Godzilla Against MechaGodzilla (2002)

directed by Masaaki Tezuka

Japan

88 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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As I may have mentioned, I am not a huge fan of Mechagodzilla despite the many films he's appeared in. I'm just not a giant mecha person, and Mechagodzilla usually signals that the main conflict will be humans vs. Godzilla, instead of Godzilla vs. another kaiju. However, this movie made me renege on almost all of my opinions. Maybe I didn't like those things before because I'd just never seen them done this well.

Despite the maximalist turn that the Godzilla franchise was taking in the 2000s, culminating in Ryūhei Kitamura's absurdly garish and chaotic Godzilla: Final Wars, Godzilla Against MechaGodzilla is a remarkably serious and measured approach to the franchise that feels far more like a smart, restrained disaster movie than anything else. It's another scenario where humanity had been enjoying a Godzilla-less 45 years, all of the previous films never having happened and Godzilla remaining a pile of bones at the bottom of the ocean as far as everyone was concerned- until now. This is the closest I personally think the series has gotten since 1954 in depicting Godzilla in his original ideal form as a force of nature, not a malevolent being looking to intentionally hurt and destroy, but a living natural disaster like a tsunami or earthquake.

And even though the human element of this is what it focuses on the most, the portrayal of Godzilla in this one is fascinating. Never has he felt more like an animal, moving inexorably through the human slurry of buildings and civilization with his head high, no regard whatsoever for anything he crushes underfoot. There is a deep sense of danger coming off of him that feels the same way it feels to look at a tiger or bear or another wild animal. You get the feeling that he is a creature that knows what he's doing- but because it's Godzilla, and we know from other films that he reasons at or even slightly above a human level, there's that added element of the unknowable. I would argue that this stretches the limit of characterizing him as a monster and takes it up a notch into something else. This movie reminds you that Godzilla can be genuinely fearsome after you may have been lulled into seeing him on just a surface level, as a large monster that stomps around. This Godzilla is something we can't control or understand.

As I said, this film is mostly concerned with the human aspect of the events taking place, and although most of the time it's extremely boring when a Godzilla movie tries to have a main character with their own storyline instead of focusing on the efforts of a faction or group against Godzilla or another kaiju, in this case the stories of the individuals are impactful and make the film better instead of worse. The main character is the kind of Ellen Ripley-type personality where I could easily imagine that her role had simply been written genderless until a suitable actor of any gender came along. I really, really appreciated this story about a single woman with no attachments who spent the film working on herself instead of falling into unnecessary romantic sideplots. This is a very on-the-ground approach to a Godzilla movie, and we spend some time looking at the aftereffects of his invading Japan and what that means for the people displaced by the destruction, instead of the obligatory shots of people running in an indistinguishable mass. I think this was quite purposeful, as demonstrated by a scene where we literally do see one man look back and exclaim "My house!" I think showing that everybody is personally, individually losing something was a deliberate choice, reinforcing the idea of Godzilla as natural disaster.

And again, there is just something so titanic about the way he treads through Japan in this one. When I was a kid I used to have anxiety dreams where giant robots were invading the world and I could not hide or take cover for long. As silly as it sounds to an adult mind, I still remember the fear and panic of being exposed and knowing that something unfathomably large was roaming and destroying everything that used to be safe. That's what this movie feels like. True to the original concept, that kind of fear of everything you know being taken away is also strongly reminiscent of what could happen during a bombing raid.

The balance that this movie strikes between being serious and still being massively fun to watch is what impressed me. There is a dignity to it that made it age better than probably 90% of other Godzilla movies, although in fairness to the others, that could be due to the fact that it really just isn't that old yet. I don't feel great about the heavy use of CGI, especially not when it comes to Godzilla himself, and his overall appearance was not what I in my snobbery prefer my Godzilla to look like, but it works, as does the rest of his characterization, to make him feel more unfamiliar and threatening. To that end, he also makes animalistic growling sounds that he's never made before, and again on some level I just didn't like this at all- he's not supposed to make those noises! he goes skreeonk and skreeonk only!!!!- but this is a new and different Godzilla, a speculative take that intentionally doesn't fit in with the rest of canon, and it works really well.