Pacific Rim

Pacific Rim (2013)
Legendary Pictures / Double Dare You Productions
Director: Guillermo del Toro
Also discussed: Pacific Rim Uprising (2018).

Reminder: This blog contains plot spoilers, possibly in the main body as well as in the plot summary section. Read on at your own risk!

Just when interest in giant monster movies seemed to be on the wane in Japan, it started to pick up again in America. Cloverfield (2008) presented a new take on the genre, the kaiju movie as found footage. There’d been a fashion for “found footage” genre films since the runaway success of The Blair Witch Project (1999); the Norwegian film Troll Hunter (2010) did something similar a couple of years later with the giant creatures of Nordic folklore. Super 8 (2011) took this to the next narrative level, a film about child characters capturing footage of a gigantic alien creature on a handheld camera but presented as a big-budget family movie in the tradition of Steven Spielberg, co-produced by Spielberg and scripted and directed by JJ Abrams, who’d also been responsible for Cloverfield.

While all this was going on, scriptwriter Travis Beacham and director Guillermo del Toro were developing a film that would combine massive, colourful visual spectacle and slambang action with human (melo)drama. Del Toro was probably best known at this point for the Spanish-set dark fantasy Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) and two adaptations of Mike Mignola’s Hellboy comic book series (2004, 2008), and was a fan of Godzilla and Japanese manga. Beacham, who’d previously been working with del Toro on a cancelled project, came up with the idea of a blockbuster pitting giant robots, with two pilots neurally linked to each other, against giant monsters. Beacham conceived of the multiple-piloted mecha as a way of exploring themes of loss and survivor’s guilt; del Toro latched onto the concept as a vehicle for a simple, positive message about people learning to work together to survive. The project was taken up by Legendary Pictures, who’d recently announced that they’d acquired the licence from Toho to make a new Godzilla movie, of which more next time.

The prologue: In 2013, a creature of no previously known type emerged from “the Breach”, a dimensional portal along a line between two tectonic plates at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, and attacked San Francisco. It took six days for the US military to kill the creature, dubbed a Kaiju (from the Japanese word), during which thousands of lives were lost. Six months later, a different Kaiju attacked Manila. More Kaiju followed, each one being given a category number and a nickname. (It’s never clarified who comes up with the names or on what basis – some, like “Knifehead” are bluntly descriptive, but others are less obvious. The category system is also never explained, except that higher numbers are clearly worse. Are they assessed purely on their size? Or maybe on their speed, like severe weather events?) When it became clear that the series of attacks would continue, an international team of scientists and engineers collaborated to create pilotable humanoid machines that could match the size of the Kaiju. Referred to as Jaeger (from the German word for “hunter”), these machines were controlled through a neural interface by an on-board pilot, but because of the extreme mental strain of piloting the Jaeger, the burden was spread across two pilots connected to each other. The Jaegers were able to successfully combat the Kaiju when they appeared, and people grew complacent.

In 2020, brothers Raleigh and Yancy Beckett are deployed from their base in Alaska to stop a category 3 Kaiju in their Jaeger, Gypsy Danger. The Becketts are eligible pilots because of their family bond – the neural linking process, called “the Drift”, requires that the pilots are comfortable and compatible with each other, and the closer the bond, the better. The fight goes worse than expected – the Kaiju dismembers Gypsy Danger and kills Yancy before Raleigh can finish it off. Severely wounded, Raleigh is able to drive Gypsy Danger back to shore but later resigns as a pilot.

In 2025, support for the Jaeger programme is at a low. The frequency of Kaiju attacks is increasing, as is the strength of the Kaiju – category 4 appearances are now commonplace. The Kaiju seem to have learned from their predecessors’ experiences and are routinely destroying Jaegers before themselves being stopped. Unwilling to keep paying for the production of new Jaegers, the governments of the world propose to fund the Jaeger programme for just eight more months while the coasts of Pacific nations are fortified with large walls, following which the Jaegers will be decommissioned. Stacker Pentecost, the Marshall in charge of the programme, is ordered to muster all remaining Jaegers in Hong Kong to hold the line while the walls are constructed.

Construction workers in Alaska, including Raleigh Beckett, are disheartened by a news report from Sydney that a Kaiju took less than an hour to break through the wall already constructed there; it was ultimately defeated by a Jaeger. Pentecost flies into the Alaska construction site in person to recruit Raleigh back into the Jaeger programme. In the “Shatterdome” facility in Hong Kong, Raleigh meets Mako Mori, who has been assessing potential new co-pilots for him, and Drs Newt Geiszler and Hermann Gottlieb, a chalk-and-cheese pair of scientists researching the Kaiju. In the Shatterdome’s hangar, only four Jaegers remain: Crimson Typhoon, a larger model piloted by Cantonese triplets; Cherno Alpha, an antiquated model with a head resembling a nuclear reactor that’s piloted by a Russian husband and wife; Striker Eureka, piloted by Australian father and son Hercules and Chuck Hansen, who took down the Kaiju in Sydney; and a refurbished Gypsy Danger.

Pentecost’s plan to end the Kaiju threat is to use Striker Eureka, the fastest of the four Jaegers, to send a massive thermonuclear warhead through the Breach while the other Jaegers provide cover against any nearby Kaiju. The Breach only seems to manifest when Kaiju are coming through it, but the bookish Dr Gottlieb believes the accelerating frequency of incursions will cause the Breach to stay open, allowing Pentecost’s bomb to pass in the other direction and collapse it permanently. The overenthusiastic Dr Geiszler has determined that the outwardly very different Kaiju are all genetically identical, based on his study of recovered organic samples; he has the still-living brain of a Kaiju in a tank and is keen to use Drift technology to mine it for insights into the attackers’ motivations, but Pentecost vetoes that. Regardless, Geiszler experiments behind Pentecost’s back using his own improvised hardware.

The trials to find a new co-pilot for Raleigh take the form of bouts of bōjutsu, as a test of mental as well as physical strength. Raleigh easily defeats the slated candidates and suggests Mako try instead when she criticises him for holding back. Mako herself is eager to fight in a Jaeger because she lost her family to a Kaiju attack. The two prove to be very well matched, but Pentecost is reluctant to allow Mako the opportunity. It will later be revealed that he’s over-protective towards her because he adopted her after the Jaeger he was piloting killed the Kaiju that orphaned her; he’s also on long-term medication, having been irradiated by the power source of his early-generation Jaeger. A Drift test with Raleigh and Mako inside Gypsy Danger is carried out and goes well at first, but when the pair tap into each other’s memories of losing their family, the trauma powers up Gypsy Danger’s weapons systems and the test has to be cut short.

Geiszler tells Pentecost that he’s learned from his experiment that the Kaiju are the bioengineered tools of beings that travel across dimensions, exhausting each world and abandoning it for the next one. The environmental damage caused by human activity has made the world more suitable for their species, so they’ve decided to press their attack now. The Kaiju incursions to date have only been laying the groundwork for the extermination of humanity. Pentecost asks for more information, but Geiszler has burnt out the Kaiju brain he had. Pentecost reveals that, in order to keep the Shatterdome running without the funding it needs, he’s been selling Kaiju remains to a local black market dealer called Hannibal Chau, and directs Geiszler to Chau’s address.

Two category 4 Kaiju emerge simultaneously from the Breach and the three active Jaegers are dispatched to intercept them off the shore of Hong Kong. Crimson Typhoon and Cherno Alpha are very quickly destroyed, while Striker Eureka is immobilised by one of the Kaiju emitting an electromagnetic pulse. The other Kaiju heads inland; Chau suggests that its masters were alerted by Geiszler’s attempt to Drift with what Geiszler believes is a hive mind shared by the Kaiju, and have sent this pair to find him. Kicked out onto the street, Geiszler takes refuge in a public bunker. Raleigh and Mako head out in Gypsy Danger and arrive in time to save Striker Eureka from the EMP-emitting Kaiju. Meanwhile, the other Kaiju has homed in on the bunker Geiszler is hiding in. The people in the bunker are saved when Gypsy Danger draws the Kaiju away and kills it. The surviving pilots are taken back to the Shatterdome and hailed as heroes, while their Jaegers are recovered and quickly repaired in anticipation of their next mission. Chau’s team move in to dissect the Kaiju carcass, but discover that it was pregnant when the child tears its way out and attacks them. The newborn Kaiju swallows Chau before dying of strangulation by its own umbilical cord. Gottlieb, who has been sent to find Geiszler, helps him prepare to Drift with its brain.

Two more category 4 Kaiju are detected, but they remain near the Breach as if waiting for something. Gypsy Danger and Striker Eureka are scrambled once again. Hercules Hansen broke an arm in the last mission and is unable to co-pilot with his son, so Pentecost takes his place even though he’s been told it would be medically too risky for him. With only two Jaegers left, and the rate of Kaiju appearances rising exponentially, this will probably be the last chance to enact his plan to launch a nuclear strike against the Kaiju’s masters. He delivers a rousing pep talk to the pilots and ground crew (the one in which he announces that they’re “cancelling the apocalypse”).

The two Jaegers are launched into the ocean and dive down to the Breach to find the two Kaiju patrolling it. Geiszler and Gottlieb return to the Shatterdome in time to warn the pilots that they’ve discovered, from their recent Drift with the fresh Kaiju brain, that the Breach will only allow passage between the dimensions if it detects Kaiju DNA. Although it looks as though the team could simply drop their bomb into it, the Breach would reject it and send it back – their only chance is to descend into the Breach with a Kaiju. At that moment, a third Kaiju is detected rising from the Breach, the first ever category 5. In the fight that ensues, Gypsy Danger is badly damaged but succeeds in killing one of the Kaiju. The other two Kaiju converge on Striker Eureka, the Jaeger carrying the nuclear payload; Pentecost and Hansen detonate the bomb to buy time for Raleigh and Mako. Gypsy Danger is a sufficiently old model of Jaeger to still have a nuclear power source – it can be used as a backup bomb. Carrying one of the Kaiju, Gypsy Danger launches into the Breach. As the life support systems fail, Raleigh ejects Mako, sets the Jaeger’s reactor to self-destruct and ejects himself before it explodes at the other end of the dimensional passage. The Breach collapses and both Raleigh and Mako are recovered alive.

In a mid-credits scene, a still-living Hannibal Chau cuts his way out of the infant Kaiju’s corpse.

This is without a doubt the best remake of Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla (2002) you’ll ever see.

I jest, but the scenes of the Jaegers being airlifted into battle are strangely reminiscent of Mechagodzilla’s 1993 and 2002 film appearances. The similarities end there, though – Pacific Rim is a very slick and clearly expensive film that manages to transcend its pulp aesthetics with some moments of genuine human interest. The writers’ intended themes of dealing with loss and learning to co-operate are evidently there, but it’s also easy to see the intimacy of the Drift as a metaphor for love in various forms. (Well, right up until Stacker Pentecost is required to Drift with Chuck Hansen for plot reasons and the script handwaves away all the technical issues around that.) There’s the sibling love between the Becketts, the parent/child love between the Hansens, Dr Geiszler’s fannish love of the Kaiju, and eventually the romantic love between Raleigh and Mako. This last is clearly indicated but never explicitly spoken – something that sets Pacific Rim apart from the typical Hollywood blockbuster and makes it a little more similar to the Japanese films it’s pastiching.

And that’s the other kind of love that’s on display – del Toro’s love of Japanese pop culture. To the eyes of a hardened fan of kaiju eiga, this film has been made by a director who clearly Gets It. Yes, it’s nice that the characters are a step above baseline cardboard cutouts, but the true purpose of Pacific Rim is to look like a cross between a live action Mobile Suit Gundam (1979) on a massive budget and the Shōwa era Gamera movies if the Daiei special effects team had had access to CGI. (I mean, the Kaiju that kills Yancy Beckett at the start of the film even looks like Guiron (1969) – coincidence?!) Spectacle is what we’re here for, and the film delivers it very well and plenty of it. The Kaiju and Jaegers feel weighty, they have a definite presence, and the design work is eye-catching throughout. There may not be a lot more to Pacific Rim than that – we’re long past the years when kaiju movies can reliably be expected to have something to say about current affairs, and well into the twilight years when the genre largely feeds on itself. But it serves very well as a tribute to its predecessors.

Two things del Toro reportedly wanted to avoid with his movie about huge, destructive pieces of defence hardware were sensationalised scenes of civilian death and any hint of the "military recruitment video” aesthetics that the Transformers movies (2007-present) are so famous for. This may explain why the Jaegers Crimson Typhoon and Cherno Alpha meet such abrupt, unglamorous ends and why the Jaeger/Kaiju battles seem to take place in conveniently deserted cities – both points that might otherwise count against the film. We do at one point see some people in an anti-Kaiju bunker in Hong Kong, which makes some sense of that side of things. I think the only time we see civilians in peril, other than in Mako’s backstory, is in the scene set in 2020 in which Gypsy Danger picks up a fishing vessel in the middle of a fight and shoves it off towards safety – a nice touch. The inner city battles and the use of things like shipping containers as bludgeoning weapons help to sell the scale of the monsters, but it’s always nice to get the human’s-eye view. As far as the lack of militarism goes, it is notable that the Jaeger pilots and ground crew are knocking around in casual clothes and have no rank, but Stacker Pentecost – with his non-military rank of Marshall – does make his first appearance in what appears to be an air force parade jacket with a chest full of medals, and there’s inescapably something of the military academy about the Shatterdome.

Among the cast, I think Idris Elba is the standout as Pentecost, taking what could easily have been a one-note character and giving him some much-needed nuance. At this point in his career, he’d just recently played the god Heimdall in the Marvel movie Thor (2011) and the ship’s captain in Prometheus (2012) and was starring in the long-running TV crime series Luther (2010-19). Rinko Kikuchi, playing Mako, might have been best known at the time for her leading role in the Murakami adaptation Norwegian Wood (2010). British viewers are likely to have spotted Burn Gorman as Dr Gottlieb, not long out of his role as Owen in the Doctor Who spinoff Torchwood (2006-08); and Charlie Hunnam in the leading role as Raleigh Beckett, who had played the title role in a film adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby (2002) shortly after his star turn as teenager Nathan in the original Queer As Folk (1999-2000). Hannibal Chau is a lovely character part for Ron Perlman, who had worn the red make-up and prosthetics in del Toro’s Hellboy films (2004, 2008). But the cheekiest bit of casting must be the computer interface for Gypsy Danger, which is voiced by the same artist as the evil computer in the Portal game series.

Pacific Rim didn’t really need a sequel, but it got one anyway in 2018. Pacific Rim: Uprising has its redeeming features. It does a good job at the start of depicting a world that’s survived an apocalypse, with a bored, hedonistic younger generation playing with the leftover parts of the old war machines and the Jaeger defence corps repurposed as an authoritarian police force. The revelation of returning character Dr Geiszler as the villain builds logically on events in the original film. Following his and Dr Gottlieb’s desperate act of communing with a Kaiju brain, he’s become addicted to the experience and is now working on behalf of the would-be invaders, now dubbed “Precursors”. Meanwhile, his expertise has legitimately given him the access he needs to sabotage humanity’s defences. The movie toys with the less frequently seen trope of swarm kaiju in Geiszler’s Kaiju-piloted drones and the physical combination of three Kaiju in the climactic showdown. It’s a good showcase for John Boyega, who had just attained international stardom as one of the leads of the new Star Wars trilogy (2015, 2017, 2019). But for all that, it’s a by-the-numbers sequel and a somewhat hollow experience. Not to mention that, by the time of its release, it was screening in the shadow of Legendary’s new take on the titans of the genre, Godzilla and King Kong.

Parodies

Big Man Japan (2007)
Shochiku Co., Ltd.
Director: Matsumoto Hitoshi, Hyakutake Tomo (special effects)
Also discussed: Monster X Strikes Back: Attack the G8 Summit (2008), Geharha: The Dark- and Long-Haired Monster (2009).

As this blog starts to cover films released within the last 15 years, I thought it was worth reiterating that these essays will include plot spoilers, and probably not only in the summary sections. Read on at your own risk!

As Godzilla rolled over and went back to sleep and Gamera took his final bow, a spate of self-mocking Japanese special effects films stepped up to fill the gap. What can I say, it was the late 2000s, suddenly everything was “ironic” (and not in the Alanis Morissette way). This isn’t to say humour was a new thing for kaiju eiga – there’d been openly comedic movies before (King Kong vs Godzilla (1962), Dogora (1964), arguably the Tri-Star Godzilla (1998) and Godzilla Final Wars (2004)), plenty of funny moments in mostly straight movies and more than enough movies that left themselves open to mockery. But this was something different – an attempt to mine comedy out of the movies’ premises and tropes themselves.

I should just note up front that these movies have been less widely distributed in English-speaking markets than the average kaiju eiga, and interested readers may struggle to find copies. They do sometimes pop up on YouTube, and even if they’ve been uploaded without Anglo subtitles, YouTube does at least offer an attempt at simultaneous on-screen translation. I’ve used a variety of sources, subtitled and Youtubetitled, and made extensive use of Google Translate in getting what sense I can out of any on-screen Japanese text.

What seems to have opened the floodgates (pun intended) was Sinking of Japan (2006) and its immediate parody, The World Sinks Except Japan (2006). Sinking of Japan was a new adaptation by Toho of a popular 1973 novel by author Komatsu Sakyō that they’d previously adapted as Submersion of Japan (1973). (Note: the Japanese titles of both films and the book are identical – as with the Godzilla movies, I’ve used Toho’s preferred Anglo titles here. Further note: the 1973 movie was released in America with substantial edits and new scenes of actor Lorne Greene as Tidal Wave (1975).) The premise of the story is that a series of massive tectonic upsets causes Japan to sink into the Pacific Ocean and millions of Japanese people find out who their friends are as they try to secure flights out of the country and asylum overseas. The independent production The World Sinks Except Japan, funnily enough, was based on the literary parody of the book, a short story by Tsutsui Yasutaka also published in 1973. I can’t say how similar the full-length film is to the short story, having seen only highlights of one and not read the other, but I’m going to guess it’s a loose adaptation. Although it featured no kaiju (barring a low-grade TV show within the movie), the scenes of geological disaster showed the capabilities of the CGI technology then available to the makers of low budget comedies. It could only be a matter of time before someone produced a full-length parody kaiju movie.

Sure enough, the very next year the Shochiku film studio produced a film that was released to overseas festivals as Big Man Japan.

A cameraman follows Daisatō Masaru as he goes about his daily business. Daisatō lives in a rundown old house with a derelict child’s swing in the garden and only a cat for company. A sign above his front door claims that the house is the office of a branch of government dedicated to fighting monsters. He’s estranged from his wife and daughter. He spends a fair bit of time hanging around the park he used to take his daughter to, but is unable to devote any meaningful amount of time or attention to anything, because he’s permanently on call. His job pays badly, barely enough to cover the rent, and he clearly isn’t appreciated – unseen members of the public throw stones through his windows and spray insulting graffiti around his home.

When Daisatō gets a call, we find out what his job involves. Daisatō is the sixth – and, so far, the last – Dainihonjin (“Giant Japanese Person” or “Japanese Giant”), one in a line of people who become gigantic when high voltage electricity is passed through their nipples. He has to report to a state-owned facility – of which only three remain in the whole of Japan out of what used to be a substantial network – where he is charged up and then dispatched to fight the weird giant creatures that periodically appear in Japan’s cities. A slim, long-haired man, in his giant form Daisatō appears overweight with especially bulky shoulders and torso; the transformation makes his hair stand up in a bouffant brush. The effects of the transformation typically persist for two or three days, during which he has to recuperate out of sight. He wears only purple underpants and is armed with nothing but a very large stick. He’s heavily tattooed, but in order to supplement his inadequate salary, he also rents out space on his chest and back for advertising. It becomes obvious over the course of the movie that the agent he employs to secure the sponsorship is screwing him over financially. His fights are recorded and broadcast on national TV, but due to declining public interest, the transmissions have slipped from prime time to the small hours of the morning.

When Daisatō wins his fights, it seems to be as much by dumb luck as anything. His foes are a bizarre assortment of creatures, often with human faces, that vary from the destructive to the merely inconvenient. There’s a bipedal entity with a bad combover and a loop of cable for arms that delights in pulling down skyscrapers, an enormous head on a single clawed leg that leaps around shouting, a thing that looks like a hairy roast chicken with a single eye on the end of a rope-like stalk. When these creatures die, we see their souls ascending into heaven, adding to the bathos of Daisatō’s victory. His poor TV ratings only improve when he’s beaten by a red, demonic creature and runs away.

Other bouts make him less popular with the public. He’s sent in to move on a tentacled creature with a woman’s face that’s been exuding an overpowering stench in a residential neighbourhood, only to discover that she’s in heat and has attracted a (very phallic-looking) male creature. Daisatō receives hate mail complaining that the monster copulation, which he was unable to prevent, might have been seen by children. Later, he’s ordered to deal with a creature that resembles an enormous baby, which he feels sympathy for but drops when it viciously bites him; the nation holds vigils for the deceased monster and vilifies Daisatō. In general, the public views the lumbering, put-upon Daisatō as just as much a nuisance as his monstrous opponents, and even those who watch his televised bouts complain that they’re not exciting enough.

Daisatō visits his grandfather, the fourth Dainihonjin, at a nursing home. His father, the fifth Dainihonjin, was a pushy and ambitious man who overexerted himself and died young. Daisatō’s grandfather, who was a beloved national hero at a time when Japan was attacked by strange creatures on a weekly basis, was obliged to come briefly out of retirement and now suffers from dementia. He seems to still possess the ability to grow to gigantic size, even without access to the government facilities, and causes the occasional embarrassing tabloid scandal.

The JSDF contrives a rematch between Daisatō and the red, demonic creature by breaking into his home and electrifying him while he’s asleep, the cameraman having first got him drunk. He fares no better against the creature this time. His grandfather appears on the scene and faces off against the monster, but is abruptly killed. Daisatō’s life is saved, however, by the sudden arrival of “American Hero Super Justice” and his family. The appearance of the Super Justice family marks a shift from CGI effects to old-fashioned suitmation in an obvious studio set, something that even Daisatō seems to notice as his supercharged torso is now a costume that zips up at the back. Super Justice and his family brutally thrash, kick and debag the now pathetic demonic creature before obliterating it with an energy beam they collectively fire from their hands. Daisatō is invited to join his hand with theirs at this point, but sees that his participation makes absolutely no difference. The Super Justice family then fly away to their futuristic base, carrying him with them. As the end credits roll, Super Justice’s father plies a miserable Daisatō with wine while the family members critique each other’s performance in the fight.

I would assume Big Man Japan isn’t literally concerned with the state of kaiju eiga in 2007. It’s more likely just a shorthand for late 20th century Japanese culture falling away in the rear-view mirror, and the film is offering a broader comment on how Japan sees itself heading into the 21st century. The outlook seems bleak. The world of Big Man Japan is one that’s been drained of all wonder. The freakiest creatures invade Japan’s cities and are (usually, just about) repelled by a stick-wielding giant in purple underpants, and not only does this not command people’s attention, it can’t even justify a 2am TV spot. Even the guards at the Dainihonjin operational sites don’t seem particularly to care about what they’re doing – the solitary gatekeeper at the first site turns the cameraman away on general principle, but at the second site he’s allowed full access, because why not. Even the Shintō priest conducting the ceremony that precedes Daisatō’s transformation is fine with stopping halfway through and taking it from the top again for the camera’s benefit. At one point, sitting in Daisatō’s living room, the cameraman gets him to clarify that what he fights are “kaiju” – up to then, and for most of the movie, he and the other characters just say “ju”. These aren’t seen as “weird beasts” anymore, just plain “beasts”, no more noteworthy than Daisatō’s cat. They’re merely a nuisance – and so, it would seem, is Daisatō.

This is a tragic comedy about the downtrodden “little guy”, notwithstanding the “little guy” in this case is physically huge. It’s interesting to compare the movie with Hancock (2008), which did something similar a year later with the tropes of the American superhero. In that film, the protagonist shares many superficial traits with Superman, the generic archetype – super-strong, bulletproof, can fly, mysterious origins, wades into emergency situations and “solves” them with excessive shows of force. But he’s an alcoholic living in a trailer park who has to deny himself all meaningful human contact in order to survive. It could be taken as an expression of national self-doubt at a turning point in modern history, and so could Big Man Japan.

The ending, bewildering as it is, could be taken several ways. (Assuming, that is, that you don’t just want to dismiss it as the final absurd straw.) It certainly doesn’t offer a simple conclusion to the film. We might imagine that Daisatō will be redeemed by a final victory, or that at least he’ll learn some important life lesson – but then that wouldn’t be an honest follow-on from what’s gone before. Instead he gets a thorough beating and then stands impotently by while someone else saves the day. Despite having a superpower, he’s ultimately powerless. We might, alternatively, expect that the appearance of his grandfather at the big showdown is going to lead to a cross-generational team-up and some kind of heart-warming family moment. The film has spent a fair bit of time prior to this showing us that Daisatō has a genuinely loving relationship with his grandfather, perhaps the last family member or friend who hasn’t run out on him or screwed him over. Surely there’ll be some kind of payoff to that? But no, the film rejects that option too. The older generation, it seems, doesn’t have the answers (or in this case, the fighting moves) needed to resolve the younger generation’s problems.

Perhaps it’s a metafictional thing. The low production values make the final scene stand out against the rest of the film, but that wasn’t any more “real”, it was just a different kind of fake. The documentary style of most of the film is fraudulent precisely because it’s trying to imitate reality (and let’s not get started on the degree to which documentary or “reality” TV is staged). The Dainihonjin fight scenes are rendered with what, in 2007 and since, looks like second-rate CGI, crawling along the floor of the uncanny valley. It helps to make the rogue monsters unsettling as well as laughable, properly weird, but it’s just as obviously false as the rubber costumes the Super Justice family turn up in. And they’re just as unsettlingly weird in their own way. They seem to inhabit a plane of reality that belongs in a 1960s TV studio. We’ve heard Daisatō pining for the days when his grandfather was kept busy by weekly kaiju attacks, he enjoyed respect and his adventures were broadcast on prime time TV – in other words, the 1960s and 70s when the pulp superhero output of Tsuburaya Productions and their rivals ruled the airwaves. There’s more than a touch of Ultraman about Super Justice and his relatives. Perhaps this is a way of telling Daisatō (and us) to be careful what he wishes for – those “good old days” weren’t as glamourous as he imagines.

Or maybe there’s a political angle. After all, Super Justice may have the look and the trappings of Ultraman, but he’s explicitly an “American Hero” – an on-screen caption tells us so, in large, unmistakeable katakana characters. (Just in case the nuclear family, the way they greet Daisatō with a loud, slow “Nice to meet you!” in accented English, the red-white-and-blue colour scheme and the stripe and star motifs on the costumes didn’t give it away.) Maybe this is a belated comment on Japan’s involvement in America’s “coalition of the willing” in Iraq, or Japan’s broader relationship with America at this time, with Daisatō pressured into supporting the family’s excessively violent antics even though he’s clearly surplus to requirements.

But one way or another, the ending of this film provokes thought and comment. It might be the most interesting part of Big Man Japan – I’ve certainly found it easier to write about than the rest of the film. Honestly, that’s Big Man Japan’s failing, as cinema and as comedy – plot out its moments of interest, weirdness, humour or just anything happening, and you’ve got an exponential curve upwards. It takes 20 minutes to get to a point where you’re not just watching a social dropout describe how drab his life is. This movie asks a lot of the viewer on the way in, but it does reward patience with... something. There’s something substantial here, even if it’s hard to pin down exactly what that is.

Which is more than can be said for Monster X Strikes Back: Attack the G8 Summit.

The “Monster X” in question isn’t the one that appeared in Godzilla: Final Wars – it’s Guilala, The X from Outer Space (1967), the one Shōwa era daikaiju Shochiku owned the rights to. Kawasaki Minoru, the director behind The World Sinks Except Japan, hooked up with Shochiku to make this knockabout kaiju farce.

A summit of the G8 member nations is held at Lake Tōya in Hokkaido to discuss climate change. Japanese tabloid journalists Sumire and Sanpei are sceptical that this summit will achieve anything more than the previous thirty-plus summits. Investigating a strange sound in the neighbouring woods, they stumble across a shrine at which a couple of dozen villagers chant and dance in prayer to Take-Majin. The wooden carvings on the lintel of the shrine prefigure the battle of giants that will end the film.

In nearby Sapporo, a falling object releases a giant monster with a scaly body and a head that looks like a spiky UFO wearing deely-bopper antennae. It quickly ruins the city and heads towards Lake Tōya. The Japanese chiefs of staff are keen to move the world leaders out for their own safety, but each agrees to stay and face down the monster for a variety of self-serving reasons. The summit meeting room is redesignated the headquarters of the G8 Space Monster Task Force. The press are told that the leaders of the G8 nations will work together to spearhead the fight against the monster, although notably no specific details are given. A little boy who has improbably found his way into the meeting room suggests naming the creature Guilala, and is quickly escorted out.

It's quickly discovered that the object Guilala arrived on was no meteorite but was in fact a Chinese Mars probe. A scientist analysing the debris suggests that Guilala has grown from some kind of spore that attached itself to the probe, its sudden growth fuelled by the energy of the impact. It’s likely to seek out sources of more energy to sustain itself. Sure enough, Guilala attacks a power plant at Noboribetsu. Interviewed on TV, several pop culture pundits give their opinions on the situation, while stallholders on the streets of Noboribetsu do a brisk trade in Guilala-themed merchandise.

Japan’s leading geologists create a build-up of magma under an active volcano to lure Guilala, then the JSDF attack it with their largest missile, which it promptly swallows. Plans by the Italian, Russian and German leaders to trap, poison or gas Guilala also fail. The British Prime Minister suggests destroying Guilala’s mind with a brainwashing device that resembles an enormous set of headphones, but this only drives Guilala into another furious rampage.

Sumire and Sanpei have been ordered by their editor to ignore the summit and get the scoop on Guilala, but JSDF roadblocks have prevented them from getting anywhere near the action. However, Sumire remembers having seen a carving that looked like Guilala at the shrine, so the two journalists return there. The priest of the shrine shows them an ancient scroll that predicts the coming of Guilala and its defeat by Take-Majin, the guardian of the lake. Take-Majin is represented by a small statue on the altar of a squatting, many-armed figure holding an umbrella and a fire extinguisher. Enchanted by the villagers’ simplistic way of life, Sumire joins them in their worship of Take-Majin and persuades Sanpei to stay as well.

The Japanese Prime Minister (a caricature of Abe Shinzō) has had to leave the summit because of bowel trouble and his place has been taken by his predecessor (a caricature of Abe’s predecessor, Koizumi Junichirō). He’s already shocked some of the world leaders and aroused suspicions by suggesting the use of nuclear weapons against Guilala. He now reveals himself to be a foreign dictator in disguise (clearly Kim Jong Il, although the script dances around specifying who he is and which Korean-speaking “North” country he could possibly be the ruler of); the translators at the summit are all his armed infiltrators. He takes the leaders hostage and announces his plan to test a low-yield atomic warhead on Guilala. The French President isn’t among the hostages – he slipped away earlier to seduce his designated translator, and she’s told him about the plot. He now re-enters the meeting room wearing only a towel, distracting the translators and allowing Japanese soldiers to take control of the room. However, he’s too late to prevent the launch of the North Korean missile. The scientist who was consulted about Guilala earlier suggests that a nuclear missile strike might only spread its spores around the world.

Just as the missile is about to hit Guilala, Take-Majin materialises in front of it. He’s an eight-armed humanoid figure wearing golden armour with a flower-shaped helmet.

(Sadly, the umbrella and fire extinguisher are not in evidence. Six of the arms are fixed to a kind of back-plate that disappears once he starts fighting Guilala. The name Take-Majin is undoubtedly a riff on Daimajin. “Take” means “bamboo” and Take-Majin’s helmet could plausibly be meant to look like a bamboo flower.)

The missile lands between Take-Majin’s buttocks and disappears inside him, exploding harmlessly. A prolonged fight ensues, with Take-Majin’s worshippers cheering from the sidelines and the dignitaries and soldiers at the G8 summit watching the proceedings on a screen. Take-Majin eventually decapitates Guilala, causing him to explode, and dematerialises once more. Kim Jong Il has managed to escape while everyone’s attention was on the fight, but the world leaders decide to celebrate anyway with a visit to one of Lake Tōya’s famous hot spas.

Where Big Man Japan was open to interpretation and even, dare I say it, sophisticated, Monster X Strikes Back is obvious and crude. There are some clear similarities with World Sinks – the two movies have several actors in common, notably those playing the American, Russian and North Korean heads of state; there’s the surprise reveal of Kim Jong Il as a punchline; and the focus of the humour is more on the characters than on the special effects scenes. Monster X bolsters its effects budget by reusing the scenes of Guilala’s attacks from the 1967 film, which may inspire laughter but weren’t made with it in mind, although the new scenes – achieved with good old-fashioned costumes and props, mind you – were obviously meant to be funny. Probably the funniest moment in the movie for kaiju fans is the Gamera-spoofing bit where a random kid pops up in the briefing room and tells everyone what the monster should be called.

The use of the “foreign” characters in Monster X, at least as far as I can tell, differs from that in World Sinks. World Sinks seems to be concerned with xenophobia as a theme, as once-powerful people are forced to abase themselves in the hope of winning favour with a Japanese people who are at once happy to exploit their guests and suspicious of them. Monster X only seems interested in playing with national stereotypes – the bland British leader who goes along with whatever the American leader says, the devious Russian leader, the food-obsessed Italian leader, the French leader who beds his translator because it’s simply what his people would expect of him. The only impersonations as such are those of the then-current and previous Japanese Prime Ministers, and credit where it’s due, they’re on the nose. I don’t think the script attempts any deeper political commentary than that. The parody version of the liberal Koizumi Junichirō is explicitly an impostor and not the real politician, so I don’t think there’s any statement intended in the reveal that he’s Kim Jong Il in disguise. There’s certainly no mention made of the conservative Abe Shinzō’s repeated denials of Japan’s war crimes (60 years after the fact and 20 years after the Emperor started apologising for them...), but who knows, perhaps it’s significant that the parody version is sidelined for much of the film because he’s literally full of shit.

And then, in 2009, NHK television broadcast the 20-minute skit Geharha: The Dark- and Long-Haired Monster. Fun fact: the writer, Miura Jun, was one of the pundits who appeared in the “talking heads” scene in Monster X Strikes Back.

A fishing boat in Japanese waters is attacked by a vast creature with glowing eyes. Hideo, a journalist, watches a TV news report about the boat’s recovery that shows enormous strands of greasy black hair hanging off the hull. The one surviving sailor has been taken to hospital – he’s gone completely bald and is raving about hair. The press turn to an official for answers, but he seems to be obsessed with kaiju and yōkai and offers a selection of supernatural explanations. Up in the mountains, Hideo finds a shrine to Geharha, possibly a local lake monster that has been disturbed.

The public are evacuated and the tanks sent in as Geharha makes landfall and heads into the nearest city. It’s a four-limbed but ambiguously shaped creature covered all over in long, dark hair. The thick hair protects it from conventional artillery fire, and the military are forced to retreat when Geharha starts to release choking fumes (some kind of toxic gas, or just smoke from its burning hair?). In despair, the JSDF welcome the appearance of a brash American military contractor who offers them the blueprints for a “gas vortex device”, codenamed Fujin (“Wind God”). Immediately built and deployed, Fujin is a rotary fan as high as a tower block, mounted on a flatbed truck. In addition to causing substantial property damage, Fujin disperses the foul fumes and blows the hair away from Geharha’s face to reveal its weak spot – a receding hairline. Several direct missile strikes on Geharha’s exposed forehead drive it back and it crawls away to its mountain lake where it tumbles in, possibly dead. Amid the celebrations, the Defence Minister strikes a note of caution, saying that pollution and climate change could summon up another Geharha. The priest at Geharha’s mountain shrine muses that humans were the real monsters all along, while Hideo suggests that Geharha was just as much a victim.

Just as the END caption appears, a cheap-looking flying saucer bursts through the screen and retrieves Geharha from the lake. The alien pilots broadcast a message to the world: surrender or they will set Geharha loose again. There then follows a trailer for an even more spectacular, more apocalyptic and more clichéd sequel.

Geharha is a checklist of kaiju eiga tropes: the opening scene of a boat under attack, the deranged survivor, the mysticism, the fantasy superweapon, the trite messages tacked onto the denouement. It’s purely concerned with sending up the kaiju genre, and it does it with precision and obvious love. On top of this, it features a classic motif of Japanese horror fiction in Geharha’s hair. The international boom in J-Horror cinema, which was subsiding by this point, had given the world plenty of examples of vengeful ghosts with long, dark hair, notably in the Ringu (1998) and Ju-On (2002) cinematic franchises. In a less prominent example, Exte (2007), the victims are actually killed by haunted hair extensions. But this wasn’t a recent thing – the anthology film Kwaidan (1964), based on folk stories transcribed by Lafcadio Hearn at the turn of the 20th century, included the tale of an unfaithful husband being attacked by a disembodied head of hair.

Geharha lands all its jokes, boasts some surprisingly good special effects and doesn’t outstay its welcome. They say brevity is the soul of wit, and at a trim 20 minutes, Geharha illustrates that point very well.

Gamera the Brave

Gamera the Brave (2006)
Kadokawa Herald Pictures, Inc.
Director: Tasaki Ryuta, Kaneko Isao (special effects)
Also known as: The Japanese title seems to suggest “the brave” doesn’t refer to Gamera at all, but rather the child characters. Perhaps a colon in the Anglo title would have helped. Still, Gamera the Brave is what we’ve got.

In 2002, Tokuma Shoten sold their interest in Daiei Film to a rival publishing company, Kadokawa Shoten. Kadokawa’s new film-making subsidiary went through a few mergers and name changes over the years – during the year in which this film was released, it was called Kadokawa Herald Pictures following the parent company’s acquisition of Nippon Herald Films. With kaiju anniversary celebrations in the air, Kadokawa decided to mark Gamera’s 40th birthday (in 2005) with a new film, although the release ended up being delayed until the following year. They dusted off their Daiei assets, found an unused draft storyline for what had become Gamera: The Guardian of the Universe (1995) and handed it to scriptwriter Tatsui Yukari and director Tasaki Ryuta, who used it as the basis for a child-friendly story more in keeping with the Gamera movies of old.

In 1973, the coastal city of Shima in Mie Prefecture is the site of a nocturnal battle between Gamera and a swarm of Gyaos. (Fans will recognise the giant turtle and the wedge-headed pterosaur-like creatures immediately; everyone else will have to wait 15 minutes for one of the characters to fill in the backstory.) Outnumbered and on the defensive, Gamera blows himself up, destroying the Gyaos at the cost of his own life. The people of Shima rejoice, except for solemn little Aizawa Kosuke.

In 2006, Kosuke is the chef and manager of a diner, with a son of his own, Toru. It’s the first summer since his wife died in a car accident. As they visit the Aizawa family shrine, Kosuke tells Toru his mother is watching over him, but the practically minded Toru believes his mother is simply dead. Walking back to town, Toru sees a flash of red light coming from the nearby island where Gamera died 33 years earlier.

A news report announces that, after years of funding cuts, the government has finally disbanded the special council that was formed to respond to giant monster attacks after the 1973 incident. The JSDF will be authorised to handle such matters, should any arise. The news also reports the unexplained disappearance of a small ship, the latest in a series.

Toru’s neighbour, an older girl called Mai, is a good friend to him. Her father owns a pearl shop which has done great business since local divers discovered a trove of bright red pearls in the water around the island after Gamera’s demise in 1973. The pearls are considered lucky; Mai’s due to have heart surgery the next week, and he plans to give her the last one for good luck.

When he sees the red light again and swims out to the island, Toru finds an egg resting on a glowing red stone the size of his hand. A turtle hatches out of the egg. Toru takes the turtle and the stone home with him. He decides to name the turtle Toto, which is what his mother used to call him. Knowing his father has banned pets from the diner for hygiene reasons, Toru tries to keep Toto a secret, but ends up letting Mai and his friends Ishimaru and Katsuya in on it. Toto grows quickly and soon develops the abilities to fly and to belch fire. Mai tells Toru what she knows about Gamera and suggests Toto might be related to him. Unable to keep Toto hidden when he’s more than a metre across, Toru enlists his friends’ help to relocate Toto to an old fisherman’s hut one night. Despite the evidence, he’s still unwilling to accept that Toto might be a new Gamera. After all, Gamera was a kaiju, and kaiju fight and die, and Toru doesn’t want his friend Toto to die.

The next day, Toru overhears a conversation between Mai and her parents and learns that she’s going to be hospitalised the next day for a potentially life-threatening operation. He gives her Toto’s red stone for good luck. Later that day, he goes to the hut but finds that Toto isn’t there any more.

Shima is suddenly attacked by an enormous, spiny, reptilian creature nearly 100 metres long. It demolishes the local lighthouse and starts hunting and eating the citizens. Toru and his friends are saved in the nick of time by the appearance of a turtle the size of a truck, now walking upright and with small tusks, that barges the creature aside. Kosuke recognises the giant turtle as Gamera, but Toru recognises it as Toto. Toto and the creature fight their way onto the Shima Pearl Bridge (a.k.a. Shima Ohashi, a then-new road bridge and tourist attraction). The creature is unable to reach Toto through the cage of the bridge, but stabs at him with a long, purple, sharply pointed tongue. Toto breathes fire into the creature’s mouth and it falls into the river. Before Toru can intervene, a military detachment arrives on the bridge and takes Toto away on a flatbed truck – alerted by reports of the attack on Shima, the government has desperately turned to their former kaiju experts to find a solution.

Professor Amayima, at the Nagoya University of Science, has spent years working with the disbanded kaiju response council. He’s bought up the red pearls that were found in Shima and extracted from them an energy source that’s vital to Gamera, and has synthesised a liquid form of it in large quantities. The government hopes to force Toto’s growth by injecting him with the liquid energy, so that he can continue to fight the carnivorous monster which they’ve dubbed Zedus.

At an evacuee centre, Kosuke gets a phone call from the hospital in Nagoya and passes it to Toru. Mai’s surgery has been successful and she’s semi-conscious, but she’s clutching the red stone and keeps muttering about Toto. Toru rounds up his two other friends and they head into Nagoya. Zedus also appears in Nagoya, demolishing the university facility in which Toto is being held and smashing a path towards the city centre. Toto erupts from the wreckage and engages Zedus in battle.

Toru, Ishimaru and Katsuya look for Mai at the hospital but find it deserted; in fact, everyone’s been evacuated from the hospital to a shopping mall further away from the kaiju fight. Kosuke catches up with Toru at the hospital and is angry at him for putting himself in danger, but Toru insists that he must help Toto. Restrained by concerned nurses, Mai is prevented from getting up to take the red stone to Toto, but another child agrees to take it from her. Through the streets of Nagoya, as people stampede away from the destruction, a series of children relays the stone in the opposite direction, working together with some kind of unspoken but shared understanding. The stone finds its way into Toru’s hands and Kosuke helps him to get it to Toto, who’s been thrown into an office block by Zedus. As Zedus attacks Toto from outside the building, Toru explains that he’s doing this so that Toto will live, not self-destruct like the previous Gamera, and throws the stone into Toto’s mouth. Restored to the peak of his power, rockets and all, Toto knocks Zedus off the building and destroys him with a huge fireball.

The government wants to recapture the exhausted Toto, but this time they’re prevented from sending soldiers in to collect him by dozens of children who form a wall in front of him. Accepting at last that his friend Toto is Gamera, Toru urges him to escape and waves him off.

You can just about see the common ancestry between Gamera the Brave and Gamera: The Guardian of the Universe. A young protagonist has a special connection to Gamera through a mysterious, glowing stone; as Gamera confronts his kaiju opponent in a climactic fight, the protagonist insists on rushing into the battleground with the stone to offer moral and supernatural support. This is, however, a very different but equally well executed development of that basic premise. One major difference is that here, the Japanese authorities don’t treat Gamera as a threat but are already aware of him from past encounters and want to exploit him in the present crisis. We only see that part of the story glancingly, when it intrudes on Toru’s world. The government official chasing Gamera is depicted as self-important, over-demanding and short-sighted in his decision-making – he’s not meant to be our hero. He’s oblivious to the relationship between Gamera and Toru, but that’s the real story as far as this film is concerned.

Although Gamera the Brave thankfully refrains from assaulting us with the “Gamera March”, it is very much a return to the Shōwa era idea of Gamera as a friend to children. The relay race of children in Nagoya getting the stone to Toru is an uplifting scene, although no explanation is offered. I think the implication is that they all instinctively want to help Gamera and somehow know where to go and what to do to achieve that, but that would be a bit weak and schmaltzy. The alternative, I suppose, is that Gamera’s telepathically directing them somehow, which seems a bit too sinister for this film.

It feels like quite a sharp turn after an hour and a quarter with very little schmaltz in it. The film deals honestly with Toru’s bereavement, as he initially refuses to engage with it then displaces his feelings onto Gamera/Toto as a support animal while his father, whose own emotional struggle is both obvious and largely hidden from us, tries to keep an eye on his son and put on a brave face for his customers. None of this ever comes across as maudlin or melodramatic. Gamera the Brave is a surprisingly effective – and affecting – tale of a child coming to terms with mortality, loss and grief. Gamera/Toto, as the emblem of hope and new life that Toru nurtures, and Zedus, a never-explained source of sudden and arbitrary death, are simple but potent symbols of the forces at work in Toru’s psyche as he grapples with his mother’s passing and the possibility that his friend Mai might die in hospital. The principal actors Tomioka Ryō (Toru), Tsuda Kanji (Kosuke) and Kaho (Mai) all do a tremendous job in bringing this story to life.

Supporting this are some fine special effects, with an accomplished blend of costumes, digital compositing, mattes and miniatures. There are some novelties in the monster fight scenes – the Shima Pearl Bridge is used well in the first confrontation between Gamera and Zedus, while the final showdown includes an athletic Zedus somersaulting off one building to catapult Gamera, who’s been clinging to his tail, into another building. The cinematography’s lovely too – the transition from 1973 to 2006 as Kosuke stares out across the bay is a standout moment.

This is a little gem of a kaiju movie that I think is too easily overshadowed by Kaneko’s 1990s Gamera trilogy, which tends to get all the attention from kaiju fans who prefer their movies to be brash, edgy or both. It meets the brief of simultaneously taking Gamera back to basics and bringing him into the 21st century. It’s a shame this is (at time of writing) the last full-length Gamera film, but it’s a high note to go out on.

Godzilla Final Wars

Godzilla Final Wars (2004)
Toho Studios / CP International / Zazou Productions / Napalm Films
Director: Kitamura Ryūhei, Asada Eiichi (special effects)

For Godzilla’s 50th birthday, Toho organised a co-production with what might still be the largest budget of any Japanese kaiju eiga – an estimated 1.9 billion yen – including location filming in Australia and America, a dozen returning monsters, extensive CGI effects and a soundtrack by prog-rock pretentissimo Keith Emerson. They surely can’t have hoped to recoup that money, but they must have expected there to be some hype among cinemagoers. Yet, even with a limited release in cinemas outside Japan, Godzilla Final Wars made no more in ticket sales than Godzilla vs Megaguirus (2000) had. It’s the only Millennium series Godzilla movie to make a gross financial loss, and a substantial one at that.

This isn’t to say that Final Wars killed the Millennium series. Toho were already planning to rest Godzilla by this point – the 50th anniversary celebration was just a bonus. A very expensive bonus.

This film features a lot of callbacks to earlier Toho tokusatsu films. The synopsis that follows will include frequent pauses to note those callbacks, which readers will hopefully find helpful rather than confusing.

Two strange phenomena have characterised the second half of the 20th century. The first is the widespread appearance of daikaiju, in the face of which humanity has put aside all international differences and come together under the protection of the Earth Defense Force (EDF). (An indulgent selection of clips from old Toho movies illustrates the emergent threat of the kaiju.) The other is the discovery of mutants among the human population. They’re differentiated from regular people by their superhuman athleticism and reflexes. (In other words, don’t expect wings or laser eyes or any of that.) The EDF has formed an elite battalion of these mutants, called M Organisation.

(We do see some of M Organisation’s soldiers fighting daikaiju in person, but still, you’ve got to wonder whether the EDF’s gunships might really be doing the heavy lifting and the mutants might possibly be used to counter more... human-scale threats. Just how peaceful is this world of global co-operation? Judging by appearances, it looks very authoritarian. But more on that later.)

The EDF employs a small fleet of gunships that look like hovering submarines. One of these, the Gotengo (which can be distinguished from the others by the large drill bit on its nose), buries Godzilla under a landslide in Antarctica in 2004, leaving him alive but frozen. An unspecified number of years later, the gunner on that mission has become the captain of the Gotengo. Captain Douglas Gordon is fending off an attack from Manda, a golden sea serpent, at the bottom of the Atlantic. (Manda debuted in the film Atragon (1963), as did the Gotengo.) Gordon shakes off Manda by ordering his crew to dive deeper, close to a volcanic vent, and succeeds in killing the monster, but the Gotengo is badly damaged. The head of the EDF, Commander Namikawa, reprimands Gordon for his recklessness and orders him to report to base for a court martial.

At M Organisation headquarters, Ensign Ōzaki Shinichi is ordered to report to his commanding officer. Ōzaki, who is considered weak by his peers because of his compassion, is assigned to act as bodyguard for Otonashi Miyuki, a biologist, while she examines an unusual kaiju specimen that’s being held in the hangar-like Defence Force Museum. Calcified and more than 12,000 years old, it was dredged up near Hokkaido. The museum staff have already discovered that it was a cyborg and that its organic components included M-base in the DNA, a fifth genetic base that’s only previously been found in the human mutants. In an impromptu psychic vision, Mothra’s envoys the Shobijin reveal to Ōzaki and Otonashi that the inert daikaiju is the evil Gigan, and gift Ōzaki a cross-shaped amulet. (Viewers familiar with Gigan will probably have recognised him immediately from his shape, even under that rock cladding. He was introduced in Godzilla vs Gigan (1972) and last seen in Godzilla vs Megalon (1973). The Shobijin are played by the same actresses as in Godzilla: Tokyo SOS (2003) and are dressed much the same, but now have bob haircuts.)

In the skies over New York, an aircraft carrying Daigo Naotarō, the Secretary-General of the United Nations (which apparently still exists, although Daigo seems to be something more like a celebrity figurehead than a political or diplomatic leader) is destroyed by Rodan. Simultaneously, other kaiju attacks are reported including Anguirus in Shanghai, King Caesar in Okinawa and Kamacuras in Paris. The EDF scrambles its gunships to contain the beasts. Other kaiju that we see attacking cities around the world are: a CGI iguana-monster in Sydney that looks almost exactly like the 1998 Tri-Star Godzilla, but not quite exactly enough to infringe copyright; Kumonga in Arizona; and Ebirah at the “Tōkai Petrochemical Complex”. Meanwhile, an old man and his grandson who are out hunting in the woods near Mt Fuji stumble across a timid Minilla.

(Rodan, the pterosaur, debuted in his own film in 1956 and was last seen in Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla II (1993). Anguirus was a fixture of the Shōwa era Godzilla series and was last seen in Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla (1974). King Caesar, a bipedal lion-dog-faced guardian creature, made his only previous appearance in Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla. Kamacuras and Kumonga, a giant mutated mantis and spider respectively, date back to Son of Godzilla (1967). So does Minilla, the titular son of Godzilla. He’s as round-faced here as he’s ever been, and he gurgles instead of making “wag-wa” noises – he actually sounds a lot like Mr Blobby. As in All Monsters Attack (1969), he has the ability to change his size depending on whether he’s interacting with human characters or Godzilla. Ebirah is a lobster kaiju last seen in Ebirah, Horror of the Deep (1966). Toho named – and trademarked! – the creature that appears in Sydney as “Zilla”, a direct response to an American kaiju that, according to the producer of Final Wars, “took the God out of Godzilla”. Ouch.)

A squad of mutants is sent in to fight Ebirah with bazooka-like phaser weapons. Just as they succeed in bringing Ebirah down, all the daikaiju around the world dematerialise, gathered up by UFOs that converge on a spherical mothership above the EDF HQ in Tokyo. Secretary-General Daigo is transported down to explain that the occupants of the mothership, who rescued him from his plane, come in peace. He is beamed back up along with Commander Namikawa and a senior M Organisation officer, and they’re met by the leader of the aliens, apparently a bald-headed middle-aged man, and his younger deputy. The leader suggests that the humans, who would find the true name hard to pronounce, refer to his homeworld as Planet X and his people as Xiliens. The Xiliens have hoovered up all the daikaiju as a show of goodwill, and have come to Earth to warn humanity that in less than a year and a half, a small, fiery world called Gorath will collide with Earth. They suggest the humans devote their attention and their military resources to that problem.

(Invasion of Astro-Monster (1965) also featured a group of aliens from Planet X with dubious motives. The Xiliens seen here, like those Xiliens, favour black clothing and narrow black visors, although they don’t cover their heads and they’re quick to take the visors off. The uniform they wear here includes black leather trenchcoats, still quite trendy one year after the end of the original Matrix trilogy (1999-2003). Their story about the rogue planet Gorath, meanwhile, is lifted from the sci-fi adventure film Gorath (1962).)

In a press conference, Daigo proclaims the dawning of a new age of interplanetary co-operation and the replacement of the United Nations with the “Space Nations”. The world is seized by “X” mania. But Ōzaki remains sceptical – the timing of it all, just when the EDF has got its hands on Gigan, is suspicious. And Otonashi’s journalist sister, Anna, who interviewed Daigo before his plane accident, has noticed that in more recent footage he doesn’t blink; she later catches him out in a lie about his beloved pet dog. The final proof comes when Daigo is attacked with a knife by a would-be assassin – Otonashi is able to collect and analyse some of the Secretary-General’s blood and discovers that he isn’t human. When Ōzaki goes to Commander Namikawa with the intention of revealing this, he quickly realises she too has been replaced by the Xiliens. What’s more, the EDF’s chief scientist has noticed that all the images of Gorath taken from Earth look identical, suggesting that it’s just a shabby projection and not a real threat at all.

The impostors are killed and the alien deception is exposed on live television. The Xiliens are, it turns out, thin silvery humanoids wearing organic outer skins to disguise themselves as humans. The Xilien leader was hoping to take over the planet peacefully by stealth; his deputy now shoots him and takes control. He’s able to exert some kind of power over M Organisation’s mutants which prevents them attacking him; only Ōzaki is unaffected, and he’s unable to beat the Xilien on his own. The new alien leader leaves to begin a more direct takeover of Earth using his menagerie of captured daikaiju. Ōzaki, the Otonashi sisters and a crew of loyal EDF officers go on the run, pursued by mind-controlled mutants, with the man they hope can save the Earth – Captain Gordon, whom Ōzaki has released from the brig where he was waiting to be sentenced after his court martial.

Gordon retakes control of the Gotengo, which has been repaired, and goes to Antarctica to release Godzilla, the one force that can threaten the Xiliens. He dubs this mission “Operation Final War”. Godzilla clearly bears a grudge against the Gotengo and is easily led across the globe towards the Xiliens’ mothership, fighting and defeating rogue daikaiju along the way. His first opponent is Gigan, who’s been revived and sent in pursuit of the Gotengo (and this time, he does fire laser beams from his red visor). Godzilla soon blasts his head off, much to the Xilien leader’s dismay. In Sydney, he dispatches Zilla even more quickly. In New Guinea, he is only briefly stalled by Kumonga. Making landfall in Japan, he tackles first Kamacuras, then Anguirus, Rodan and King Caesar simultaneously. The Gotengo reaches the Xilien mothership and drills its way in while Godzilla thrashes Hedorah (last seen in 1971) and Ebirah in Tokyo Bay. Gordon, his first officer, Ōzaki and Otonashi are taken prisoner by the Xilien leader, who reveals that the Xiliens intend to farm humanity for their delicious mitochondria.

In the ruins of central Tokyo, Godzilla faces his ultimate foe, Monster X, who’s just arrived inside a meteor. Monster X is a bulky, heavily armoured biped, although as we’ll shortly discover, that armour’s hiding something. Sent by the Shobijin, Mothra arrives to help but is pitted against an upgraded Gigan. (That was fast work, recovering Gigan from the South Pole, repairing him and giving him a makeover.) The new Gigan looks just like the old Gigan except that he has bifurcated chainsaws instead of metal hooks for forearms. He can also now fire razor-edged discs from his chest. Mothra dodges these and they circle back and decapitate Gigan again.

On the mothership, the Xilien leader tells Ōzaki that his people evolved from something like the mutants, and that he and Ōzaki are both rare super-mutants called “Keizers”. This is why Ōzaki was able to resist being controlled earlier. This time, he nearly kills the other humans while under the leader’s control, but Otonashi uses the Shobijin’s amulet to bring him back to his senses. A fight breaks out in the control room, during which the real Daigo, Namikawa and the senior M Organisation officer enter the bridge and come to our heroes’ aid, having been kept alive and apparently broken free in the confusion. Ōzaki and the Xilien leader fight hand to hand to the death while the others escape back to the Gotengo. Ōzaki ultimately wins, but as the Xilien leader dies, the mothership begins to self-destruct and Ōzaki barely joins the others aboard the Gotengo.

As Godzilla fights him to a standstill, Monster X sheds his armour to reveal that he’s really the winged, three-headed daikaiju Ghidorah. (Least surprising reveal ever. The monster puppet of many Shōwa era alien invaders, Ghidorah was last seen playing a very different role in GMK three movies ago. He looks more of a dull metallic colour than his usual golden-yellow; his necks are a bit stumpier, his horns are more pronounced and his eyes glow red.) Ghidorah is able to use the energy beams from his mouths to levitate Godzilla and smack him around, then bites into him and starts to drain his vitality. Ōzaki somehow channels his super-mutant energy through the Gotengo’s weapons systems and gives Godzilla the boost he needs to fight back. In short order, Godzilla blasts off two of Ghidorah’s heads, throws him into orbit and incinerates him. He then turns on the Gotengo, apparently still bent on settling his grudge against the gunship. At that moment, Minilla appears on the scene, having directed the hunter and his grandson to drive him into central Tokyo. He persuades Godzilla to back down and the two of them lope off into the sunset. Ōzaki remarks that it’s not the end, but the start of a new war, although what he means by that is never explained.

With celebratory anniversary episodes of media franchises – and the bigger the number, the more so, although I’m struggling to think of more than a handful that have made it as far as 50 years – the point isn’t to produce an exemplar of the series. It’s nice if that happens, but the real point is for the fans and the creators to look back and wallow in nostalgia. It’s more about iconography than substance. Hey, look, it’s this thing again. Remember that thing? Ha ha, we repeated the other thing. What made the franchise successful or interesting in the first place is hollowed out and presented as the gift shop souvenir version of itself.

Final Wars takes that to an extreme. There’s no suggestion here that the daikaiju might symbolise anything or offer any sort of comment on current affairs, unless it’s to whale on the Tri-Star Godzilla (1998) once again. They only exist to fight each other for our amusement, and they do precious little of that. Godzilla and his sparring partners get scant screentime, with most of the fight scenes – and admittedly there are a lot of them to get through – wrapped up in moments. All that money spent on new costumes and CGI models for a dozen old monsters, and they’re barely even there. I think Hedorah’s on screen for a total of 18 seconds. The film is far more interested in showing us scenes of humans (and humanoid aliens) fighting each other, posturing and looking butch while they drive motorbikes and flying submarines. (Ha, I nearly said the film was “more invested in its characters”! What an idea. The nearest anyone gets to character development is the revelation that they own a dog, and even that’s only in there for a plot reason.)

When the Godzilla movies of the 1970s were emptied of deeper meaning and reduced to a more superficial formula, they at least had camp appeal to fall back on. There’s some camp business here – Matsuoka Masahiro as Ōzaki and Kitamura Kazuki as the young Xilien leader are so arch they’re parabolic – but on the whole, Final Wars isn’t trying hard enough to justify being labelled as camp. What it seems to be aiming for is a kind of generic Hollywood brand of macho nihilism, and it’s quite lazy about it. It’s a rolling parade of explosions, tumbling vehicles, eye-rolling, grimacing and casual sexism with moments of outright misogyny, punctuated by classic Toho references that go nowhere, while a hyperactive dance/rock soundtrack rattles away underneath it all.

I wouldn’t say it takes itself entirely seriously. Exhibit A for the defence is the scene of a television talk show during the “X” craze, in which a panellist declares that it’s the dream of scientists everywhere to fight full contact with an alien. Exhibit B is the moment during the climactic bust-up when Ōzaki repeatedly punches the Xilien leader while, on a screen behind them, we can see an identically framed shot of Godzilla punching Monster X; this is the closest this film comes to offering anything that could be described as art. Exhibit C is the brief scene of a child in Canada playing with an army of kaiju action figures, which almost feels like a comment on Final Wars itself – in the course of its two long hours, the movie conveys all the narrative logic and sophistication of that child. Still, the overall tone of Final Wars is a humourless one.

In support of that is the washed-out cinematography. There’s a blue theme for scenes aboard the Gotengo and a yellow interior for the Xilien mothership, but everything else just looks grey. For a world that’s embraced international peace and harmony, it doesn’t look all that appealing. It’s more like a vision of Soviet-era futurism. Throughout the movie, Captain Gordon looks like he’s cosplaying a beefed-up version of Joseph Stalin. In fact, it looks a lot like a dry run of Iron Sky (2012), the crowd-sourced sci-fi comedy film about Nazis on the Moon, but with less self-awareness. And, well, maybe this speculative vision is fair enough. If the world is in a constant state of emergency because of all those daikaiju, and the diplomatic authority of the UN has yielded to the military authority of the EDF, maybe this is just what it would look like. Perhaps this is a more honest take than the more wholesome, photogenic heroism of G-Force (1989-95) or the JXSDF (2002-03).

Here's what I think might have happened behind the scenes, and bear in mind this is purely speculation on my part. IMDb credits Mimura Wataru and Tomiyama Shōgo with developing the storyline for Final Wars. Tomiyama was the executive producer of every Toho kaiju movie from Yamato Takeru (1994) onward, including this one; Mimura had worked on the scripts for Yamato Takeru, Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla II (1993) and three previous Millennium series Godzilla films. I imagine they came up with the idea of marking Godzilla’s 50th anniversary with something like Destroy All Monsters (1968) but bigger, drawing heavily on the tokusatsu movies of their youth for inspiration. (There is a definite lean in Final Wars towards commemorating the Shōwa era, and I think that’s significant. Barring Zilla, and we all know why that’s there, the daikaiju are exclusively Shōwa era veterans. Those creations that were original to the Heisei and Millennium series do get a nod, but only glancingly, in the opening montage of clips and in the toys scattered on that Canadian child’s floor.)

As the actual scriptwriters, IMDb credits the director, Kitamura Ryūhei, and Kiriyama Isao, who has collaborated with Kitamura on several of his films. Nothing in their resumés indicates any history with kaiju eiga, or with any cinematic genre other than hyperkinetic action thrillers. They’d become international big shots with hi-octane flicks like Versus (2000) and Azumi (2003). I suspect they were brought in to make Godzilla’s birthday movie as saleable as possible to the international audience that had responded so well to sci-fi films like The Matrix (1999) – the Wachowskis’ breakthrough movie is specifically referenced in the Xiliens’ trenchcoats and a couple of “bullet time” shots in the fight scenes. I think Isao and Kitamura took the shell of what Tomiyama and Mimura had plotted out and used it as a frame on which to hang the gung-ho Hollywood-style martial arts explosionbuster they really wanted to make.

At some point, someone must have noticed that the plotline about superhuman mutants offered a link to the hugely successful Marvel comics spinoff X-Men (2000) and its 2003 sequel, and that that in turn resonated with the presence in Toho’s back catalogue of a species of aliens from Planet X, in Invasion of Astro-Monster. Maybe it was baked into the original storyline, maybe it was added into a later draft. The Xiliens we see here are a kind of amalgam of several Shōwa era alien invaders. They have more in common with the aliens from the nebula next door in Godzilla vs Gigan – using specific humans as disguises, actually sort of insectoid in appearance, plus of course they control Gigan. The parallels with Destroy All Monsters, meanwhile, might make us expect the Kilaaks to turn up. It’s plausible that this movie’s villains weren’t originally intended to be the Xiliens. Apart from their deceptive offer of help to humanity and their penchant for Matrix-friendly clothing, they don’t share many of the characteristics of the original visitors from Planet X.

There are further Shōwa era reprises in the casting. Mizuno Kumi, who made a recent comeback in Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla (2002), appears as the head of the EDF, and in a direct callback to the character she played in Invasion of Astro-Monster, her character here is called Namikawa. Takarada Akira, playing the UN Secretary-General, also starred in Invasion of Astro-Monster, Mothra vs Godzilla (1964) and the original Godzilla (1954). Sahara Kenji is unrecognisable as the EDF’s chief scientist; he’d been the star of Rodan (1956) and King Kong vs Godzilla (1962) and had a recurring minor role as a government official in the Heisei series movies. Representing the more recent film series and cameoing in the pre-credits scene of the Gotengo burying Godzilla in Antarctic ice are Nakao Akira and Ueda Kōichi, as the vessel’s original captain and his first officer; they’d played the Prime Minister and a senior Defence Ministry official in Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla and Godzilla: Tokyo SOS, and Nakao had made repeat appearances as the head of the UN’s anti-Godzilla strike force during the Heisei series.

Stealing most of the scenes he’s in with his sheer physicality is Don Frye, playing Captain Douglas Gordon. Frye was a mixed martial artist and pro wrestler who was popular in Japan, so he clearly met the filmmakers’ requirements as far as the fight scenes were concerned. But Frye seems to have parlayed this opportunity into a switch to an acting career. I note purely as an aside that, at time of writing, his IMDb listing is longer than Kitamura Ryūhei’s.

It would have been a shame if this cavalcade of absurdity had been the final hurrah for Godzilla. There will be more Godzilla movies, but it’ll take a few blog posts to get to them. For now, let this stand as the last film to feature a Godzilla portrayed by a stunt actor in a costume. Three cheers for Kitagawa Tsutomu, the main Millennium Godzilla; Satsuma Kenpachirō, the main Heisei Godzilla; Nakajima Haruo, the main Shōwa Godzilla; and all the other stunt actors who stepped into the role when needed.