#11 in my ranking of the Heisei, Millennium, and Reiwa eras of the Godzilla franchise.
What is Godzilla doing in this Mothra movie?
In the continued effort to take Godzilla seriously, Takao Okawara and Kazuki Omori move Godzilla from being a metaphor for nuclear power and throw him into an environmentalist tale of how Japan’s modernization is killing Gaia. That’s a marked contrast from the previous film where Japan was on the guide path to world domination in the 21st century. We also have the returning problem of needing humans to explain things but being unable to actually influence anything, making most of the film feel superfluous. At least the monster action is actually really good. The film has that going for it.
A meteorite strikes Earth and awakens Godzilla. Unfortunately, it also awakens the ancient moth-like creature called Battra, hidden in the colder norther sea where it has rested for 10,000 years. It also causes a mudslide that reveals the hidden egg of Mothra on Infant Island. In the middle of this is a adventuring thief, Takuya (Tetsuya Bessho), caught in Thailand and convinced to work for the Japanese government by his ex-wife, Masako (Satomi Kobayashi) who works for an agency that wants him to accompany Masako to Infant Island. They bring along the young representative from the Marutomo Corporation, Kenji (Takehiro Murata). They discover the Cosmos (Keiko Imamura and Sayaka Osawa), tiny people who sing to Mothra in her egg and exposition dump about the battle from 10,000 years ago against climate changing machines that Battra sort of won but Mothra ultimately won when the machines were destroyed and Battra was cast into the icy sea.
You see, the point of all this is that human industry has “loaded the gun” that the meteor triggered in awakening Battra too early, all evidence of the Earth’s spirit being attacked and out of balance. However…the meteor woke up Godzilla as well, so Mothra and Battra waking up to help stop Godzilla is…good? I mean, if you want to take this seriously and say that Godzilla was a sin of nuclear energy (always created by nations other than Japan, originally by America, in the revamped version as described in Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah, by the Soviets) in addition to the sin of environmentalism then all of the mess that happens in the movie is just humanity’s fault in general. If that’s the message the movie wants to make, that’s fine. Bit of a downer, though. I mean…the film is blaming humanity for the environmental part, but if that’s the extent of it then there’s always the hope at the end of change. Add in the nuclear part and it’s all an intertwined disaster of humanity’s own doing without ever addressing the nuclear part, well, then it’s just that humanity sucks.
Anyway, the actual plot is Godzilla and Battra battling it out at sea, Mothra hatching, and then the two battling monsters getting consumed by an underwater volcano. This leaves humanity time for the CEO of Marutomo (Makoto Otake) to take the Cosmos and try to include them in his corporation marketing strategy real quick. This pisses off Mothra who heads towards Tokyo to cause destruction, made all the worse by Takuya stealing the Cosmos and hiding them for money from someone else (it doesn’t matter who). This is essentially a narrative delaying tactic until Battra and Godzilla come out to play again.
By the end and the third act, humanity gets so sidelined by the giant creatures battling it out that all they can do is provide the occasional color commentary as Mothra and Battra have a fight that Godzilla eventually becomes a part of. Seriously…it really feels like this is Mothra’s movie against Battra and Godzilla is just kind of in it.
So, it’s kind of an incoherent mess of a message movie dressed up in a rubber suit, but at least, if you ignore some of the subtext of the larger franchise, it kind of makes sense. The human characters feel like a waste of space since their actions within the drama itself don’t seem to affect anything. The most is to attract Mothra to Japan, but the rest just happens completely outside of their control.
So, most of the film is following humans who can’t affect anything while the actual focus is on large monsters fighting, changing allegiances, and having some kind of allegorical fight about the health of the planet. Those monsters get forgotten for long stretches, and the film as a whole suffers for it. I’m once again hoping for a Godzilla film without any puny human characters, made all the worse by the fact that this is probably the best looking monster action in the franchise so far. I mean, the monster stuff is often quite beautiful to just look at.
So, no, it’s not good. It’s a mess. I mostly blame the writer, Omori, because his fingerprints over the franchise since Godzilla vs. Biollante are not that hard to discern. Well, it’s mostly the incoherence of Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah that is an obvious prelude to the action here. However, the monster stuff is…really good. I just wish the rest of the movie was that good.
Originally published here
English (US) · 