The Whale God (1962)

directed by Tokuzō Tanaka

Japan

100 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I tried watching this quite some time ago but couldn't make it through, I guess because it felt too long. But recently, thanks to it finally getting a good home media release, people have started talking about this movie again - and for good reason, because sitting down and mustering the energy to focus on this fairly demanding, but extremely rewarding film made me realize how much of an underrated gem it is.

This is a movie about a whaling village driven collectively to madness by their repeated failure to catch and kill an abnormally large whale which they've taken to naming the "Whale God" (kujira-gami; it's more or less a literal translation, but there are subtleties to the word "kami"/"gami" that I encourage you to look into). From an outside perspective, it's easy to balk at that runtime given the simplicity of the plot - "Movie about a whale, 100 minutes" - but there's so much that goes into the story that it makes those 100 minutes feel expertly utilized.

Most of the first half of the movie deals with establishing individual characters and developing conflicts between them. One thing that's interesting about this is that the presence of so many extras and various background actors in every scene gives the characters who are focused on more of a sense of just being random members of the village. They're not - one of the leads is the son of the village's best spearman, and other prominent figures such as the village elder and his daughter come into play - but there's none of that feeling of the movie being full of random nobodies and then a couple of famous actors that you might get in a Hollywood film with a similar setting. Not that the actors in the forefront are nobodies: we have Kōjirō Hongō (Gamera, reluctantly), Shintarō Katsu (Zatoichi), and Takashi Shimura (everything), as well as Shiho Fujimura in a smaller role, who is not immediately recognizable but had a career playing various supporting female characters in many famous films. But these more familiar faces are blended really well into the overall atmosphere of the village so that everybody feels like they're on even ground.

I want to take a second to talk about Katsu's performance in specific because he's really great here. His character, Kishu (this I think was less of a name and more just a nickname based on where he says he came from) is an outsider whose only goal is to make money off the Whale God. The village elder promises his home, title, and his daughter's hand in marriage to whoever can kill the whale. Not only does Kishu have his sights set on all of this, but he openly brags that he won't be satisfied there; he'll sell the daughter to a brothel and continue making money off of his kill. Katsu in this role exudes a malevolence, a total lack of conscience. He has an unsettling and domineering physicality to him that makes for a real contrast with his role as Ichi. Kishu plays off of Hongō's character, Shaki, in very interesting ways; had I the time to do so, I would want to go on at further length about how deeply homoerotic the fight scene between the two of them felt, but I'll leave that thought in my brain for now.

An element of this movie that I think is absolutely fascinating but remains subtle is the fact that this whaling village is either undergoing or has already undergone Christianization. A white Christian priest has a church in the village, and when Shaki adopts the child his girlfriend Ei has after Kishu rapes her, they have the baby baptized in the church. Although the backdrop of Christianity is there, the villagers nonetheless continue to conceptualize the whale as a kami, and this is never shown as being in conflict with the growth of Christianity in the village. Indeed, traditional religion seems to take precedence over Christianity when it really matters - although the priest is against it, the villagers move the dying Shaki to where he can converse with the remains of the whale in his last days. 

There is an implication here that, with Shaki and Ei's child, the future of the village and its traditional animistic religion is uncertain. The killing of the Whale God could be an element of this. With the death of the whale there is now one less god in the world - a trivial thing, perhaps, when your worldview holds that every single object and animal is inhabited by its own god - but the presence of a new God begins to take shape. The villagers' collective rage and hatred towards the whale swells to such an all-consuming height that one cannot help but begin to wonder if there's something else underneath it.

An incredibly dark, at times somewhat slow-paced film, The Whale God is capped off by twenty or so minutes of total practical effects insanity. Both Hongō and Katsu spend the latter part of the film on top of the whale (sorry, Raúl Ruiz fans, pun intended) in a protracted sequence that looked absolutely miserable to film but extremely compelling. The whale is very realistic, but what really cinches it is the performance both actors give while attempting to ring the whale's nose and bring it to shore to be killed. It's totally believable, as is everything else about the film. Akira Ifukube's inimitable score, Kaneto Shindo's screenplay, Tokuzō Tanaka's direction, and the myriad of impressive acting skills on display here all work together to create a film of rare caliber.

Seven Samurai (1954)

directed by Akira Kurosawa

Japan

207 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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For a long time I was carrying around a dirty little secret, and that secret was that despite being a huge fan of Showa-era Japanese film, I had not seen Seven Samurai. I wasn't unfamiliar with Kurosawa, and I wanted to watch this, but you gotta carve out time for a 207-minute-long movie, even when you know doing so will be a rewarding experience. (This is not, as of this time, the longest movie I've ever seen; it is tied with Inagaki's 1963 Chushingura, which is also exactly 207 minutes.) Many people have written a library's worth of words about this movie far more intelligently than I ever could, but not saying at least something about it feels wrong.

It's kind of amazing that almost four hours of film can come out of a remarkably simple premise. The plot of the film is that a village of poor farmers, pushed to near-starvation by continued bandit raids on their rice crops, hires a group of samurai to fight back against the bandits and protect them. The film is split down the middle by an intermission, and while I'm not sure if it was intentional to divide it into two distinct halves, there is a definite change in tone, from a focus on planning in the first half to a focus on doing in the second. And the beauty of it is that the planning stages are almost as interesting, if not more so, than the action.

Now, this was my first watch, and I haven't even read any of those far more intelligent things people have said about this movie yet. But I think I'm onto it. I think I might have it figured out. I think the idea here is that Seven Samurai is not about the samurai.

Kurosawa does this thing that I've noticed in almost all of his films where he has a way of making characters - even ones who should be the "protagonists", ones who we spend the most time with and should be getting to know the best - decentralized. Instead of populating his movies with heroes, he populates them with people, making it so the characters who are in the spotlight feel like they're functionally no deeper than the villagers in the background. We never get much backstory on the seven, and if you're not familiar with the movie, like I wasn't, you might be expecting that. I think the movie plays with that expectation intentionally: it's only the leader of the seven, Shimada (played by Takashi Shimura in one of his best performances), who realizes that the victory belongs to the peasants, not his group. Neither are the antagonists ever expanded upon: the difference between villain and victim here is somewhat ill-defined, and the film presents a cycle of violence that should make the viewer slightly uneasy about assigning glory to any side.

The best example of this kind of surprising de-valorization of characters who would in any other movie have been framed as heroes comes in Kikuchiyo's death. Most if not all of the samurai do have at least some kind of personality, but Kikuchiyo is the most outsized by far - of course he is, it's Toshiro Mifune in the role - and he dies in the mud without final words, like a peasant. Which he was - he's one of the only characters to have backstory, and we learn that he was born a poor farmer just like the villagers he's reluctantly protecting. That totally unexpected coda to an incredibly colorful, loud, energetic character is the perfect example of how this movie shifts the focus off of who we would expect to be focused on, and onto the people in the background.

Seven Samurai is one of those movies where time has done it a bit of a disservice - it's not that it doesn't warrant the reputation it has as one of the best movies ever made, but its constant popularity throughout the past 70 years has done a lot to obscure our context of the film. Because movies like this can be made with relative ease today through the use of CGI and other "cheats", one can sometimes forget that all of this was real, physical stuff; real sets, real mud, real (extremely terrified) horses. The history of Japanese cinema began decades earlier, but I would argue that with such landmark films as Seven Samurai, Godzilla, and Twenty-Four Eyes, 1954 was a huge step for the country's film industry.

I won't brook a single argument about whether or not this deserved to be three hours and forty minutes long. It deserves to be longer, if it wants to be. There's nothing in here that feels unnecessary to the larger picture. Visually, narratively, and in its dialogue, this is a really monumental film. But it's also that way because of what isn't in it. It's brilliant because it leaves these holes through which you can get a better feel for the real core of it. The end doesn't feel triumphant - the peasants certainly seem to have triumphed, but there's not a sense of satisfying victory. But the end isn't the point. To risk deploying a cliche, this is a movie that is totally about the journey rather than the destination.

Ultraman: The Adventure Begins (1987)

directed by Ray Patterson, Mitsuo Kusakabe

USA/Japan

78 minutes

1.5 stars out of 5

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So I knew that an Ultraman cartoon produced by Hanna-Barbera existed, but I'd for the longest time I was under the impression that it was an entire series, not just this one-off thing, so I'd been treating it like Hanna-Barbera's Godzilla: "I'll get around to that someday, maybe, if I feel like it." The Adventure Continues was evidently intended to be an entire series, but that didn't work out, and honestly, I'm okay with it.

The premise should be somewhat familiar to anybody who's seen an Ultra series, and easily digestible to those who haven't: three pilots - Chuck, Beth, and Scott - collide with a mysterious energy sphere, later revealed to have been Ultras from the M78 nebula heading to Earth. The pilots would have been killed in the accident, but the Ultras chose instead to merge with their bodies, giving them the ability to shift forms. At the same time, an invasion by aliens from a planet called Sorkin is going on, and although attempts are made to deal with the monsters non-violently, the Ultras must protect the Earth against these giant monsters with their newfound powers.

It's been a while since I've rated anything this low. Maybe it feels worse because I've been watching a lot of good stuff lately, but I've got to say, the quality of this one ranges from "mildly entertaining" to "pretty dismal". I'll try to be kind to it, and get the stuff I liked out of the way first, but after that... no guarantees.

I have a soft spot for late-'80s/early-'90s anime, which is basically what this is; the animation is clearly not done by a US studio (as many cartoons aired in the States weren't) and it's got the vibe of anime from that era, where everybody is blocky and buff and all the women look the same. I'm not saying the animation is good, but it's comfortingly familiar to someone like me who enjoys that kind of thing. There is interesting conflict between Dr. Susan Rand and her team, who are dedicated to researching the monsters instead of just killing them, and the three pilots/Ultras. They're eventually persuaded into seeing the value of a non-violent solution to dealing with the monsters whenever possible, but unfortunately, it's not possible very often. Looking at this with the knowledge that it was meant to be expanded into a full series, introducing that option of having monsters who were not intentionally destructive and were dealt with in a kind and gentle fashion would have provided a nice change of pace. The fight scenes are also extremely entertaining; aerial battles are definitely the place (the only place) where the animation team shines and the cartoon feels like it's actually getting decent.

Also, Zoon, the big fat dragon who's just a sweet confused baby, was great. What an adorable little dude. I loved seeing the Ultras take care of him and relocate him to somewhere he could live in peace. Perfect creature.

I really have to struggle to come up with nice things to say about this, because the balance of good and bad here is weighted heavily towards "bad". Maybe this is my fault for having internet brainrot, but I could not stop thinking about G.I. Joe PSAs throughout this entire thing. The voice acting is so bad and so ill-fitting with the animation that it creates these unintentionally hysterical moments, such as the pilots' boss witnessing them all die horribly in a fiery crash and just solemnly going "They were the best." All of the dialogue feels like a parody of emotion, a script written by an AI who's never met a human before and has only been fed on Saturday morning cartoons. And that's not even touching on the jokes - the humor is so, so stale. Absolutely nothing about it that's intended to be funny is. The only humorous moments were when I was cracking up thinking "Hey, kid, I'm a computer! Stop all the downloadin'!"

I was trying to give this the benefit of the doubt, because I think all Ultra is good Ultra, and I didn't want to have a bias against The Adventure Begins just because of its being produced by a domestic, mainstream studio. I don't have to worry about that, though, because as it turns out I have a bias against it because it is bad. To be fair, it's not really right to judge this by itself, because how many pilot episodes are considered the best part of a series? If it had been given the chance to develop its storylines and feature more interesting ideas and fresher jokes, it could have turned into something good, and maybe that's the real tragedy here - maybe this thing was cut off before it could blossom. What we have, though, is just a dud, to me. The action sequences are fun, but I couldn't say I got much out of this. If there's anything good about it, it's that Tsuburaya has embraced Team USA into their fold, and they appear in some truly fun scenes in the Ultra Galaxy Fight side-series. Ultrawoman Beth for life.

Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla (1974)

directed by Jun Fukuda

Japan

84 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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This year is the 50th birthday of one of my favorite Godzilla films, which also means it's the 50th birthday of Mechagodzilla itself. I used to talk about how I didn't particularly like Mechagodzilla, but somehow I've come around to it, to the point where I think it's genuinely one of the most fascinating aspects of the series to think about. Pitting something created artificially against something created by accident brings a new angle to the "man vs. nature" question that often comes up within the narrative of a Godzilla film.

In fact, thinking about "man vs. nature" provides an interesting lens through which to examine Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla, because it's really man and nature tag-teaming it in this one. Mechagodzilla looks insurmountable at some points: that final battle where the real Godzilla and King Caesar are up against it and it's firing off weapons from every single part of its body is one of the most breathtaking battles in the series - yes, from any era, even beating out some Heisei stuff, IMO - because it's a moment where there's really nothing Godzilla can do, save for standing there and enduring the constant barrage of missiles and hoping to outlast it. But, all of this being said - and this is something I really only realized on my fourth rewatch - Mechagodzilla, and by extension its creators, the Black Hole Planet 3 aliens, were defeated by our friendly local irradiated dinosaur and a big guy who lives in a mountain who can only be summoned by a lady singing a song.

It's the chthonic vs. the invasive species. The whole "defenders of Earth" theme would be more explicitly developed in Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack, but Godzilla and King Caesar being guardians of the Earth is the de-facto backbone of Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla. 

There's ongoing debate - and probably always will be - about which Godzilla movie best balances its human story with its kaiju business. I don't see this one brought up to argue for the merits of its human characters, but personally (and this could just be because I've seen it four times and I know everything I can expect out of it) the mix between human/kaiju storylines feels totally satisfying here. It's not like the human characters have any depth, or relatable backstories that make me root for them as people, but they're still fun and interesting to watch. You don't want to see them get killed by aliens, which is, honestly, the bare minimum standard for any given character in fiction. Everybody's also dressed really nice all the time. Nobody looks like they woke up that day and just threw something on. I admire how put-together the whole cast of characters looks throughout the entire film.

You can't not talk about this one without talking about the practical effects. Teruyoshi Nakano's fingerprints are all over the thing. Even if you're a new fan who isn't familiar with the team behind the movies, you would easily be able to tell a Nakano movie apart from something else based on the sheer quantity of explosions. It's because of him that that final battle looks so unique; it's because of him that Mechagodzilla's entire body being a weapon is executed so flawlessly onscreen. There's a quote from him about how he wanted to blow the roof off one of Toho's soundstages but Toho didn't let him, and I gotta say I think they should have let him cook.

Another thing I realized on this rewatch is how jarring the Fake Godzilla scenes are. At this point they'd really perfected the "friendly Godzilla" design, and seeing that chubby, affable, cartoonishly-proportioned version of Godzilla break Anguirus' jaw so badly it starts spewing blood and limps away (and out of the series for the next 30 years) feels wrong. I think it was kind of a bold move to have a character who'd become pretty much explicitly a children's superhero look like it was committing brutal acts of violence. With Eiji Tsuburaya's death, they went to some weird places with this one, and I do love it. I do.

I don't really have much to say about this that other people haven't said better. I like this one more with every rewatch. There's something so pitch-perfect about it. I love every Godzilla movie, but I will admit that some of them do have moments where it feels like nothing is happening. This isn't one of them: I'm always either focusing on the wacky artifact-stealing/INTERPOL/ancient prophecy/ferry ride/kidnapping stuff or on the fieriest kaiju battle ever put to film. I wouldn't cut anything from this. It's all good.

Twenty-Four Eyes (1954)

directed by Keisuke Kinoshita

Japan

156 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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Even before meeting her, Miss Ôishi's class have already given her a nickname ("Miss Koishi", or "little pebble", a play on her surname, which means "large stone"). The children love her just because she's there; a kind, friendly face; the only person who's willing to let them be children for a while in the middle of the harsh island life that requires them to grow up much too fast. This is shown by Miss Ôishi's reaction to a prank that trips her in the sand and causes her to tear her Achilles' tendon, taking her out of her job for several months: kids will be kids. She'd be within her rights to be frustrated with her class, but they had no way of knowing what would be the result of their innocent joke, and if she were to punish them simply for being children, the innocence they had such a tenuous hold on would be further damaged.

For the first part of this film, the focus is mainly on the children, and they're portrayed as a group. It's not that they don't have their individual lives, but they're united for a brief time by the experience of being children and facing the hardships that all young children face. The theme of unity is something that comes up very often in this film: not unity in a political or ideological sense, but in a sense of just being a human, being alive in a difficult world. When the children sing their school songs, which they remember throughout their lives, and which are a thread that continues to connect them well after leaving school, they're together not in motivation or outlook but as a family of individual souls connected by a shared humanity. One could watch the more lighthearted first act of this film forever, because the performances Kinoshita elicits from the children are so wonderfully authentic that it feels like watching real children go about their lives. One of the most endearing parts is when they learn where Miss Ôishi is staying while recuperating from her injury, and somehow, as a group, manage to catch a bus to her hospital, but they don't plan it very well, so by the time they arrive, they're just a band of miserable, dusty, crying, hungry children. The unwavering loyalty the kids show to their teacher remains constant throughout the timeline of the film, no matter the strife that they all endure.

This is a beautifully shot film, incredibly expansive in its scale but at the same time enclosed. It doesn't restrict itself to the school or the homes of the children, but instead involves what truly feels like the entire island. And that's because it literally is: the film was shot on Shôdoshima, the island that it depicts. I don't think any studio sets were used here, so the scenery is utterly breathtaking. It may have been deliberate that as the world of the children gets smaller and is defined more by societal pressures, there are less sweeping nature shots, and characters are more commonly shown in towns and houses. But for a little while, Twenty-Four Eyes reminds us like very few things do of what it's like to be a child in a vast and new world.

Eventually the war comes even to a small secluded island. Despite being beautiful, tender, and softspoken, this has to be one of the most brutally effective anti-war films I've ever seen. Even before the events that would lead to Japan's official entrance of the war, it rapidly becomes dangerous for Miss Ôishi to go on teaching the same way she had been before. One of the school's other teachers is arrested on suspicion of being a communist simply because another teacher he was friends with was reading a book rumored to have communistic or at least anti-war messages to his students. Miss Ôishi pipes up: she's taught the same book to her kids, and has it in her classroom at that moment. (The principal burns it upon this revelation.) Suddenly, practically overnight, Miss Ôishi can no longer teach her students material just because it's well-written and sounds good and talks about the value of life. Now, her job is as an extension of the Empire, to teach her students to become nothing more than soldiers whose only value lies in their ability to die for their country.

This is when the film takes its inevitable turn towards being completely devastating. Miss Ôishi is driven right out of her job by her newfound restriction from teaching her students anything that might lead them to appreciate being alive. With a new and growing family, her time is now taken up with caring for her own children, and the love of teaching is beaten out of her - but not her love of her students. Her class is decimated by the war. Her male students are drafted and only two of them come back, one permanently injured. Her husband dies in the war as well. Even before the war, life takes its toll on her children almost from the minute they can walk: several of her girls are required to stay at home and care for younger siblings, or to earn money doing jobs for their family. Again, Miss Ôishi's role as the one refuge for these children where they can learn about a world bigger than their island and experience wonder and care is crucial to their lives and hers. Despite narrowly escaping censure or worse for "communist sympathies" (the appreciation and protection of human life), Miss Ôishi remains staunchly anti-war. When it ends, she doesn't care that Japan lost, she's just happy it's over.

I believe that this film is something that needs to be paid attention to now because of the change in curriculum that comes when the government begins to intervene in Miss Ôishi's school. When the children were young and war wasn't on the horizon, being taught how to live in the world, how to appreciate just being alive in nature with your friends, seemed as or more important as being taught actual book knowledge. But that doesn't make for a good soldier. Indoctrination with a message espoused by the government or a miscellaneous ruling party, for ends that ultimately serve the larger structure at the cost of the lives of individuals, is occurring now, in the US, in what is occasionally referred to as "peacetime". Teachers aren't - and haven't been - free to teach children how to live. They can only teach them how to be citizens.

Despite the overwhelming amount of suffering the children and Miss Ôishi undergo, the end of the film remains - although bittersweet and emotionally raw - still lit up with hope. After 18 years, the children still haven't forgotten their teacher, although their number has been greatly reduced - by war, disease, circumstance, and the simple process of growing up. I think the end message of this movie is that the only real way to live a life is to be there for other people who are also trying to live their lives, no matter how much it might hurt when things separate you. Watching this just cements my feelings about cinema even further, that movies like this have to be seen and remembered, because even though it is fiction, it's still crucial to the human experience to tell stories that are a lot like real life, but a little more beautiful. Also, I knew I recognized Hideko Takamine from somewhere, and I realized that I first saw her in Naruse's A Wanderer's Notebook, in which she played a character who underwent changes in response to her circumstances over some span of time in a similar way to Miss Ôishi. Her performance as the lead (if one wants to define "the lead" as her, not the children) in this movie makes it what it is.

- "Are you against soldiers, Miss Ôishi?"

- "No, but I prefer fishermen and rice merchants."

- "So you're a coward?"

- "Yes, I'm a coward."

Godzilla Raids Again (1955)

directed by Motoyoshi Oda

Japan

82 minutes

2.5 stars out of 5

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Of every Godzilla movie, this was the last one I'd only watched once since I saw it for the first time four years ago. I don't think I'm alone in considering it possibly the worst Godzilla movie (certainly, if I may get on my soapbox, worse than the Heisei movies that people tend to deride, like vs. Megaguirus or 2000), which was an opinion I'd had ever since I first watched it, but enough time had passed that I wanted to see if maybe I liked it better this time. As it turns out, the opposite happened: I think I actually like it less. But I do, at least, have more to say about it now.

I think the most obvious area where Raids Again is lacking is in the human story. There are human characters there, but they don't have the kind of depth to them that the human cast in the '54 film did; however, I don't dislike the characters in this one, because even if they aren't fleshed out on a personal level, they're interesting for the position that they occupy. All of the main players in this are military pilots who are actually fighting Godzilla up close and personally. Many Godzilla movies following this one have focused on members of the military or of a defense team, but usually when this happens in later films it's because there's something special about the team itself: maybe they're a newly-formed splinter operation with a unique superweapon and skills specifically created to combat Godzilla, or they work closely with an outsider scientist/psychic to come up with the best possible strategy to defeat Godzilla. Not the guys in Raids Again. These are just JADF pilots, and god damn, they're good pilots. It took the most frightening weapon the world had yet seen to kill Godzilla in the first film, and this crew buries - not kills, but buries - Godzilla by shooting at it with a bunch of normal planes. It's been interesting post-Minus One to go back through the franchise and appreciate all the things that influenced MO, of which I think this movie was one.

The other thing I really like about this movie is the way the kaiju fights are filmed. Raids Again introduces fan favorite (if not Toho favorite) Anguirus for the first time, and the scuffles Anguirus and Godzilla get into are remarkably violent and animalistic. This is because, while kaiju scenes are usually slowed down in post to give a sense of enormous scale, the fight scenes in Raids Again are instead either at normal speed or actually sped up. I don't know if it's true or not, but I've heard that this was an error on the part of the camera operators that got left in because the crew thought it looked cool. And it does! It's possibly the only interesting and unique part of the film.

There are other moments, too, where this feels like it gets close to capturing some of the magic of the first movie. Mostly these moments come when individual characters are focused on. I really enjoyed the scenes when Hidemi (Setsuko Wakayama) is alone with the radio on, listening to radio coverage of Godzilla and Anguirus' fight and the JSDF's attempts to stop it, and she looks out her window and sees a massive cloud of dust and debris out over the sea where the fight is happening in real life. That was a really neat trick of perspective and made the action feel massive but also real and close to home. The aerial combat scenes are also very well done, but Eiji Tsuburaya was special effects director, so "well done aerial combat scenes" are basically a given.

All in all, though, this is just not a great movie. It's a decent movie, but it's not great. I honestly think a lot of this might be down to Motoyoshi Oda as a director. I like his other movies, but he mostly did either lighthearted comedies or slightly scandalous horror-mysteries. Oda seemed like a cool guy personally and I think he's a good director, but Honda's direct experience with war gave the '54 Godzilla a weight and direness that's totally lacking in Raids Again. And it's a shame, because this is the only one of his movies to have any kind of release outside of Japan. His most internationally-famous film and it's the one that reflects the most poorly on him as a director. Someday we will see A Texan in Tokyo. I bet it's better than this.

The storyline also just faffs around a lot. The prison-break subplot is flat-out bizarre and I forgot it was in here. Like almost every Godzilla fan, I bought a copy of the novelization of Shigeru Kayama's Godzilla/Godzilla Raids Again story treatments, and I'm really curious to read it and see if the prison break is there.

I'll end this by saying that it's essentially impossible for me not to like a Godzilla movie. I just love Godzilla and everything it represents so much that if you stick Godzilla in a movie I will watch that movie and enjoy it, no exceptions. But there's just something off about Raids Again. It's absolutely, undoubtedly an attempt to cash in on the popularity of the first film - I mean, this came out six months after the first one, six months - which doesn't inherently doom it; the same crew were working on it, for the most part, so it comes from the same talented hands as the first movie. But it still comes out lacking. The first Godzilla was an allegory, and an incredibly sober, haunting one. Raids Again is a monster movie. I love monster movies with my whole heart, and they can be as deep as the '54 Godzilla if they want to be, but this rushed, awkward sequel does not seem like a "wants to be" situation.

I revamped my vs. Biollante review.

Just can't get enough of that big plant beast.