Godzilla: Tokyo SOS

Godzilla: Tokyo SOS (2003)
Toho Studios
Director: Tezuka Masaaki, Asada Eiichi (special effects)

It’s March 2004, ten months since the JXSDF’s cyborg superweapon Kiryu drove Godzilla away at the end of the previous movie. Radar stations in Hawai’i and Japan detect an unidentified object approaching Japanese airspace. The Japanese air force send jets to intercept it, but they’re unable to establish contact with it or deter it. It soon becomes apparent that the mystery object is Mothra. The Shobijin, Mothra’s twin fairy envoys, have arrived with Mothra to talk to Chūjō Shinichi, the linguist who helped them more than 40 years earlier (in Mothra (1961)).

(The Shobijin here are dressed somewhat like the originals, with long hair and simple, off-the-shoulder garments. They’re showing quite a bit more midriff and leg, though. We’re told that they’re not the 1961 Shobijin but related to them. Although we’re reminded in a later scene that Mothra’s 1961 attack was only provoked by the kidnapping of the Shobijin, the kidnappers aren’t named. This is in line with the rewriting of Mothra in Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla (2002), in which we were told Japan developed their own maser weapons and the fictional Cold War superpower Rolisica wasn’t named.)

The Shobijin want Chūjō to pass on the message that it was wrong to use the 1954 Godzilla’s corpse to create Kiryu and that his skeleton must be returned to its resting place. If it is, Mothra will pledge to protect Japan from the new Godzilla; if not, Mothra herself will wage war on humanity. This visitation is also witnessed by Chūjō’s nephew Yoshito – who, as luck would have it, is a mechanic in Kiryu’s ground crew – and his grandson Shun.

The repairs to Kiryu following the previous year’s battle are still ongoing – the severed right arm has only just been replaced. We see a computer schematic that makes it clear this time that Kiryu has been built around Godzilla’s skeleton. The JXSDF has put its head on their official seal, suggesting they continue to have confidence in it. (On which note, there’s no mention in this movie of the Anti-Megalosaurus Force (AMF), which have perhaps been subsumed into the larger JXSDF.) There’s a change of flight crew, with the old pilots being sent to America for advanced training and a new cohort being brought in. Yoshito is surprised to see his old friend Kisaragi Azusa among them – she was an engineer herself just a few years ago, but has retrained as a pilot. There’s some friction, possibly jealousy, between Yoshito and one of the male Kiryu pilots, Akiba Kyosuke. In Kiryu’s hangar, Yoshito is musing on what the Shobijin said when Yashiro Akane, the hero of the previous movie, walks in to say goodbye to Kiryu. She believes Kiryu doesn’t want to fight Godzilla, but wishes Yoshito well when he says he intends to make it fighting fit again.

Chūjō gets an audience with the Prime Minister, but is unable to persuade him to decommission Kiryu on the basis of his story. The Prime Minister objects, as Yoshito also did, that he can’t easily trust Mothra to defend Japan when she caused so much damage in 1961. He intends to scrap Kiryu only after Godzilla has been defeated. Meanwhile, the JXSDF investigates the corpse of a giant sea turtle that’s washed up on Japan’s Pacific coast. (It’s named as Kamoebas, one of the daikaiju from Space Amoeba (1970), and a JXSDF scientist says that its species was discovered by the scientist character in that movie. Left hanging is the question of whether, in this continuity, the Kamoebas species is the product of alien interference or occurs naturally.) It was fatally wounded by another creature, suggesting Godzilla is on the move again. When an American nuclear submarine is destroyed off the coast of Guam, the JXSDF are ordered to make Kiryu ready for combat. The ground crew aren’t confident: although Kiryu can move, it needs more testing and there’s no way to replace its Absolute Zero Gun, the only weapon effective against Godzilla. Officials at the Defence Ministry continue to mull over the question of whether Mothra can be relied upon.

Godzilla is spotted heading for Tokyo. Hoping to minimise further damage to the city, the JXSDF tries unsuccessfully to corral him towards Shinagawa, which hasn’t yet been rebuilt after the events of the previous year. As the population rushes to evacuate or find shelter, Chūjō discovers Shun has run off and follows him to his school playground. Remembering what his grandfather told him about painting Mothra’s symbol onto an airport runway to summon her, Shun has laid out the school’s desks and chairs in the shape of the symbol. Mothra immediately responds and intercepts Godzilla, physically battering him and using her glowing wing scales as chaff against his breath ray. Chūjō is concerned that Mothra would only shed her scales as a last resort and must be desperate. Watching the stalemate between the daikaiju, the Prime Minister orders the launch of Kiryu to support Mothra. Meanwhile, on Himago Island in the Bonins, the Shobijin sing the old Mothra song to an egg. (Tempting as it is to rewrite this as “Imago Island”, the kanji letters that spell “himago” on-screen translate into English as “great-grandchild”. Wikipedia tells me this is in line with Japan’s naming convention for the real Bonin Islands.) The egg hatches to reveal twin larvae which soon swim at full speed towards Tokyo.

Kiryu arrives on the scene just as Mothra is flagging. It scores some hits on Godzilla with its arsenal of missiles, but is soon knocked over. Mothra flies in front of it to take the force of Godzilla’s breath ray. The Mothra larvae arrive after Kiryu has taken another beating and distract Godzilla by firing their cocoon webbing at him. The adult Mothra sacrifices herself to protect them from Godzilla’s breath ray. Akiba struggles to get Kiryu upright again, but the controls are unresponsive – Godzilla has caused too much damage.

Off duty while Kiryu’s out in the field, Yoshito has taken a staff car into central Tokyo to look for his uncle and nephew. Guided by a talisman bearing Mothra’s symbol that his uncle had dropped, he finds them both safe but buried under rubble near the fallen Tokyo Tower. Consequently, he’s on the scene when Akiba reports that Kiryu’s remote control is dead, and he radios in to reply that he will attempt to make field repairs to Kiryu. Racing through the deserted subway, Yoshito reaches Kiryu and assesses the damage while the pilots and ground forces provide cover. He makes the necessary repairs with radio support from the other members of the ground crew, but is trapped inside a maintenance compartment by a damaged access hatch as Kiryu stands up and re-enters the fray.

Kiryu is able to exploit a weak spot on Godzilla’s chest where he was wounded in the previous film and incapacitates him, whereupon the Mothra larvae cocoon him. Godzilla roars and, as before, Kiryu stops responding to the pilots’ commands. (Looks like Professor Yuhara didn’t entirely fix that problem after all...) But instead of going on a destructive rampage this time, it picks up the cocooned Godzilla and flies out to sea with him. The flight crew are ordered to pursue and shoot it down, but Yoshito radios to tell them not to, revealing that he’s still inside Kiryu. He believes that Kiryu wants to take itself and the current Godzilla down to the bottom of the Pacific, where the 1954 Godzilla’s skeleton can rest in peace. Kisaragi shoots open the damaged hatch, and Kiryu spontaneously turns onto its back so that Yoshito can fall safely out over the water and be rescued by his teammates. It farewells him by displaying the words “Sayonara Yoshito” (in English) on a maintenance computer screen. Their work done, the Mothra larvae swim off home while the Shobijin telepathically thank our heroes. The Prime Minister pledges to work with humility to correct the mistakes of the past. However, in a post-credits scene we see a laboratory fully stocked with genetic samples from Godzilla and other kaiju, implying that some new mistakes are about to be made.

I must admit up front, I like this film. Of course I do – it’s a sequel to the 1961 Mothra that also happens to feature Mechagodzilla. Koizumi Hiroshi’s reprise of Chūjō, 42 years later, is the fanservice I didn’t know I wanted.

All things considered, this is quite a lightweight sequel to Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla. It’s nice to shift the focus from the previous movie’s Top Gun (1986) shenanigans onto the mechanics (or at least, for them to share the limelight with the pilots), but the story beats are pretty similar and there’s not much here that we haven’t seen before. The military characters bitch at each other, but with less reason than they had in the previous movie. Once again Kiryu goes off the rails because Godzilla awakens his predecessor’s ghost, even though that problem was supposedly fixed last time. The ethical problem of exploiting the 1954 Godzilla’s corpse is made more of this time, with the whole business of Mothra being willing to fight humanity over it, but nothing comes of it – in the event, Kiryu is dispatched to give support to an ailing Mothra and no more is said about it.

The question of Kiryu being “alive”, which was raised in the previous movie, is developed here but in a subtle way. No one but Yoshito sees Kiryu’s farewell message to him and it isn’t commented on at all, but the implications are huge. Clearly, the 1954 Godzilla’s genetic material – or presumably it would be more accurate to say his consciousness (or soul?) – has fused with Kiryu’s computer systems to such an extent that he/it can communicate verbally and identify individual humans by name. There have been occasional moments in the past when Godzilla seemed to single out specific people for victimisation (Godzilla vs King Ghidorah (1991), Godzilla 2000: Millennium (1999)) and when it was suggested that there might be some kind of linguistic meaning behind Godzilla’s roars (Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (1964), Godzilla vs Gigan (1972)), but this is something else again. It looks like the JXSDF have inadvertently created a kaiju-derived AI with human-level cognitive ability. That the (re-)reawakened Kiryu reacts intelligently and compassionately instead of going on another rampage suggests that, sometime between the two movies, it has recognised and grappled with the same moral dilemmas as the human characters – and solved them. It’s a shame there wasn’t a third movie, or more time in this one, to expand on this further.

There’s arguably a hint of romance between Yoshito and Kisaragi, following in the footsteps of the pilot-plus-scientist romances in Tezuka Masaaki’s previous Godzilla movies, but honestly, there’s just as much or more of a hint of romance between Yoshito and Akiba. They start off fighting each other, but by the end, Akiba is the one ejecting from his plane to catch Yoshito and it’s the two of them lounging in a dinghy waiting to be rescued, playing James Bond and Love Interest. (You decide which is which!) Kisaragi even comments on how Yoshito, who spends all his time focused on his work, isn’t interested in women. If any kaiju fans out there are looking for queer subtexts, a) you’ve probably picked the wrong genre, but b) you could do worse than look to this film.

Once again, the Shobijin are played by the Grand Prix and Grand Jury Prize winners of the most recent Toho Cinderella talent contest (the fifth one, held in 2000). Once again, feel free to read some meta hilarity into their casting as this pair of objectified magical pixie women. On the plus side, they didn’t get kidnapped and exploited by an unscrupulous businessman this time.

As with the previous movie, the special effects are good. It seems to be a standard Toho trope now for Godzilla’s first appearance to be heralded by a tsunami-like wall of water. Mothra is well realised, both as a practical model and through CGI – the opening scenes with the JASDF jets are nicely done, and there’s a very pretty shot later on of Mothra silhouetted against a setting sun that stands out. There’s a cute moment early on when Kiryu’s rampage from the last movie is presented in a TV news report as a bit of shaky handheld camera footage. The acting is mostly OK, although there’s some terrible acting from the Americans among the cast, and some terrible dialogue for them to deliver. I truly pity the poor bastard playing the submarine’s sonar operator, who was expected to deliver the line: “Oh Jesus – big heartbeats!”

The post-credits scene hints at a third Kiryu movie that never came to pass. After the promise of Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla, the reception of Tokyo SOS was a grave disappointment and the longed-for trilogy was, once again, abandoned. And that might have been it for the Millennium series, except that 2004 would be Godzilla’s 50th anniversary year. Toho couldn’t let that pass without marking the occasion, could they?