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.