#6 in my ranking of the Heisei, Millennium, and Reiwa eras of the Godzilla franchise.
This is a mess, but it’s a surprisingly enjoyable mess. The first thirty minutes is borderline intolerable. The last five minutes are ridiculous. The middle hundred minutes, though? The exact kind of fun monster mayhem I like to see from this franchise. It’s just overstuffed with minor subplots that don’t really matter that much, along with more techno-jargon than you can shake a stick at. Overstuffed and fun is kind of the stock and trade of the Godzilla franchise, so this second entry in the Heisei era is something of a limited return to form.
Godzilla remains buried under the volcanic ash while Japan tries to rebuild Tokyo. In the middle of this effort, a group of American soldiers steal some Godzilla flesh and try to get out with it, only stopped by being killed by SSS9 (Manjot Bedi), an agent working for a Saradian company (like Arabia, but different). The company hires Dr. Genshiro Shiragami (Koji Takahashi) to develop plants for the desert, but his daughter, Erika (Yasuko Sawaguchi), is killed in a terrorist attack organized by the American company Bio-Major. Five years go by, Dr. Shiragami crossbreeds a rose with his daughter’s DNA and Godzilla’s cells, and we’re primed for a giant monster to face off against Godzilla.
There are more characters, but they’re hardly worth digging into. They amount to little more than functionaries in a plot that they can barely affect. However, when a terrorist organization (Bio-Major) threatens to blow up the volcano and release Godzilla for an engineered bacteria called the Anti-Nuclear Energy Bacteria from a Japanese company, things are ready. Godzilla rises. The rose develops very quickly and grows to Godzilla size, named Biollante by Shiragami. Godzilla heads straight towards Biollante for a fight, wins, and then is off to feed. However, Biollante is immortal and will come back.
Also, there’s a girl with ESP who helpfully informs everyone that Biollante has the spirit of Erika inside it. Which is nice.
All of the plodding setup and endless rhetoric about the pros and cons of genetic engineering (with a nuclear tinge because Godzilla movie) seriously drag down the first thirty minutes of the film. Thankfully, though, the writer/director Kazuki Omori, understood the more proper balance for this kind of film meant that it gets completely and totally discarded at a certain point. And that point is when Godzilla rises out of the ocean to face off against Biollante.
From that point on, the film is a special effects extravaganza that has full aim on making Godzilla scary and unbeatable. He traverses across Japan, this time towards Osaka, ready to consume nuclear energy for food all while the puny humans actually do have a plan that they try to execute. One of my issues with The Return to Godzilla was how lazily all of the elements came together in the big action sequences. That doesn’t happen here as soldiers have to hoof it up skyscrapers based on where Godzilla is instead of just waiting for him to show up outside the window, which allows them to shoot a missile with a warhead filled with Anti-Nuclear Energy bacteria into Godzilla’s mouth. And then they have to figure out how to heat Godzilla up for the bacteria to operate faster, so they set up a roadblock to hit him with energy weapons.
It’s ridiculous. It’s adorable in miniature. It’s fun. This is why I enjoy Godzilla movies.
And the film really had me for that solid 100-minutes or so. I was having a really good time.
And then we had to revisit out “theme” in the final minutes along with the attempt to resolve the SSS9 subplot that involves the use of a remote weapon that makes just this side of no sense. Also, Godzilla gets to march off into the sunset for reasons (sequels, duh). The final five minutes kind of ruined the film for me.
But only to a limited degree. It’s a fun overall package that just drags for that opening and becomes stupid in its final minutes. I was entertained in that special, Godzilla way for the bulk of the film. I know that there are Godzilla fans out there who love that their favorite franchise “takes on serious issues”, but it’s never more than incoherent nonsense. I could deal with less of that and more with the smashy-smashy. On balance, Godzilla vs. Biollante almost gets me there.
Almost.
Originally published here
English (US) · 