly a pseudonym – his four-man team all have hyphenated names beginning with “Jean”, which is so absurdly hyper-French it can only be a cover.)

Philippe wants Nick’s help to find the nest. He’s concerned that, if the situation escalates, Godzilla’s origins could be tied back to French nuclear tests in the South Pacific. Disguised as American soldiers, the French team and Nick enter the New York subway network, followed by Victor, who saw Nick being abducted, and Audrey. While Godzilla is lured away by another abortive military trap and escapes into the Hudson River, the French team find hundreds of eggs beneath the Madison Square Garden sports stadium, each more than two metres tall. The eggs begin to hatch and the humans escape into the lower levels of the stadium. The man-sized Godzillas take down Philippe’s team as they forage through the stadium complex for food. Nick, Philippe, Audrey and Victor manage to reach the broadcast control booth, from which they’re able to transmit a message calling for the army to launch an airstrike to prevent the creatures from spreading and multiplying. They flee the building seconds before it’s destroyed.

Before they can celebrate, Godzilla emerges from the ruined stadium, evidently displeased at finding its children dead. The four commandeer a taxi and escape, hotly pursued by Godzilla. They lead it onto the Brooklyn Bridge, where it becomes tangled in the suspension cables and is an easy target for the military’s F-18s. Philippe slips away with Victor’s camera footage, which he promises to return after he’s edited his team out of it. Audrey, now in demand as a reporter, quits WIDF and heads home with Nick. Unseen by anyone, in the wrecked basement of the stadium, one final Godzilla egg hatches.

The main theme of kaiju fan complaints about this film is that Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin didn’t “get” Godzilla. Steve Ryfle in particular, in his book Japan’s Favourite Mon-Star, offers a curated selection of quotes from interviews with Devlin that make him sound dismissive or even contemptuous of the Japanese Godzilla movies, with the clear implication that he was entirely the wrong person to take on this project. Conversely, in the behind-the-scenes bonus material on the DVD release, Devlin talks about the happy childhood hours he spent watching those old movies. (Emmerich, on the other hand, is clearly just not a fan.) It’s not that he wasn’t familiar with them or didn’t like them, he says, it’s just that he didn’t want to copy them, he wanted to do something different. One might fairly ask why he insisted on using the title Godzilla and didn’t just produce his own film, and doubtless the monetary advantages of brand recognition are a part of the answer. But still, I don’t think it’s wrong of him or Emmerich to remark on the flaws of the Japanese movies or to have wanted to do their own thing.

On its own terms, as a formulaic, family-friendly action blockbuster about a giant mutated iguana, I think the 1998 Godzilla gets a lot right. It even has some features in common with better kaiju movies. The opening credits sequence neatly anticipates Legendary Pictures’ Godzilla (2014) and its sequels. The street-level effects shots and chases through the streets of Manhattan give scale and drama in exactly the same way as equivalent shots in Gamera: The Guardian of the Universe (1995) and Gamera 2 (1996). The realisation of Godzilla and its velociraptor-like offspring through CGI is both a triumph and a failing: the film simultaneously benefits from all the development work put in by the makers of Jurassic Park (1993) and its sequel The Lost World (1997) and sets itself up for inevitable negative comparisons and comments about diminishing returns. And didn’t Godzilla vs Destoroyah (1995) and Gamera 2 both just do that same sequence of people being picked off by small kaiju in an underground complex... but with more interesting monsters?

One possible reason why the film doesn’t quite land is the comedy. This isn’t to say comedic business isn’t welcome in giant monster movies. Gamera 2 parodied news coverage of its narrative too, although it didn’t site several major characters in the newsroom. Mayor Ebert and his assistant Gene – famously named after film critics Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel in retaliation for their panning of Emmerich and Devlin’s previous films – are the kind of lightweight comic relief characters who often pop up in Japanese kaiju eiga. The endless business with characters mangling Nick’s surname wouldn’t be out of place either – he shares a name with Patrick Tatopoulos, who provided the film’s creature designs, so I suspect the name and the manglings are an in-joke. The repeated digs by the French characters at the expense of American coffee are fine too. But stick them all together and the overall tone of the movie starts to feel more heavily weighted towards comedy.

I think the casting gives a further indication that the filmmakers had their tongues in their cheeks: three of the four actors that I would guess viewers are most likely to recognise are known for their comedy roles. Hank Azaria (Victor) and Harry Shearer (Caiman) are both prominent members of the Simpsons (1989-present) voice cast, and Shearer’s also well-known as one of the stars of the music mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap (1984). Matthew Broderick (Nick) was probably still best known in 1998 (and may still be today!) for his star turn in the teen comedy Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986). Notable entries in his filmography to either side of this movie include the Jim Carrey vehicle The Cable Guy (1996) and the ill-advised live-action Inspector Gadget (1999). The fourth, Jean Reno (Philippe), may have been more of an action movie star, coming to America’s attention as the eponymous assassin in the Luc Besson film Léon (1994) and swiftly landing a role in Mission: Impossible (1996), but in France he’d also made a splash in the time-travel comedy Les Visiteurs (1993), a sequel to which was released in 1998.

And then there’s the poster and trailer tagline, “Size Does Matter”. With everyone so reluctant to show off the redesigned Godzilla ahead of time, the one thing that would have defined this movie in the minds of prospective cinemagoers was a sexual innuendo.

But I wonder if its biggest flaw, its true failing, is simply that it tries to apply American cinematic standards of "realism” to Godzilla? I don’t just mean the decision to present Godzilla as some bland animal when, in the Toho movies up to this point, he’d often been more of a supernatural force and a potent symbolic entity. (I don’t know, maybe I am saying Dean Devlin didn’t “get” Godzilla...) I’m also thinking of the more theatrical standards of Japanese cinema, at least in this genre and at this time. Tragic melodrama is a key part of Godzilla’s DNA that’s entirely absent from this movie. Perhaps it would have helped to give Iguana Godzilla some personality if they’d realised it through motion capture? Apparently mo-cap was considered, but rejected precisely because it made Godzilla look like he was being portrayed by a human actor. The trouble with this film is that it was in a position to lean on Jurassic Park, which proved that creatures could be convincingly realised on-screen through CGI, but preceded that other milestone in special effects cinema, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002), which similarly proved the capabilities and worth of motion capture. (And of Andy Serkis. Let’s be honest, if the TriStar Godzilla had been made in 2004, no one but Andy Serkis would have been playing the title role.) The Legendary Pictures movies have used elements of mo-cap to great effect.

Let’s talk about French nuclear weapons testing. Presumably attributing Godzilla’s mutation to American tests was never an option in an American movie, and blaming the Russians would have meant including a charismatic Russian character in the main cast, also presumably a no-no. Blaming the French meant the filmmakers could cast the highly bankable Jean Reno, a win-win situation. It’s just possible some cinemagoers might have remembered all the fuss about the 1985 sinking of the Greenpeace vessel Rainbow Warrior at harbour in New Zealand, an act of terrorism sponsored by the French government to counter the vessel’s proposed protest of nuclear tests in French Polynesia. Bear in mind, though, that this film was released about five years before America got all weird about the French because of their opposition to the invasion and occupation of Iraq. (Who could forget the hilarity of “freedom fries”? On a related note, when Caiman is reporting on Godzilla’s first incursion into New York and describes it as the city’s biggest calamity since the World Trade Center bombing, it took me a minute to remember that he’s talking about a terrorist incident that took place in February 1993.)

France didn’t sign up to the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty the Soviet Union and the USA had ratified in 1963 – the one that banned all nuclear tests except those carried out underground – and continued its nuclear weapons tests for some time after that. At the time, France was in the middle of a series of tests in Algeria, 13 of them underground and five atmospheric, that it continued under the terms of the treaty it had signed in 1962 granting Algeria its independence. When the tests had started, France had been at war with its former colonial property. Later on, it turned its attention to the islands of the Pacific Ocean, conducting 193 tests after the middle of 1966 in French Polynesia – these are the ones referenced in this film. The majority from 1975 onward were underground detonations but most prior to that were devices deployed by balloon. The last one was carried out in January 1996 – at the time Emmerich and Devlin were writing their first draft script, for all anyone knew, France might have been planning to continue its nuclear tests.

France did sign the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty when it was introduced at the United Nations in 1996 and ratified it in April 1998, one month before this film was released. That treaty, however, has not yet come into force because eight nations including the USA never ratified it and Vladimir Putin withdrew Russia’s ratification in 2023.

The 1998 Godzilla underperformed at the box office and was mauled by the critics, leading to the abandonment of a planned trilogy. It did, however, lead to the second American animated Godzilla series (1998-2000). In this, Godzilla’s last surviving child imprints on Nick Tatopoulos, allowing him to direct it to defend America from the predations of other monsters, not unlike the premise of the Hanna-Barbera animated Godzilla (1978-79). They even got some of the film's actors to reprise their roles (voice only) as Mayor Ebert, Colonel (now Major!) Hicks and Dr Craven. All of whom are second fiddle to Animated Iguana Godzilla, whose roars are provided by the guy who voiced Megatron in The Transformers (1984-87).

Gamera 2: Advent of Legion

Gamera 2: Advent of Legion (1996)
Daiei Film Co, Ltd
Director: Kaneko Shūsuke, Higuchi Shinji (special effects)
Also known as: Gamera 2: Attack of Legion, the US title. Once again, I’m going with the version helpfully included in the title caption. (Although it’s rendered with no punctuation as “GAMERA2 advent of legion”, which would look messy at the top of this page.)
Also discussed: the Rebirth of Mothra trilogy (1996, 1997, 1998)

NASA tracks a cluster of objects on a collision course with Earth. A group of amateur meteor watchers sees one passing low overhead and striking the ground near a lake in Hokkaido. The JSDF scrambles to inspect the scene of the crash; although there are no signs of radioactivity or chemical fallout, it looks as though the meteor was braking on impact. A strange green aurora appears in the night sky over the site, accompanied by localised electrical interference. The meteorite itself can’t be found, as if it melted or moved away of its own accord. Honami Midori, a curator at the Sapporo Science Centre, and her boss compare notes with Colonel Watarase and Lieutenant Hanatani, two of the JSDF soldiers at the scene.

A couple of days later, two security guards at a Kirin brewery (hooray, product placement!) investigate a disturbance in the warehouse. One of the guards is Osako Tsutomu, formerly of the Nagasaki Police Department. He quit the force after his terrifying experiences in the previous film and became a security guard at the opposite end of the country because he thought it would be an easier job. He isn’t best pleased when he and his colleague find a large, spiny, silvery, one-eyed creature, like an insect the size of a man, wandering among the beer crates. Watarase and Hanatani investigate this incident too, and call Honami in to ask if she has any theories. The contents of 10,000 crates of beer are spilled across the floor, but most of the glass has gone, leaving only a residue of powdered silicon. Honami has just learned that all the fibre-optic cable has mysteriously vanished from NTT’s Hokkaido network centre, which may explain the telecoms issues the Science Centre has been having lately. The strange incidents form a line from the meteorite impact site towards Sapporo.

The day after that, more of the alien creatures attack a Sapporo subway train. In addition to the glass from the train’s windows, they attack any passengers carrying electronic devices. Above ground, what looks like an enormous red flower bursts through the roof of a mall. Below ground, the creatures continue to relay silicon to the plant’s roots, which dramatically raise the atmospheric pressure and concentration of oxygen in the subway. Concerned that humans can’t survive alongside the aliens, the JSDF decides to destroy them by setting off explosives in the subway – the high concentration of oxygen should amplify the blast of a relatively small payload. Honami hypothesises that the plant is the aliens’ way of reproducing and spreading themselves to other worlds, by explosively launching seed pods into space. Obitsu, an NTT engineer who’s been liaising with Honami, runs a computer projection showing that if the plant launches its seed, everything within miles of the city will be flattened by the blast.

As the plant blossoms and prepares to seed, Gamera flies in from the coastal waters to the south. (He looks somewhat less rounded and cute and more sharp-edged than he did in the previous film. We see that he has retractable underarm flaps that he uses in flight, when he’s not spinning like a UFO.) He sucks in the hyper-oxygenated air around the plant and roasts it with a fireball, then just to be sure he pulls it up by the roots and gives it another flaming. The creatures from the subway respond by swarming up and covering Gamera, leaving him stumbling around blindly and discharging electricity across his skin. Seeing this, Hanatani quotes the Biblical Gospel of Mark (chapter 5, verse 9) and names the alien creatures Legion – the name is soon picked up and falls into common use. Gamera is able to take flight when some of the creatures are drawn from him to a nearby electrical transformer station, and he spins the rest off as he makes his escape. After he’s gone, a new, larger variant of the alien creatures, one resembling a gigantic mosquito, bursts up from the subway and flies off. The JSDF pursue it but, despite hitting it with missiles, are unable to bring it down.

The corpse of one of the insectoid Legion creatures is recovered from the beach after Gamera’s escape and dissected. It has pneumatic joints instead of muscles and its exoskeleton has the same molecular structure as a silicon semiconductor. (Although we’re not shown this, we’re told later that it also has wings powerful enough to carry it across the water from Hokkaidō to Honshū.) Discussing the findings at her home, Honami, Watarase and Obitsu speculate that the creatures might communicate electromagnetically, and that they might be deliberately targeting Japan’s cities as a source both of food and of “enemy” electromagnetism that disrupts their communication.

Watarase and Honami travel to Tokyo (where, delightfully, the Tokyo Tower hasn’t yet been rebuilt following the events of the previous film) to discuss strategy with a senior JSDF officer. The JSDF is stretched too thin to prepare for possible attacks on all Japan’s cities, but it seems likely that Legion will attack another city somewhere between Sapporo and Tokyo. Legion strikes again at Sendai, with the insectoid creatures neutralising a pachinko arcade and the plant erupting from the main train station. The JSDF moves in and evacuates the population, flying civilians out in tandem-rotor cargo helicopters. By chance, Honami, who’s among the evacuees, meets Kusanagi Asagi, who had a telepathic connection with Gamera in the previous movie and who has been holidaying with a friend in Sendai. The evacuation is disrupted when Gamera flies overhead and is attacked by the kaiju-sized mosquito creature, which appears from under the runway at Sendai Airport. Gamera fights to protect the last helicopter and allow it to get clear, while Legion fights to stall Gamera long enough for the plant to seed. The mosquito creature’s proboscis opens out sideways, allowing it to knock Gamera down with a powerful electrical discharge. By the time Gamera manages to get to the plant and knock it over, it’s already seeding. Sendai is obliterated in the explosion and Gamera is left comatose at the centre of the crater.

By comparing the electromagnetic output of the neon signs of the pachinko arcade with that of the transformer that attracted the small Legion creatures in Sapporo, Obitsu finds a common pattern. Honami suggests that this could be used like a pheromone to lure the creatures into a trap the next time they appear. The JSDF anticipates an attack on Tokyo and is mobilised on the government’s orders to defend the city. The large Legion creature surfaces in Ashikaga (roughly 50km inland from Tokyo); the JSDF’s artillery bounce off its metallic hide, and it makes short work of the tanks and jets with the electrical discharge from its proboscis. It fires a swarm of the smaller creatures from its abdomen which fly towards the city centre.

Honami plans to put Asagi onto a plane home at the airport, but Asagi insists that Gamera isn’t finished and the pair travel to the crater at Sendai instead. They find a crowd gathered around braziers, keeping vigil over Gamera, who is covered in an ashy crust. As they will Gamera to recover, the sparks from their braziers form a cloud of energy over him and he shakes off the ash and lifts off. Asagi’s magatama shatters in her hand. Gamera confronts the larger Legion first, but is again outmatched. As the Legion swarm flies back to assist, Obitsu persuades the duty manager of a local NTT relay station to broadcast his electromagnetic pheromone signal, and the swarm is distracted onto the station’s power lines where they’re easily picked off by JSDF helicopters. The JSDF is eventually persuaded to support Gamera and, with their help, Gamera is able to break off Legion’s proboscis. Unfortunately this doesn’t incapacitate Legion, which is still able to fire punishing beams of energy at Gamera. In a final bid to stop Legion, Gamera draws wave after wave of energy into himself from across the Earth. The abdominal plates of his shell hinge open and he releases the gathered energy, vaporising Legion at last. As the sun rises, he takes flight, saluted by several JSDF soldiers.

As they stroll through the centre of Sapporo some time later, Honami suggests to Obitsu that Gamera isn’t really protecting humanity but acting to preserve all terrestrial life. Obitsu wonders if humanity’s destructive behaviour might lead Gamera to consider us his enemy.

So, my first thought on rewatching this film is: Wow, the Kirin Brewery Company really emptied their marketing budget on this!

My second thought is: This looks suspiciously like a response to Godzilla vs Destoroyah (1995). There’s a swarm of puppet-like human-scale kaiju; a scene of armed troopers fighting the monsters in a confined underground space, a bit like in Aliens (1986); a sort of daikaiju queen of the swarm portrayed by a stunt actor. As with Destoroyah, there’s a rare and satisfying “scienciness” to Legion – Honami likens the organism’s combination of hive creatures and plant to the symbiosis between leafcutter ants and the fungus that they farm, in a moment that feels very much like the scriptwriter indulgently showing off his research. Both films include scenes of atomic-bomb-esque destruction, but where Godzilla vs Destoroyah throws its scenes in without warning whenever characters start talking about Godzilla going into meltdown, essentially faking out the audience, Gamera 2 really delivers the scene and means it. (It might be a stretch too far to compare Gamera’s new trapdoor torso fireball attack, never seen before or since, with the fiery glow of the dying Godzilla’s chest in the Toho film.) Basically, at various points the makers of this film seem to be turning to the makers of that film and saying, “See, we can do that too”. (Or even – heresy! – “We can do that better”.) There’s a clear seven months between the release dates of the two films, so a direct response isn’t impossible given the fast production schedule of a 90s Japanese kaiju movie, but it would have been tight if so.

The effects overall are, once again, excellent. Like Gamera: The Guardian of the Universe (1995), Gamera 2 makes good use of ground-level shots to give scale to the proceedings and to show off the miniature work. There’s a brilliant shot of a public phone box shattering as Gamera stomps towards the Legion plant in Sapporo, and a shot of the queen Legion bursting out of the ground with a phone box similarly foregrounded. On a slightly different scale, the inclusion of a large model of a cargo helicopter circling Gamera and Legion during the standoff at Sendai Airport really helps to sell that scene.

Some of the production’s other choices are peculiar. There are some weird freeze frame moments scattered across the film – of Honami and Watarase piecing together the clues at the meteorite site, the survivors being rescued from the subway train, and Obitsu and Watarase piecing together more clues later on in Honami’s home. These feel like perhaps an attempt to use the visual language of docudrama – perhaps they’re meant to make the movie feel less far removed from reality. There’s also a fair bit of religious, specifically Christian imagery. Aside from Hanatani naming the kaiju antagonist after a Biblical demon (and citing the chapter and verse to back it up!), there’s the way the “me” of Gamera’s name, メ, is presented in the opening title graphics as an upright cross on a fiery background before settling into its place in the film’s title, and the way the people gathered in Sendai raise Gamera from the dead by essentially praying him better. There was already a hint of this in Gamera: The Guardian of the Universe, in which Asagi, with her stigmata and the symbol of her saviour around her neck, declares her faith at the end of the film that he’ll return to save the world again. Lastly among the odd choices, an ecological message is clumsily tacked onto the final scene because apparently that’s just what we do in kaiju eiga now.

There are some good choices too, mostly in the use of comedy. There’s plenty of “realistic” news coverage of the events playing on TV screens in the characters’ home or in the background, some of which verges on the parodic. There’s also some comedy business of Honami’s mother stopping her father from eavesdropping when she has male visitors. Most noticeably, Hotaru Yukijirō is back as the cowardly ex-cop Osako, albeit briefly. He and Fujitani Ayako, as Asagi, are the only two returnees from the first film. The new main cast are fine, but for me they’re less memorable than the old main cast.

So what were Toho doing at this time? Obviously not making more Godzilla movies, but they weren’t going to let their visual effects team sit idle either. So, while everyone was waiting for the American Godzilla movie to arrive, Toho turned to their other superstar kaiju and produced a new trilogy of Mothra movies. These are known outside Japan as Rebirth of Mothra (1996), Rebirth of Mothra 2 (1997) and (...checks notes...) Rebirth of Mothra 3 (1998). As with the Heisei Gamera trilogy, the second and third instalments use Anglo (technically Arabic) numerals in their promotional materials and on screen, and these are pronounced in the trailers and interviews as if in English (“Tsū” and “Surī”). They were pitched at a younger audience than the Heisei Godzilla movies, with child protagonists throughout, cartoonish villains and simple, super-obvious environmental messaging.

It’s interesting, in the wake of two films in which Daiei modernised the children’s favourite Gamera with a grittier, more mature tone, to see Toho going in the other direction and presenting their modernised Mothra as a bit of light fantasy for kids. It’s also fascinating to watch the 90s generation of Toho kaiju filmmakers, over the course of the trilogy, essentially rediscover how to make a kids’ film. This surely wasn’t a lost art – it had only been 20 years since the studio’s live action output was headlining the children’s Toho Champion Festival. And yet, as slick as the movies are in their visual effects, thanks in no small part to an injection of CGI, they’re clunky as hell on the narrative level.

In the first film, an unlikeable, bickering brother and sister are drawn into a battle between titanic supernatural forces when their father’s logging company disturbs an ancient seal. The second film takes more of an Indiana Jones approach, with a trio of kids and a couple of fishermen racing to uncover the secrets of a vanished civilisation that’s connected to a pollution-loving aquatic daikaiju. (This second movie follows in the questionable footsteps of Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla (1974) by plundering the indigenous culture of Okinawa for the name of the civilisation whose ancient temple surfaces, Atlantis-like, off the Okinawan coast.) By the third film, the writers have just about got the hang of sympathetic child characters but make them subordinate to the fantasy characters in a story of kaiju battling across the present day and the Cretaceous Period.

As far as the kaiju antagonists go, Rebirth of Mothra 2 fares the best with an original creation that also comes with an entourage of toxic starfish to menace the human cast. The first and third films fall back on variations on the familiar old King Ghidorah.

The protagonists, meanwhile, get a significant makeover. Mothra’s fairies, formerly referred to as the Shobijin and more recently, in Godzilla vs Mothra (1992), as the Cosmos, are now called the Elias. Naturally, they’ve been recast. They used to be not so much characters in their own right, more a kind of weird interface between Mothra and the humans, but now they’re expected to carry large parts of the plot of this trilogy themselves, so they’ve been reimagined as individuals with distinct personalities and proper names. What’s more, there’s a third Elias, coded in her costume and performance as evil, who’s working against them and trying to use the antagonist kaiju to save Earth by destroying humanity. The good Elias have their own tiny version of Mothra to ride around on, which they call “Fairy” – if Toho weren’t making toys off the back of the illusory tiny Mothra that appeared in Godzilla vs SpaceGodzilla (1994), they surely would be now. The evil Elias, meanwhile, gets to fly about on a kind of miniature cybernetic dragon, which opens up a world of questions about the presumably extinct civilisation the Elias represent.

In further contrast with their rustic islander predecessors, the Elias appear in increasingly elaborate fairy princess costumes across the trilogy. And yes, they still sing the old Mothra song. The first movie screeches to a halt to showcase what looks like a pop video for the song, with the two good Elias matted incongruously onto the generic background of a roaring log fire. They also get a completely new song in the third movie, and very nice it is too.

The more disappointing change, perhaps, is that Mothra, traditionally one of the few explicitly female daikaiju, is replaced by a male version. I don’t if this was considered necessary to appeal to the target child audience or done for any other particular reason. The more familiar Mothra dies in the first movie and hands over to a male larva which quickly pupates to win the climactic fight. He’s referred to by secondary sources as Mothra Leo, but on-screen he’s just Mothra. In what looks like another strong bid for spin-off toys, during the trilogy he mutates into a succession of specialist forms that allow him to do plot-mandated things like dive underwater, grow plate armour and literally fly millions of years into the past.

I wouldn’t recommend the Rebirth of Mothra trilogy to anyone but kaiju completists. They’re not terrible enough to make the Tri-Star movie look good – I wouldn’t go that far, but more on that in the next blog post! – but they certainly make the Heisei Gamera trilogy look even better by comparison. That Daiei, after so quickly turning around Gamera 2, should have waited a few years before producing Gamera 3 (1999) makes it look cruelly as if they’re just hanging back and giving Toho more rope.

Godzilla vs Destoroyah

Godzilla vs Destoroyah (1995)
Toho Studios
Director: Ōkawara Takao, Kawakita Kōichi (special effects)

With the Hollywood blockbuster version of Godzilla now confirmed to be in production, Toho decides to wrap things up and clear the deck in the most apocalyptic (and showy) way possible. This is nothing less than the Gojidämmerung – the Twilight of the Godzilla.

It’s 1996. A G-Force helicopter flying over the island Godzilla’s child was living on in Godzilla vs SpaceGodzilla (1994) discovers that the island is gone. From the look of it, it’s been destroyed by volcanic activity, but later investigation reveals some kind of nuclear radiation was to blame. Meanwhile, Hong Kong is attacked by Godzilla, who’s glowing bright red and visibly steaming with heat. His breath ray looks like it did at the end of the previous movie, all red and fiery (which suggests the strange energy he absorbed in his fight with SpaceGodzilla has had some sort of continued effect on him). The UNGCC Council discuss a thesis about Godzilla’s biology that might help them to understand what’s happening to Godzilla. They received it from Yamane Kenkichi, none other than the adopted grandson of the Dr Yamane played by Shimura Takashi in the original Godzilla (1954).

On a TV science programme, Kenkichi’s journalist sister Yukari interviews the chemist Ijūin Kensaku. Dr Ijūin presents his latest discovery, a means to compress oxygen molecules into a form he calls “micro-oxygen”. The process accelerates fish growth and could be used to alleviate famine. It also produces a lot of energy under certain conditions, but Ijūin is confident that it won’t be weaponised. Kenkichi’s and Yukari’s aunt, Yamane Emiko (yes, the romantic lead from Godzilla!) contacts Yukari to express her concern over the programme. The micro-oxygen process sounds a lot like Dr Serizawa’s research into the Oxygen Destroyer, the weapon that killed the original Godzilla.

A tunnelling project at Tokyo Bay runs into problems when the tunnel machine shaft enters a fossil-rich stratum of rock and begins to disintegrate. Yukari establishes that the tunnel has passed under the part of the bay where Godzilla was destroyed 40 years earlier. Ijūin is interested in the site, and in the pre-Cambrian life forms that were sealed away under that rock in the billenia before oxygen-dependent life evolved on Earth.

(The tunnelling project is almost certainly a reference to the Tokyo Bay Aqua-Line toll bridge/tunnel. This project to connect Kawasaki and Kisarazu across the middle of the bay was started in 1989 and wasn’t completed until December 1997, making this a super-topical reference for the Heisei Godzilla series.)

Kenkichi, who has inveigled his way into the UNGCC summit, suggests that Godzilla’s heart is like a nuclear reactor approaching meltdown. One false move and Godzilla could explode with the force of the world’s entire nuclear arsenal. Colonel Asō is appalled to be told his forces must under no circumstances attack Godzilla. Kenkichi suggests instead recreating the Oxygen Destroyer to use against him. Dr Ijūin, meanwhile, is examining mineral samples from the tunnelling site and discovers microscopic signs of life in one of the sample flasks. The life forms break out of the flask and soon find their way through the city’s water infrastructure to an aquarium, where they promptly skeletonise all the fish. Close analysis of the aquarium’s camera footage suggests that the creatures, now insect size, are a kind of arthropod unknown to science. Ijūin speculates that they were revived by the effects of Serizawa’s Oxygen Destroyer.

Godzilla proceeds from Hong Kong to Taiwan and Okinawa. Colonel Asō fears an attack on mainland Japan. But the Tokyo Bay tunnelling complex is instead attacked by dozens of the supercharged pre-Cambrian life forms, now grown to the size of a horse, which make short work of a squad of armed police (in a scene clearly influenced by Aliens (1986)). They have red carapaces, axe-head-shaped heads and crab-like bodies, and can fire some kind of energy beam from their very toothy mouthparts. (Those mouthparts are also inspired by the Alien franchise – we later see one shooting a smaller, toothed proboscis from inside its mouth.) They are, it turns out, vulnerable to rocket fire, but the police didn’t bring enough of those and the creatures soon emerge above ground. G-Force, however, is distracted by Godzilla emerging from the channel between Kyūshū and Shikoku islands and heading for the nearest nuclear power station. They’re authorised to launch the Super X3 against him.

The Super X3 is a return to classic form after the bipedal mecha of the last two movies. (Presumably the JSDF has exhausted its supply of reverse engineered 23rd century technology.) It looks like the bastard offspring of a Sukhoi tactical bomber and a Northrop stealth bomber. It’s armed with cadmium missiles and an array of freezing weapons, including one that emerges from its nose in the style of the Super X2. The X3 succeeds in temporarily freezing Godzilla, which brings his detectable temperature down to normal levels and diverts him from the power station. The apocalypse appears to be averted.

Saegusa Miki shares a moment of confidence with Ozawa Meru, a younger psychic who’s been attached to the American wing of G-Force. Miki has been trying to find Little Godzilla and reveals she’s always struggled with the anxiety that her abilities would fade. Meru’s concerns are more superficial – she just wants to know if boys like her or not. Soon after, Godzilla’s child is spotted off the coast of Shizuoka. After another year’s growth or mutation (or both), he looks like a younger replica of Godzilla. Colonel Asō renames him “Godzilla Junior”. The UNGCC projects that his and Godzilla’s courses are taking them towards the island in the Bering Sea where Godzilla Junior’s egg was found. Meru then relays the information from the American team that Godzilla’s temperature is rising again. Although he may not explode, if his temperature continues to rise at the same rate, within a week he’ll go into meltdown and burn straight down to the Earth’s core.

The JSDF deploys conventional tanks and maser tanks to contain the pre-Cambrian creatures in the bay area. The maser tanks have been modified with freezing capabilities, since Dr Ijūin has determined in his lab that the creatures are vulnerable to extreme cold. Several of them erupt from the ground and reveal a surprising new ability: they can merge together in the presence of micro-oxygen to form a single gigantic creature that quickly polishes off the tanks. This daikaiju has a large horn protruding from its forehead and wings that allow it to fly. Ijūin declares that it can only have drawn such power from the original Oxygen Destroyer, and dubs it Destoroyah. (That’s Toho’s approved English language spelling. Japanese, being a syllabic language, tends to separate consonants with additional vowels when approximating words from other languages. What we’ve got here is a slightly closer English rendering of the Japanese rendering of the English word “Destroyer” – like the kaiju, a step removed from the original “Oxygen Destroyer”. Compare with the “o” in “Ghidorah”, a name that riffs on “Hydra”.) Kenkichi believes that Destoroyah, as the living embodiment of the Oxygen Destroyer, is the best chance of killing Godzilla before he melts down. Meru proposes psychically diverting Junior towards Destoroyah to use him as bait to draw Godzilla into a head-on fight. The UNGCC orders the complete evacuation of all areas within 200km of Tokyo.

(That’s an extremely large proportion of the middle of mainland Japan. What we actually see is crowds in central Tokyo being ushered out of the centre by traffic police and completely failing to get anywhere near either underground shelters or the countryside. There’s plenty of the usual road traffic in Tokyo when the X3 flies overhead, too.)

The plan to divert Junior works, but Junior ends up apparently killing Destoroyah after a close fight. Junior and Godzilla meet up at Haneda Airport but are surprised by the reappearance of an even bigger Destoroyah. G-Force launches the Super X3 again in the hope of containing Godzilla’s meltdown, as his temperature is escalating out of control. Destoroyah mortally wounds Junior by dropping him onto a sports stadium, which only enrages Godzilla. Godzilla fights off Destoroyah, who is ultimately defeated when the JSDF launch their freezing weapons at it while it’s in the air, causing it to plummet to its death. (Finally, the JSDF have achieved something in this film franchise!) Godzilla hits the temperature at which it’s predicted he’ll destroy the world, and the JSDF empty their arsenal at him. The pilot of the X3 reports that the radiation reading is off the scale – Tokyo may never be habitable again. Yet just as suddenly, the radiation levels drop. The smoke clears to reveal that Junior has absorbed the radiation and returned to life as a new, full-size Godzilla.

The credits roll over a selection of clips from the 1954 original and the Heisei series, and a triumphant arrangement of Ifukube’s iconic Godzilla march.

It’s all gone a bit meta. In 1954, Godzilla symbolised the atomic bomb, the most terrifying real-world weapon, and was killed by the fictional Oxygen Destroyer, an equally nightmarish weapon but a sort of conceptual opposite of the bomb. Now here we have a kaiju that symbolises the fictional weapon that killed Godzilla. And Godzilla, who seems to now symbolise the fear of nuclear power stations failing more than nuclear weapons, has to kill it right back. We’ve come full circle. Which is perhaps appropriate for a film that ends with the passing of the torch to the next generation of Godzilla.

As a kaiju, Destoroyah has a novelty that the previous year’s SpaceGodzilla lacked and is certainly more interesting. It’s not the first time we’ve seen a swarm of smaller, human-scale monsters – Rodan (1956) gave us the insectoid Meganulons, probably inspired by the giant ants in Them! (1954) – but I think it’s the first film to show us a sort of queen kaiju in charge of the swarm. No doubt this, too, is something this film owes to Aliens. But in a peculiar extra twist, the queen is formed by the smaller kaiju merging together, a bit like the cumulative growth of 1971’s Hedorah. As with SpaceGodzilla, the special effects budget seemingly couldn’t stretch to a visible transformation, although this time it’s masked by clouds of dust rather than simply happening between shot cuts. Beyond this detail, the idea of a weapon like the Oxygen Destroyer creating conditions that would actually suit pre-Cambrian life forms has a pleasing “scienciness” to it that, again, contrasts with the sci-fi salad of SpaceGodzilla’s backstory.

On the subject of special effects, this film sees the Godzilla team experimenting with CGI with some obvious and mixed results. Not in the portrayal of the daikaiju themselves – suit acting and other practical effects are still preferred for that (and on that note, a quick shout out to the stunt actor playing Godzilla Junior, Hariken Ryū, who I think outshines longstanding Godzilla actor Satsuma Kenpachirō throughout). But in long shots of the human-scale Destoroyah creatures swarming above ground, there’s clearly an element of copying and pasting a digital model going on that, looking back on it today, sadly resembles the sort of thing you’d see in the knock-off “mockbusters” produced by The Asylum. CGI is also clearly used in the scene of Godzilla frosting over as the X3 empties its freezing weapons at him.

Among the cast there are the usual regulars – Odaka Megumi as Miki, Nakao Akira as Colonel Asō – and a couple of other familiar faces. Takashima Masahiro, seen very recently as the male lead in Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla II (1993) and the titular hero in Yamato Takeru (1994), pops up as the pilot of the Super X3. Ozawa Meru is played by Osawa Sayaka, who made a cameo appearance in Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla II as one of a pair of telepaths at Miki’s psychic research centre – perhaps she’s meant to be playing the same character here? She and the other telepath were also Mothra’s fairy emissaries in Godzilla vs Mothra (1992) and Godzilla vs SpaceGodzilla. Perhaps the most surprising returning actor is Kōchi Momoko, reprising the role of Yamane Emiko she’d played 40 years earlier in the original Godzilla. Her part in this film is a small one, but a significant one as the Heisei Godzilla series draws to a close. Her co-stars Shimura Takashi and Hirata Akihiko appear in the form of photographs and stock footage respectively.

The character of Meru feels like a bit of a missed opportunity. It’s as if she’s being set up as a kind of cracked mirror of Miki, another young professional telepath but one who joined the militaristic G-Force rather than being co-opted as a consultant, and who wears the uniform (or at least the beret). The heart-to-heart scene between the two reveals Meru as shallow where Miki is introspective. Moreover, she’s spent her time with the UNGCC training in America, far from the kaiju action, while Miki has forged a genuine connection with Godzilla’s child. Meru’s the one who suggests using Godzilla Junior as live bait for Destoroyah, and although Miki is obliged to participate in this plan when the UNGCC greenlights it, she looks uneasy and has every reason to. This could, maybe should have led to a confrontation between the two, but nothing ever comes of it.

Overall, though, this is a strong finish for this run of Godzilla movies and a confident handover to TriStar Pictures as they prepare to bring Godzilla to a whole new, much larger English-speaking audience. Let’s hope they don’t mess it up.