Godzilla vs. Hedorah (1971)

directed by Yoshimitsu Banno

Japan

85 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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Since this year marks its 50th anniversary, I decided to finally revisit the first Godzilla movie I ever saw. It's a bit controversial due to being so out-of-place compared to the way the franchise had been going so far, and the director, Yoshimitsu Banno, was actually kept from ever making another Godzilla film again because Toho was so deeply, deeply upset about his decision to make Godzilla fly in this film (they would eventually begin plans to collaborate with him again, but unfortunately he passed away before this could come to fruition). In an undeniable boss move, Banno titled his autobiography Why I Made Godzilla Fly.  

Jun Fukuda is usually the Godzilla director whose movies have the most garish, hyper-modern pop feel to them, and even his non-Godzilla work often uses outlandish outfits and loud, youthful nightlife as a motif. But this movie tops even him when it comes to psychedelic imagery. The backdrop this film is set against is one where young people of the country realize the problem, but don't quite seem to have any concrete plans regarding what to do about it other than to get together in bodypaint and sing and dance a bunch. But even though Godzilla vs. Hedorah dispenses with any of the serious atmosphere of previous entries in the franchise in favor of gettin' down, Hedorah as a concept is actually very much in keeping with the message of Godzilla. Both creatures arise from a manmade crisis, though Hedorah serves as more of a metaphor since it's depicted as an alien: Godzilla from the use of nuclear weaponry, Hedorah from continually dumping waste in the sea and polluting the atmosphere. Each one is a manifestation of a particular threat to humanity that comes from within ourselves. But while Godzilla is recurring, never subsiding, always there so long as disarmament remains an optimistic dream, Hedorah feels more ephemeral. Having Godzilla, an avatar of destruction if there ever was one, fight against a symbol of such a massive problem as climate catastrophe and win really just reinforces Godzilla's own strength rather than Hedorah's.

This movie is just structured really weird and it's very obvious that it was made by a newcomer and first-timer to the series, although for what it's worth, Yoshimitsu Banno is not at all a bad director, having worked with Akira Kurosawa in the past. The human characters are generally either unimportant or slightly annoying in these films, but in this case they basically don't matter at all. There's barely a main cast. One of them gets slimed and spends the entire movie being transported from place to place while lying down with bandages over half his face. Nothing the humans do seems to have any effect on the outcome, which is also in keeping with the series - you never really know whether whatever anti-Godzilla scheme we think up is going to actually do anything - but even so, the defense forces are featured even less than they usually are and are shown as more incompetent than anything when they can't get their supposed superweapon to work in time. The kaiju just kind of bumble into the battlefield, taking out power lines and only sort of noticing the things the military set up to attempt to defeat them, and ultimately duke it out with each other while the humans watch, powerless as their efforts fail like they never had any chance in the first place.

There's so much silence and so many scenes where either kaiju and kaiju just stare at each other, or humans and kaiju just stare at each other, or nobody in particular is staring at anybody and nothing is really happening. There's a lot of standing around going on in this film. Almost as much as there is dancing and grooving. However there's also a surprising amount of onscreen death. Godzilla never really kills anybody personally, aside from a couple of times; logically we know when he stomps through cities that there's an absolutely massive body count stacking up with every footfall, but we don't see anything in the way of dead bodies. Yoshimitsu Banno says hell to that and we get to see piles and piles of victims of Hedorah's smog crop-dusting and toxic sludge attacks. People fall to the ground in crowds, choking on foul air. They get buried in acid slime until just their limbs stick out, unmoving. Like I said, this is a funky, psychedelic, wild & crazy film that's very incongruous with the slightly darker tone of its predecessors, but somehow it's also the most explicitly full of death of any of them thus far.

It's not a great movie but I love it and I have no real excuses. The message of needing to drastically curb pollution is always a good thing to see, even if in this case nobody really does anything about it other than, like I said, dance and sing. That's not to say the message is ineffective, because it is - repeated shots of disgusting, sewer-like ocean water and floating trash do turn your stomach enough to hopefully make you think about your impact on the world. But it's also victim to the shortfalls of the hippie generation that basically took aesthetics and pure contrarianism to be more important than action. Honestly though, who cares? Godzilla flies and Hedorah is a weird sludge monster from outer space who can turn into a UFO.