Godzilla vs Megaguirus

Godzilla vs Megaguirus (2000)
Toho Studios
Director: Tezuka Masaaki, Suzuki Kenji (special effects)

This film opens with a cheeky faux newsreel reporting on Godzilla’s destruction of Tokyo in 1954. (The scenes feature the current, flat-headed, super-spiny Godzilla suit – they’ve either been restaged very closely or had the Godzilla 2000: Millennium (1999) Godzilla superimposed over the original. In later, colour scenes, his dorsal plates look a lot more purple than in the previous movie.) There’s no indication that Godzilla hung around afterwards or was killed in this timeline. In the wake of the calamity, the seat of the Japanese government is relocated to Ōsaka. Japan forges ahead with its postwar reconstruction, but experiences another setback when its first nuclear power plant, the one at Tōkai, draws Godzilla back out of hiding. The government concludes that Godzilla feeds on atomic energy and bans the construction of any further nuclear plants. Japan experiments with various renewable energy sources, but none of them can keep up with the country’s demand. Finally, in 1996, the Bureau of Science and Technology succeeds in developing a means of generating electricity from plasma using deuterium, which shouldn’t pose any of the problems of nuclear energy. Nonetheless, Godzilla arrives in Ōsaka to attack the plasma energy plant. A JSDF squad is deployed to deter Godzilla with bazookas, without success; Tsujimori Kiriko, one of the survivors, swears to avenge her commanding officer’s death.

Five years later in a rebuilt Tokyo, Tsujimori is the chief officer of the G-Graspers (their name advertised in English on their baseball caps), a wing of the JSDF dedicated specifically to managing the threat posed by Godzilla. She and a colleague recruit Kudō Hajime, a brilliant but unambitious young scientist, to work on a project under his former lecturer, Dr Yoshizawa. Yoshizawa proposes to develop a weapon, deployed by satellite, that will create an artificial black hole and launch it directly at Godzilla, safely sealing him away inside its event horizon.

(She talks about a target diameter of two metres, which sounds pretty unsafe to my amateur ears. At that size, it would have 113 times the mass of the Earth. Let’s hope there’s an off switch.)

Three months later, the device is ready for testing. Dr Yoshizawa credits the research into plasma energy with making it possible. She’s keen that once the weapon has successfully eliminated Godzilla, it should be decommissioned. (Suggesting a parallel with the Oxygen Destroyer – Yoshizawa vs Serizawa?) The weapon is successfully tested on a derelict building in a rural area, although the assembled scientists and G-Graspers observe a rippling in the air above the target area that lingers for a moment before disappearing. Kudō believes this is a form of dimensional distortion caused by the temporary black hole’s gravity. The test is also observed by Hayasaka Jun, a local schoolboy and insect enthusiast on his summer break. One of the G-Graspers catches Jun in the nearby woods and Tsujimori swears him to secrecy. That night, however, Jun hears a gigantic insect flying past his house and, following it with a torch, sees it disappear into the distortion, which has reappeared. The insect has apparently laid eggs in the area – Jun finds one, silvery and the size of a beach ball, and takes it home.

A short time later, Jun and his mother are settling into a new flat in Tokyo, where his father has a new job. Jun notices that the egg, which he’s kept in a cardboard box, is leaking, although it doesn’t seem to have hatched. He takes the egg out onto the street and discreetly drops it into the sewers. Down there, it multiplies and hatches into larvae roughly the size of a person. The larvae crawl back up to the surface and start attacking people at night. Once they’ve fed well enough, they metamorphose into similarly sized flying insects like dragonflies. (From what we’re shown, this process is close to instantaneous and doesn’t involve a pupation stage – the adult simply emerges from the larva as if shedding a skin.) Jun sees one of the adult insects flying past his flat. He contacts Tsujimori and tells her about the egg he took and what he saw. He’s recognised the flying insect from one of his reference books as a prehistoric creature called Meganula.

(Yes, it’s an unexpected callback to Rodan (1956). There’s no suggestion that the events of Rodan happened in this film’s continuity. Jun refers to the larva and adult respectively as Meganulon and Meganula, as if they were distinct creatures – a JSDF scientist will say the same thing later on when examining the beast’s tissue samples. Meganeura is the taxonomic name of a genus of insects that lived roughly 300 million years ago during the Carboniferous Period – the JSDF scientist will get that detail right, which is more than can be said for the scientist in Rodan. We only ever saw the larvae in Rodan, in which they were referred to as Meganulon.)

Satellite images show Godzilla clashing with a Meganula off Japan’s south-west coast. A G-Grasper squad flies out in their VTOL plane, the Griffon, to collect samples of the dead Meganula’s tissues from the ocean’s surface. Tsujimori takes the opportunity to plant a tracking device on one of Godzilla’s dorsal plates when he returns to the scene, and her team launches an automated mini submarine to follow him. Meanwhile, the black hole weapon, now christened Dimension Tide, is successfully launched into orbit from Tanegashima Island Space Center. (A real location, established in 1969 and still operating today!)

The JSDF is called in to oversee rescue operations after Tokyo’s Shibuya district is flooded. The apparent cause of the flooding was something in the sewers. They send in an aquatic drone that Kudō’s developed based on the minisub and find Meganulon eggs littering the submerged streets. Meanwhile, Godzilla is tracked heading north towards Japan. In order to use the Dimension Tide against him, Tsujimori proposes to lure him onto the uninhabited island of Kiganjima. (It’s a fictional island – the coordinates shown on-screen would place it a little north of Ogasawara.) The government agrees, although Yoshizawa and Kudō are concerned that the weapon hasn’t been tested from orbit yet. The G-Graspers successfully provoke Godzilla into coming ashore and the Dimension Tide is powered up. Just at that moment, an entire swarm of Meganula flies in from Shibuya and mobs Godzilla, confusing the satellite’s targeting system. The insects feed on Godzilla’s energy through their stingers, but eventually he’s able to swat or blast most of the swarm. With the Dimension Tide successfully locked on, the JSDF fires. To everyone’s surprise, Godzilla reappears from beneath the impact crater, as if he was buried instead of absorbed by the black hole. Because the Dimension Tide takes an hour to cool off and recharge, they can’t take a second shot and Godzilla wades back into the ocean.

Several Meganula have somehow survived both Godzilla and the black hole and return to Shibuya. There they dive under the floodwater and transfer the energy they took from Godzilla into an enormous larva. When this hatches, it’s the size of Godzilla and shares some of his physical characteristics, notably reptilian skin and a mouth full of teeth. Its wings can scythe through buildings or, when vibrated rapidly enough, produce a loud, high frequency soundwave that devastates Shibuya. This is evidently the queen Meganula; the JSDF’s paleontological expert claims that it’s known as Megaguirus, a fiercely territorial creature.

Godzilla now approaches Tokyo, and a frenetic effort to evacuate the city begins. Tsujimori recalls that Godzilla’s previous attacks on Japanese cities were all directed at power stations and ponders what could have attracted him this time. The G-Graspers scramble in the Griffon and try to draw Godzilla into an open space so they can fire the Dimension Tide at him again, but are surprised by the arrival of Megaguirus, who faces off against Godzilla. The high frequency sound produced by Megaguirus’ wings interferes with a nearby satellite relay tower and disrupts the Dimension Tide’s control signal, stalling its firing sequence. During the course of a violent fight, Megaguirus repeatedly plunges its stinger into Godzilla’s belly and drains more energy from him, but is defeated when Godzilla bites its stinger off and roasts it with his atomic breath.

The JSDF are now faced with a new crisis: the Dimension Tide satellite has lost orbital stability and is falling to Earth. (Happily, though, it’s going to fall straight down, right onto the spot it was meant to be targeting.) Meanwhile, Godzilla marches on into Shibuya and tears down the Institute of Science. Mr Sugiura, the head of the Bureau of Science and Technology, confesses that he was overseeing continued research into plasma energy in secret. Tsujimori angrily confronts him about the lives that have been lost because of his political ambition. She then flies the Griffon over to Godzilla’s position in order to give the falling Dimension Tide an easier target to lock onto. Tsujimori ejects safely as the Griffon ploughs into Godzilla’s back, and Kudō remotely fires the Dimension Tide. Godzilla unleashes his atomic breath into the oncoming black hole; he, the black hole and the satellite vanish in a flash of light. There’s no sign of him in the resulting crater, although Tsujimori worries he may once again simply be buried in the ground beneath. In a post-credits scene, Jun is in the science lab of his new school when the building is shaken by a violent tremor and he hears Godzilla’s roar outside.

On the morning of 30 September 1999, a criticality accident took place at a uranium enrichment facility attached to Tōkai Nuclear Power Plant. Nearly seven times the legally mandated maximum quantity of uranyl nitrate was deposited into a precipitation tank, achieving critical mass and sparking a chain reaction that rolled on, firing out gamma rays and neutrons across the facility, until it was brought under control the following morning. The 1999 Tōkaimura nuclear accident was the worst Japan had seen and would only be topped by the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi incident.

The causes of the accident were a litany of failures including inadequate training, poor workplace supervision, lax regulatory oversight and cut corners, all the way down to the technicians mixing the enriched uranium manually in steel buckets. It was a stark illustration of how badly things can go wrong when industry ignores regulations and health and safety practices. The two technicians who’d had their hands on the buckets when criticality occurred died of organ failure after months in hospital, and hundreds of others within the facility and in the surrounding area received dangerously high doses of gamma radiation. In March 2000, the facility owner, JCO, was stripped of its credentials and its President resigned. Six of the plant’s staff – including the supervisor of the two technicians who’d died, who had himself received three months of treatment for radiation sickness – were charged with criminal negligence in October 2000. JCO itself and three of the individual defendants were charged with violating the relevant regulations.

Although that’s just two months before the release of this film, I imagine the prosecution was a foregone conclusion when scripting began. The defendants pled guilty but argued extenuating circumstances. The sentence that was finally handed down in March 2003 was much lighter than might have been expected, with suspended prison sentences for the individuals and a fine of 1,000,000 yen for JCO’s violations. By way of comparison, Godzilla vs Megaguirus had a budget roughly 950 times that amount.

So here, released mid-December 2000, is a movie in which corruption and complacency in the energy industry are revealed to be the cause of Godzilla’s destructive rampage. Tsujimori even gets to punch the chief executive responsible in the face, which I’m sure must have been a cathartic moment for contemporary cinemagoers. Perhaps in order to soften the commentary, the disaster that strikes Tōkai Nuclear Power Plant is moved back to the year of its commissioning and Japan’s nuclear energy industry is replaced with the more science-fictional deuterium-based plasma energy industry, fronted by the glib Mr Sugiura. (It’s not entirely clear if Sugiura is meant to be a businessman or a civil servant, or some combination of the two, like the villainous Katagiri in Godzilla 2000: Millennium. As the head of the Bureau that developed plasma energy, he takes a very hands-on interest in the related Dimension Tide project and is a constant background presence in the scenes set at G-Graspers HQ.)

And yet Godzilla vs Megaguirus equivocates. The whole premise of Japan finding an alternative to nuclear energy and Godzilla attacking anyway seems to suggest that nuclear’s as good as any other option, notwithstanding the dangers. The opening backstory makes it clear that safer, renewable energy production methods such as solar, wind and hydroelectric – at least, at the state of advancement they were at in the 90s – aren’t enough to meet Japan’s high energy demands. (Even with nuclear energy production in full swing around the time this film was made, Japan still depended on imported fossil fuels – oil, coal and natural gas – for roughly 80% of its power. Today that figure’s closer to 90%.) An unrepentant Sugiura insists that he had to play fast and loose to give the domestic energy industry a leg up and help Japan to become more self-reliant. That’s pretty much exactly the rationale JCO gave for their crimes after the public found out about them.

While we’re looking for hidden meanings, perhaps Megaguirus, as a product of the Carboniferous Period, could be said to stand in for those fossil fuels. Draining away Godzilla’s H-bomb-given energy (taking nuclear’s market share?), Megaguirus comes to resemble him and is as dangerous and destructive. And then there’s the flooding in Shibuya, which can be attributed to the hatching Meganulons although the exact cause remains unclear. Rising sea levels were a concern in pop culture at least as far back as King Kong vs Godzilla (1962), and climatologists have increasingly come to understand the part that burning fossil fuels plays in affecting the ecosystem and causing those water levels to rise. I don’t know, though – perhaps this is an interpretation too far. In this reading of the film, Godzilla would have to represent nuclear energy as a “clean” substitute for fossil fuels – much as he did in Godzilla vs Hedorah (1971) – while simultaneously being a generic stand-in for “the bad things that happen to/at power plants” in the rest of the movie.

Godzilla vs Megaguirus subordinates the commentary, if any, to the simpler business of presenting a slam-bang kaiju action movie, and that's fair enough. On that front, this is a return to more familiar territory after the slightly more grounded Godzilla 2000. Japan’s response to the threat of Godzilla once again consists of a well-drilled paramilitary outfit with access to outlandish fantasy weapons, not two scheming civil servants and an amateur investigative team armed with seismographs. But the G-Graspers are a pale shadow of the Heisei series’ UN-backed G-Force. (I mean, “G-Force” at least offered a play on words – what’s “G-Graspers” even supposed to mean?) As a reimagining, this movie treads quite a lot of familiar ground. Again, we have an antagonistic kaiju realised at least partly through CGI that wants to become like Godzilla (so again, decide for yourself whether this is a dig at Godzilla (1998) or just an overused Toho trope). Dr Yoshizawa’s concern over the possible future abuse of the Dimension Tide looks like a superficial reference to Dr Serizawa’s dilemma over the Oxygen Destroyer in Godzilla (1954) but without the noble sacrifice at the end. (The similarity in the characters’ names, Yoshizawa and Serizawa, might even be deliberate. Incidentally, Hoshi Yuriko, as Dr Yoshizawa, presents the most familiar face in the cast - she played the female journalist leads in Mothra vs Godzilla and Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (both 1964).) Besides being an unexpected reprise of the less well-remembered monsters from a 1956 movie, the Meganulons present us with a swarm kaiju just two Toho Godzilla movies after Godzilla vs Destoroyah (1995). (Or perhaps, with their insectile appearance and their appetite for energy, they’re a little closer to the Legion footsoldiers in Daiei’s Gamera 2 (1996)?)

In terms of the effects, CGI is clearly gaining a foothold at Toho. The establishing shot of the near-future parallel Tokyo is a little too obvious – it’s the CGI bullet trains that give it away. There are some very odd directorial choices in the climactic kaiju fight, with plenty of bad, jerky slow-motion moments and a comically sped-up shot of Godzilla shaking his head after a fall. There’s an absolutely crazy shot from below of Godzilla leaping through the air to bodyslam Megaguirus. Apart from that moment, we’re back to the old standard of daikaiju being shot from their own eye level, which makes the scope of the action feel somewhat limited. There is one scene of Godzilla marching through the streets of Shibuya towards the Science Institute that I think does benefit greatly from being shot from overhead and behind.

The scenes of the Meganulons and Meganula, by contrast, offer some human-scale action and are uniformly well realised. Scenes of the Meganula shedding their Meganulon skins and taking flight are very nicely achieved through CGI. The daikaiju suits and city miniatures are all as good as they’ve ever been. There’s one scene in which the effects team actually exceeded my expectations and I’m in two minds about it: the prop for Kudō’s aquatic drone (presented at actual size) very clearly isn’t the minisub prop (a miniature standing in for something the size of a car), it’s a different colour and shape, but it would have been so cheeky if they’d had Kudō walking in holding the same prop.

The character work is so-so. There isn’t exactly a romantic subplot between Tsujimori and Kudō – it’s vaguely hinted at but it comes to nothing, and after all, Kudō’s off-puttingly arrogant. Tsujimori is a stalwart lead, capable and focused, and her personal grudge against Godzilla is paid off in a nice Moby-Dick moment when she climbs over Godzilla’s back to plant the tracker on him. She has to put up with a level of casual sexism that’s actually surprising in this movie when you compare it to the Heisei series or the 1990s Gamera trilogy, with little Jun asking her what a woman’s doing in the G-Graspers and Kudō developing a desktop assistant that's an objectified version of her. The other adult characters are too bland to leave an impression, but Jun feels like in another world he could have been the child star of a Gamera movie.

The last thing I’ll draw attention to is the music by composer Ōshima Michiru. Ifukube Akira’s iconic Godzilla theme is, inevitably, heard again in this movie, but around it is, I think, the first score by another composer that can really give Ifukube a run for his money. She delivers a tremendous military march that plays over the scene of the JSDF confronting Godzilla in 1996 and the later fight between Godzilla and Megaguirus. The stridulating violin theme for the swarming Meganula shows, by her own admission, the influence of the synthesised soundtrack of Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) and maybe a hint of Psycho (1960) as well. We’ll hear from Ōshima again.