#6 in my ranking of the Showa Era Godzilla films.
Toho takes the monster mashup to the logical conclusion: turning the familiar ones into good guys to fight the new monstrous bad guy. These sorts of franchises can’t go on forever making a huge threat repeatedly defeatable. The threat loses its sense of danger by the tenth time. So, if you’re going to bring Godzilla back, don’t find another way to kill him or put him under ice. Get him to win the day for humanity instead. Then you can focus the idea of the threat on some new creation, perhaps a three-headed flying monster who previously destroyed Venus 5,000 years ago? Sure, why not? Honda and Tsuburaya are up to the task to deliver that spectacle, but the need for humanity in an inherently inhuman story undermines the effort just enough.
A meteor shower leads to one meteor crashing in the Japanese Alps at the same time that the small country of Selgina is going through a leadership crisis focused on their princess Salno (Akiko Wakabayashi). The rival regime’s assassin, Malmess (Hisaya Ito), sets a bomb on her plane which explodes midair. Salno escapes by jumping out of the plane because she hears a voice from the meteor. The crashed meteor in the Alps gets investigated by Professor Miura (Hiroshi Koizumi). A police investigator, Shindo (Yosuke Natsuki), decides to investigate a woman who says she’s from Venus who looks exactly like Salno (I’m really not sure if this is supposed to be a mystery to the audience or not). Shindo’s sister, Naoko (Yuriko Hoshi), works for a sensationalist media organization looking for interesting science-fictiony stories in the real world, so she pursues to woman from Venus at the same time. Meanwhile, the two princesses from Infant Island (Emi and Yumo Ito) are visiting Japan with news that one of the two Mothra twins died (budgetary reasons, I suppose), but the other one is alive and well and still in the larval stage (definitely production reasons because wings are hard).
Anyway, the point of the film isn’t all of these characters. It’s the monsters. And, much like Mothra vs. Godzilla, the bringing together of the monsters is really just coincidence. Rodan decides to rise up from Mount Edo because reasons. Godzilla shows up on Japanese shores for reasons. They start fighting, and it is just coincidentally about the same time that Ghidorah rises from the meteor and starts ravaging Japan. The only part that isn’t coincidental is the Infant Island princesses appealing to Mothra to come to Japan and help. It’s nice that there’s some small element of these characters running around actually affecting the monsters in some way, to be honest. It makes them feel like a bit less of a waste of space.
However, most of the human action is around Malmess trying to track down Salno and kill her. It’s obvious that Honda didn’t want to just make monster movies all the time, and he tried to make all of these things into something else for at least some of the runtime. This political thriller aspect is, much like many of the attempts across the previous decade of Honda’s body of work, decently well done. It’s not great and wouldn’t be enough to handle an entire movie on its own, but the chase around Japan while monsters pop up in the background reflects the better done effort to have monsters around another kind of movie in Dogora. I do appreciate, though, that this thriller part doesn’t just go away once the monster stomping really gets going. It actually goes through the monster action to the end.
The monster action would be great if it weren’t for this effort to humanize the three Earth-based monsters. Well, first I have to say that I have no complaints about Tsubaraya’s work. It’s the same kind of technical achievement he’s been building upon since the original Godzilla. The problem is a narrative one mixed with the needs from the studio to give more solid explanations for their behavior as well as trying to appeal to kids more. Essentially, the problem started back with Godzilla Raids Again when he lost his level of metaphor and just became a monster who likes to stomp. They took something elemental and almost unknowable into a large, uncontrollable toddler having a tantrum. That’s fine for some fun monster action, but it makes them feel small. Having three of them come together to set aside their differences to fight an extraterrestrial kaiju leads to a discussion between the three (translated by the Infant Island princesses) about how humans were mean to them. I mean, it makes them feel small, and it was a scene that Honda later regretted adding in. Sure, it’s just an excuse to get them together and fight Ghidorah, but it’s both kind of awkward from a practical filmmaking point of view (watching them flap their mouths to talk is weird) and too human for creatures who, I feel, shouldn’t exhibit much in terms of human behavior. They should be more alien and unknowable.
That being said, the entire package is a light and decently amusing time. The monster action is good and fun. The political thriller stuff is decent while the film commits to it through the entire runtime. I just have these niggling issues around how the monsters come together that keep popping up, especially in the runup to the big final fight. Also, I know that the wings were a giant headache, but when I see Mothra in a movie, I’m not there to see larva Mothra. I want those wings!
Originally published here
English (US) · 