Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack

Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack (2001)
Toho Studios
Director: Kaneko Shūsuke, Kamiya Makoto (special effects)
Also known as: GMK, which has been widely adopted for brevity’s sake.

Still looking for that elusive spark that would reignite the fortunes of the Godzilla franchise, Toho turned to director Kaneko Shūsuke. This was a dream assignment for Kaneko – he’d expressed an interest in directing a Godzilla movie in the early 90s and been rebuffed. He’d then gone on to direct the Heisei era Gamera trilogy for Daiei and kicked arse. He even got to co-write the third one, and he’d get the chance to co-author GMK too. Toho had distributed the Gamera trilogy through their cinemas and presumably couldn’t help but notice their success. Could Kaneko do for them what he’d done for Daiei?

Admiral Tachibana Taizō lectures a room full of JSDF recruits about the one great challenge the JSDF has faced since its founding, Godzilla’s attack in 1954. Godzilla was defeated and Japan has enjoyed peace since then, but the JSDF needs to remain vigilant as monster sightings are reported elsewhere in the world. He’s called away by a report of an American nuclear submarine going missing near Guam. A Japanese submarine dispatched to the scene finds the sunken vessel scored with claw marks, and is itself broadsided by a briefly glimpsed creature with a familiar set of dorsal plates.

In Niigata Prefecture, a team from the TV channel BS Digital Q is filming a piece about a legendary kaiju that’s supposed to live on the foothills of Mt Myōkō. (The “BS”, a standard TV channel prefix, stands for “Broadcasting Satellite” and not for anything else we might cynically think of.) As we’ll find out later, the journalist in front of the camera, Yuri, is the daughter of Admiral Tachibana. The local mayor is upset by the filming when he learns that BS Digital Q specialises in sensationalist features about the paranormal, but Yuri persuades him that it’ll bring tourists to the area. She thinks she sees an old man watching her from the nearby trees, but he’s not there when she looks again.

That night, an earthquake in the area causes a road tunnel to collapse and bury a gang of delinquent bikers who’ve destroyed a jizō statue (a small, rounded, roadside shrine guardian). A truck driver who was driving behind them sees the head of a large, toothy creature moving through the debris, which he mistakes for Godzilla.

The next day, Yuri is upset that her editor won’t let her follow up the story about the earthquake, and in particular the detail that the epicentre was recorded as moving. A colleague, Takeda Mitsuaki, gives her a book about legendary guardian monsters that he thinks has a bearing on the event. Illustrations in the book show a three-headed dragon, a large-eared reptilian creature and a moth.

That night, a party of drunken teenagers at Lake Ikeda remove another jizō statue, apparently planning to steal it, and are set upon by an enormous larva that emerges from the lake. (It’s easily recognised as a larval Mothra.) This event and the one at Mt Myōkō seem to have been predicted by the book, which suggests an incident at Mt Fuji will be next.

Yuri, Mitsuaki and one of their other colleagues visit the police station at Motosu, at the foot of Mt Fuji and just next to the Aokigahara Forest. The police have detained the old man Yuri saw at Mt Myōkō; apparently he lives in the forest and warns passersby of Godzilla’s imminent return, but now he’s damaged a shrine. As Yuri secretly films him, he tells her to go and wake up Ghidorah while there’s still time. Ghidorah is named, along with Mothra and Baragon, in the book about the guardian monsters. (That’s right, the third guardian isn’t Godzilla at all but Baragon, the floppy-eared, burrowing reptile from Frankenstein vs Baragon (1965). Apparently he wasn’t famous enough to get a namecheck in the film’s title.) All three will be needed to defend Japan from Godzilla. The old man believes Godzilla is animated by the souls of all the victims of the Pacific War, who are angry that people have forgotten their suffering.

Godzilla appears in the Bonin Islands, near where he was first seen in 1954, and devastates a village. The JSDF investigates and issues a warning about Godzilla’s possible reappearance, but a complacent government takes no further action. Yuri tries to tell her father about the three guardian monsters, but he’s preoccupied with Godzilla. Admiral Tachibana was orphaned as a young boy in the 1954 attack and hasn’t forgotten. Nonetheless, he remembers what Yuri told him when he hears reports of the other monster sightings that seem to line up with the legend. Meanwhile, a businessman goes to the Aokigahara Forest to commit suicide. He takes a jizō statue and stands on it in order to hang himself from a tree, but the ground opens up beneath him and he falls into the cave where Ghidorah sleeps. He’s trying to convince the Motosu police of what he saw when Baragon surfaces in the street outside the police station and breaks open the wall of the cell in which the old man’s being held, before heading off south through the countryside. Everyone present mistakenly assumes Baragon is Godzilla.

Baragon is, as before, a quadrupedal reptile with elephantine ears, a large horn on his forehead and a ridge of much smaller horns over the back of his head. His skin looks more red than it used to. He also looks quite plasticky – he’s easily the least impressive daikaiju in this movie.

Godzilla comes ashore at Yaizu in Shizuoka Prefecture. He looks more like the Heisei era version – rounded, almost feline head, dark skin colour, dorsal plates not so huge and spiky – but taller and with white, pupil-less eyes. His atomic breath ray is back to its old blue-white and there’s an added inhalation effect before he fires it. He marches inland towards Tokyo and meets Baragon coming the other way at a hot spring resort at Hakone. Baragon initially surprises Godzilla by burrowing underneath him and latching onto his arm, but Godzilla gives him a savage beating and incinerates him with his breath. The government finally authorises the JSDF to respond to the threat of Godzilla.

The JSDF discovers that conventional missiles can’t hurt Godzilla, who easily destroys their fighter jets. Admiral Tachibana is dismayed to learn that Godzilla was only defeated in 1954 by a superweapon (the Oxygen Destroyer, not named here) whose existence has since been covered up. The JSDF were in fact powerless against him and only took the credit to reassure the public. On Lake Ikeda, Mothra hatches from her cocoon, while in the Aokigahara Forest, the old man succeeds in waking up Ghidorah. Yuri, who was able to report on the events at Hakone from a distance, continues to follow Godzilla by bicycle and broadcast live footage, imploring the JSDF not to attack the guardian monsters as they confront Godzilla.

The JSDF sets up camp in Yokohama, with a battleship in the harbour under Tachibana’s command. Godzilla and Mothra arrive at the same time and face off against each other. In an unusual manoeuvre, Mothra attacks Godzilla by firing darts at his face from her abdomen. Several buildings and soldiers are caught in the crossfire as Godzilla targets and misses Mothra with his breath ray. Ghidorah arrives and joins the fray, discharging electricity into Godzilla through his teeth, but is quickly subdued. Godzilla’s atomic breath makes short work of Mothra and most of the JSDF’s forces, but Mothra dissipates into a cloud of energy that’s absorbed by Ghidorah.

Ghidorah shines with a golden light and sprouts wings, looking more like the version we’ve seen in earlier movies. Completely unharmed now by Godzilla’s breath, he focuses the energy and fires it back at Godzilla, knocking him into the bay. As the two daikaiju fight underwater, Tachibana orders a minisub loaded with torpedoes and pilots it down in the hope that Ghidorah will create wounds he can shoot into. Godzilla, mimicking Ghidorah’s trick, is able to absorb the energy blasts from his three mouths and fire them back at him, destroying him. However, the combined mystical energy of the three deceased guardian monsters drags him back underwater. Tachibana ends up piloting his minisub down Godzilla’s throat and shooting his way out from inside. Godzilla is seemingly killed by his own atomic breath discharging through a gaping wound in his shoulder.

On the surface of the bay, Yuri is happily reunited with her father. The staff at BS Digital Q celebrate the news of her survival, but as the editor orders work to begin on a special commemorative programme, he’s told the mysterious old man has disappeared from the tape of Yuri’s interview with him and has been identified as one of the victims of Godzilla’s 1954 attack. (At last, a true paranormal story for the channel!) At the bottom of the bay, Godzilla’s heart still beats.

At first sight, this might look like a reimagining of classic daikaiju to rival anything that happened in the Heisei series. King Ghidorah not evil? Mothra without the singing fairies? But that came about by accident rather than by design. Kaneko’s original plan was to pit Godzilla against three forgotten monsters of the Shōwa era: Baragon, Varan (who featured in an eponymous film in 1958 and made an unnamed cameo appearance in a Godzilla movie in 1968) and Anguirus (last seen in 1974). Toho’s response to this first proposal was to ask for the more popular Mothra and King Ghidorah to be included instead. Kaneko and his co-writers made little to no effort to accommodate this change beyond renaming the kaiju.

But I’m damned if I know which kaiju subbed in for which. As a lake monster who also flies, Varan looks like a match for Mothra, but then the big final showdown involves a flying kaiju and happens in the water in Tokyo Bay, so maybe he was replaced by Ghidorah. Anguirus, by contrast, looks underqualified for either role.

What did stick was the idea to switch Godzilla from being a mutated victim/avatar of American nuclear weapons tests to being the nightmare embodiment of the vengeance of everyone who suffered during the Pacific War. (That term, incidentally, is frequently taken simply to mean the Pacific wing of World War II, but could potentially encompass the Second Sino-Japanese War which started in 1937.) The scene in which Admiral Tachibana asks his daughter why the souls of dead Japanese soldiers who fought for their country would want to attack it, and she observes that many other Asians and Americans died in the war too, saves this from coming across as a nationalist aggrandisement of the military dead. Godzilla’s wrath isn’t the frustrated, reactionary grumping of old imperialists but a broader stand-in for “the sins of the past”, something a bit more in line with the indiscriminate curses of contemporary J-Horror films and with Kaneko’s horror-inflected take on the Gamera mythos.

Recasting other monsters of the atomic age as ancient, mystical guardian spirits of Japan is a bold choice, though. Perhaps there is a hint of a less aggressive kind of nationalism in there, a suggestion that it might be in modern Japan’s interests to reconnect with older parts of its culture. Then again, it’s only one step away from what Kaneko did with Gamera, turning him and Gyaos into genetically engineered weapons of ancient Atlantis. Perhaps, if Kaneko had been given the chance to make a sequel to GMK, he would have taken Toho’s daikaiju further into the realms of BS Digital Q’s National Enquirer-esque fantasies.

There’s a certain curmudgeonly flavour to the way GMK handles its unnamed characters. Delinquent youths are responsible for disturbing two of the guardian monsters and get a swift comeuppance. This seems a little undeserved given that, as it turns out, it’s a good thing those monsters were released and if those kids hadn’t desecrated those roadside shrines, that mysterious old man certainly would have. Kaneko, who was still in his 40s at this time, was by his own admission a grumpy old man at heart.

As for the little vignettes of people who are about to be killed by Godzilla, these were apparently meant to humanise his victims, in lieu of the usual scenes of anonymous crowds. But they more often come across as comical, either as mean-spirited jokes (the man at a urinal on the island where Godzilla makes his first landfall, the woman in a hospital in Shizuoka) or as punishment for the characters’ stupidity (the tourists who pose for holiday snaps in front of an oncoming daikaiju at Hakone).

On the subject of mean jokes, GMK features the Millennium series’ first explicit, undeniable, no-interpretation-required dig at Godzilla (1998). In the opening scene, Admiral Tachibana specifically mentions a recent monster attack in New York as a reason for the JSDF to stay alert. Two members of his audience whisper to each other about this. Wasn’t that Godzilla, asks one. That’s what they say in America, replies the other, but the Japanese don’t think so.

As far as the major characters go, Yuri feels like a suitably rounded protagonist and Admiral Tachibana, the main military figure, is humanised by the scenes of him at home with his daughter and reminiscing about his childhood in 1954. The rest are filled in with quite broad strokes and there’s not a lot of depth to them. Even Tachibana’s childhood trauma is dropped in front of us but never really followed up on. For an ostensibly moody film, GMK actually doesn’t waste that much time on mood or on human drama, focusing instead on knockabout action. I don’t know what to make of the final, cheesy twist – that old campfire tale standard, “but he died nearly 50 years ago!”

There are a couple of familiar faces among the cast. Hotaru Yukijirō, clearly a favourite of the director, having played the comedy cop Osako in the Gamera trilogy, cameos as the suicidal businessman who discovers Ghidorah’s lair. The mysterious old man who tries to warn everyone about Godzilla’s return is played by Amamoto Hideyo, a stalwart of the Shōwa era. He was Dr Who (not that one) in King Kong Escapes (1967) and the friendly neighbour Shinpei in All Monsters Attack (1969). Yuri’s editor at BS Digital Q is played by someone we’ve seen quite recently, Sano Shirō, who was the government scientist Miyasaka (with much shorter hair) in Godzilla 2000: Millennium (1999).

On the whole, GMK is a very good-looking film. (Well, except for Baragon. Baragon looks like the kind of thing that was parodied in the opening scenes of Shin Ultraman (2022).) There’s a shot up from ground level of Godzilla coming ashore, with a fishing boat dropping from his shoulder, that truly makes this giant nightmare version of the character look impressive. In its story and its characters, I think it’s weaker, but it has enough momentum to stop you noticing that until after you’ve watched it. It was the most successful of the Millennium series Godzilla movies by a clear margin and it’s well liked by the fan community. It just doesn’t quite tick all the boxes for me.