directed by Okihiro Yoneda
Japan
99 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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Wow, okay. I can't say I expected the third one to be the best of this trilogy, but to me this felt like it took care of almost everything I wished the previous two had. Maybe I was just a little more awake and alert this time. I think this genuinely is the best of them, though.
I was initially a little afraid going into this because of the time travel plot - anybody who's seen Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah will know that when Toho tries to deal with time travel, it can quickly turn into a convoluted mess. (For anyone who hasn't seen it... I really can't explain it to you because I don't fully understand it myself.) But therein lies the rub: very little in this movie is explained with any real depth, and as such, instead of becoming a headache-inducing tangle of threads you can barely follow, the time travel plot is as simple as "If Mothra goes back in time to kill King Ghidorah when he was a baby then the King Ghidorah that exists in the present will die". I think most people can grasp that one. Killing someone in the past to kill them in the future is kind of Time Travel 101. Exactly how or why Mothra is able to time travel is never elaborated upon, but doesn't really need to be - is there anything we'd be surprised to see her do at this point?
(I wish English had a neuter pronoun to refer to things that are not human, because "they" doesn't feel right for Mothra but neither does "it". We're going to refer to the concept of Mothra in general with she/her pronouns and the specific Mothra in this film with he/him pronouns, at least for the moment. It really, really, really doesn't matter, though.)
The pacing is drastically better here compared to the previous two films and it feels like this one actually has a plot. The battles are neither constant nor restricted to the finale, but spread out into skirmishes where one party usually needs to regroup after suffering grievous injury. Despite still being incredibly powerful (we'll get to that in a second), Mothra does take a beating - in almost all of her film appearances, but especially as Leo here. He gets chunks ripped out of his wings and is burnt almost to a crisp, but he never gives up. This is another big point in the film that remains unexplained because there's just no real way to explain it without detracting from it: How Mothra can continually get beaten almost to death, but revive every single time with nothing more than healing songs and dances from the Elias sisters (we'll get to that in a second too). The more sporadic battles followed by brief retreats for each party to hone their skills reminded me of some stuff that goes on in Ultraman, where a frequent theme is an Ultra having to pause to learn a new technique before they can go on fighting. It might be done simply as a way to fill time, but the actual progression of skills, rather than having a hero instantly know everything about how to fight from the get-go, makes for a more believable experience. That Mothra occasionally needs a minute to adapt to her circumstances only makes her feel more powerful and adept.
Another thing that this movie does that I was waiting for the previous two to do is address the Elias' more sinister older sister, Belvera, who spent the last two films glomming on to whatever nasty thing got woken up and tried to take over the Earth. She's tired of being evil in this one, and re-joins... if not the good side, then at least the side her sisters are on. The film does not treat her as an irredeemable villain or make it so that she has to change completely in order to be a character who fights to save the planet - in fact, her darker personality is presented as something crucial to the strength of the alliance between the three sisters. She herself says that their combined powers have to include rage and hatred, that they have to be able to harness her negative feelings to create a bond that is ultimately stronger for including her perspective. I did not expect her to be treated as such a faceted character who wasn't just there as a foil for Moll and Lora's good deeds.
Real quick I wanna talk about the work in making the sisters look realistically tiny, because while the CGI is still pretty dodgy, they do dedicate some serious time and attention to that part. One extremely small detail I caught and that I love is that Belvera's dress seems to have a zipper on the back - a human-sized zipper, and from some very quick visual math it looks like it's in scale. As in, assuming a zipper is the equivalent of maybe a little less than a foot in Elias terms, the zipper's size makes sense when you take into account how tall Belvera is supposed to be.
Mothra Leo is at the top of his game here. Besides looking absolutely beautiful in many new and colorful forms that debut for the first time, he takes on King Ghidorah - here envisioned as a 130-million-year-old menace that killed the dinosaurs (don't worry about it) - and physically picks him up at one point. Ghidorah canonically weighs 25,000 metric tons even in his younger form, and Mothra weighs somewhere between 3,500 and 5,900 metric tons. This establishes that Leo is a competent fighter in that he doesn't rely solely on his formidable beam attacks but also on sheer physical strength when it would suit the situation better.
I'll finish this unnecessarily long review by talking about how much I love the relationship between Mothra and her/his devotees, even though (and in fact, because) it's a little silly. Again, it's never explained because it's so far from being grounded in reality that there's no good logic to apply to it, but I genuinely enjoy the sense of a spiritual framework that exists around the Elias and Mothra. I love that singing the Mothra song and doing a little dance can provide Mothra with a power-up no matter how far apart both parties are from each other, or how beaten-down Mothra is. I love that it doesn't have to be hard to be back-up for Mothra, that the Elias don't have to go questing or recover some sacred object but are instead inherently imbued with the power to communicate with and heal Mothra through prayer and song. As silly as it is, I think this kind of captures something about the relationship between a god and their worshippers that Western Christianity often ignores: Devotion does not have to be hard, you do not necessarily have to suffer for it, but you have to keep doing it. You have to pray for Mothra every single time she needs you, and although it may not physically cost you to do so, it has to be constant, and you have to be unwavering, and you have to be there no matter what, because there is no alternative.
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