Matriarch (2022)

directed by Ben Steiner

UK

85 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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Since a lot of us are probably still reeling a little from visiting family on Thanksgiving, I thought that now might be a good time to post a review of a film about coming back home. I wasn't planning on reviewing this, because I had seen some other reviewers seem to take a pretty dim view of it, so I was expecting something not worth mentioning, but to my surprise I actually got a lot more out of this than other people seem to have. This may still be a short review, but honestly I'm struggling to find reasons not to rate this even higher than I already did.

I guess some people might see a flaw in this if they're used to watching movies with characters who they can empathize with or understand. Our main character is not terribly heroic or easy to root for, not because her life is in shambles or because of who she is as a person but just because she doesn't have many traits in general. Her friendships and romances are the brightest spot in her life, and even those she seems to view as of secondary importance. This feels like watching somebody right before she realizes that other people in the world might care about her and like to see her be alive and happy, like watching a person who's been so traumatized by the way her mother treated her in childhood that she's categorized all other people besides herself as not worthwhile because she assumes they don't care. And aside from that, she's generally kind of bland. It's not that she doesn't have an engaging backstory, it's that she doesn't have much else outside of that backstory. Jemima Rooper is not terrible at playing this character, and certainly has a lot of acting experience to draw upon, but she becomes someone forgettable, without many facets. This is not very important to me, personally, but I can see where it might bog down the movie for others.

What this is above most other things, to me, was an aesthetics-based film. It is probably a personal fault that I can be so satisfied with something that just looks good and not worry too much about the deeper content, but in terms of film, I think the outward appearance of a thing can, sometimes, be enough to make up for not much plot. As long as it really is "not much" plot and not bad plot, and in Matriarch's case I believe it's the former. I'm extending "aesthetic" to include sound design as well, which is where I feel like this movie really excels; from minute one that score of sparse, eerie, was-that-the-wind noises provides a perfectly unsettling backdrop to an already unsettling chain of events. IMDb credits the music to Suvi-Eeva Äikäs, who also did the music for Hanna and Devs, two television series that have garnered praise for their soundtracks. Also, I believe that Finnish people are just inherently better at music. But anyway, in terms of the visual, this is a far cry from what I was thinking of when I was expecting this to be a folk horror movie - I guess there isn't one singular unified folk horror look, but you do expect some greenery and whatnot in a film like that, not the desolation and parched, freezing landscape we get here. The fertility of the Earth is a central theme - in fact, it may be the most central theme - but everything looks like the end of days, black and cold and withered. This deeply foreboding atmosphere and how well it was carried through all aspects of the film made up for a lot of other areas where it was lacking.

I want to talk a bit more about this in relation to the folk horror subgenre because I feel like where this succeeds is in how differently it approaches that whole motif. "Folk horror" is kind of a loose descriptor; it gets applied to a lot of different things, but a commonality that most of these things have is Pagan or "heretic" religious belief (or lack of belief) that exists outside of, or in direct opposition to, Christian religion. Typically this involves worship of the Earth or of some kind of nature spirit. There may not be too much depth to Matriarch, but there is something really interesting about the situation it presents, and the activity in the main character's home village is established as a very long-standing and intricate tradition. When you think about it, there really isn't anything else in the film - this is all about what's going on in the village. We see that tradition through the lens of how it has affected the main character's entire life. The fact that the story more than adequately (in my opinion) sets that up and shows us that it's a full belief system with a long history means that whatever else it does, this movie at least successfully pulls off the folk horror bit.

While the focus of the film is heavily on non-Christian ritual, there is one character, a priest, who represents the opposition to that. By his being so elderly I assume it's implied that he's been in the village since before the main character's mother discovered its secret, and is the last holdout against something he sees as antithetic to his beliefs. But... is this really about God as we're assuming it is? Maybe this is just because the movie lacks certain details, but I created my own headcanon where when the priest is talking about the activities of the villagers as "against God", he's not talking about the Christian God, but the god that they are worshipping - he believes in it and serves it too, and he sees what they're doing to her as an abomination. Imagining that that old priest has always known about the thing the villagers are connected to makes their tradition appear to be even older - the only innovation, paralleling the rapid exploitation of the planet by humans, is that now they've appropriated its power for themselves.

And, back to aesthetics for a moment, I just loved the look of... that. Her. I'm struggling not to completely spoil this, but if you've seen it, you know who I'm talking about. The CGI is a little dodgy but I've started to not care about that too much. It's more important to me that I can tell the idea is there, even if it's rough around the edges. The entity I'm talking about looks so striking and otherworldly (well, technically it's very worldly, but you get it). There was such a strong idea here, the black mud and the worms and the life of the soil, the ground, leeching into the villagers, them dabbling in things that they didn't understand. It's so... I don't know, poetic? I think "striking" is the best word. Can you appreciate a movie based on a single image alone, rather than the bigger picture? Sometimes I can, at least.

Godzilla vs. Biollante (1989)

directed by Kazuki Ōmori

Japan

105 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Last week, Kazuki Ōmori passed away. I wanted to post a review I did some months ago of vs. Biollante that I considered too long-winded to make public. Ōmori was a part of some of my favorite Godzilla films of the Heisei era and I know I'm not alone in saying that.

Picking up where Return of Godzilla left off in 1984, vs. Biollante begins with a newscast showing the scale of devastation that Godzilla left after the Super X and the military drove him into Mt. Mihara. The aftermath of a kaiju's visit to a populated area is something that doesn't always get shown onscreen, but here we get a taste of it and it's basically as bad as you might imagine: a near-total loss, just fathomless destruction, but still with survivors picking up the pieces. I particularly liked how we're shown that one building had its façade reconstructed into a skylight around a perfect Godzilla footprint that nearly destroyed it and has been renamed as "Godzilla Memorial Lounge". After the newscast, the first thing we see is some soldiers trying to loot cast-off Godzilla biological material from the scene to bring back to their country for use in nefarious scientific developments. This lays out humanity's incredibly short memory and outright refusal to learn from our mistakes - something that will become the main theme in this film.

Because this takes place in the same continuity as Return of Godzilla, this is a version of Japan that has only experienced two - soon to be three - confrontations with Godzilla: the first, in 1954, the second in 1984, and now the developing situation that starts off this film. I personally think this is one of the most interesting of the many Godzilla timelines because no one has fully had the time to get used to Godzilla. There's a heavy focus on scientific research and the preparation of advanced-warning systems in the event that Godzilla or another of the species comes ashore, but with only two previous encounters to go off of, the country is largely in a state of nail-biting. No one is quite sure what to do with Godzilla when he does appear, but they are certain that sooner or later, he will come back. It's also implied, in other films but here as well, that Godzilla's more frequent appearances herald some fundamental change in human society, that as newer and more devastating weaponry is invented by rapid advances in science, the fabric of society breaks down quicker and quicker, and the increasing frequency of Godzilla attacks is tied somehow to the oncoming collapse of civilization.

It's not directly stated, but the whole of vs. Biollante seems to find the country in a sort of twilight era where, despite superficially being able to recover from their two previous attacks, the lack of any unified learning from past mistakes is slowly sliding humanity into our ultimate downfall. No one seems to really grasp what they're supposed to be doing, and so instead are flailing around clutching at whatever they think can give them bigger, better guns to fend off imagined "enemies" who they assume to be doing the same thing simultaneously. The core principle of Godzilla is that you cannot keep inventing a superweapon over and over and expecting that this time, maybe, you'll be smart enough or good enough that the worst won't happen to you. You can't, like both the Japanese government and the fictional country of Saradia attempt to do in vs. Biollante, essentially recycle the worst manmade disaster ever created into a new weapon without the past repeating itself. Professor Shiragami also proves that you really just can't mess with that in general, for any reason - his motivations may have come from a place of sorrow and loss, but he ignores precedent as well, and makes the mistake of thinking he can somehow logic his way into eliminating the part of Godzilla that inevitably proves fatal for humanity. The professor isn't a bad person - the point of his story isn't to paint him as ignorant or uncaring; it's an example of how history isn't always changed for the worse by evil people, but by good people who don't recognize that they too bear the weight of mistakes made by those before them.

The relationship between Biollante and Godzilla is an interesting one. Artificially created, Biollante is a genetic chimera incorporating cells from a human, a rosebush, and Godzilla. In the film it's established that they are the same thing, that they see each other as the same thing, and have some fundamental connection because of their shared genetic material. This relationship between the two creatures as well as Biollante's nature in and of itself was something I was thinking about a lot on my third rewatch. I didn't realize until now how long it takes for Biollante to reach her final, monstrous form, and how anti-climactic the fight between her and Godzilla is when it finally does happen. Biollante isn't vicious like a lot of Godzilla's opponents have been; she seems to lash out mostly from fear and anguish rather than a genuine desire to hurt Godzilla. She begins life out in the middle of a lake and never approaches civilization, and the fight between her and Godzilla doesn't hit the same beats as a typical kaiju smash does. There's no real winner between the two, in the end. It's just a short, seemingly agonizing battle between two creatures who have humans to blame for their existence. It's morbid, really, when you think of it like that; like putting two beetles in a jar and making them fight to the death, except you're the one who created the beetles.

It's also really interesting how visibly bewildered Godzilla is when he sees Biollante for the first time. Is this, perhaps, because when Godzilla sensed Biollante calling out to him, he expected, upon arriving at her location, to find another Godzilla?

This film also introduces us to Miki Saegusa, who is one of my favorites out of the few recurring characters in the series. Psychic research seems to have arisen out of the wake of the 1984 attack - not specifically for the purpose of communicating with Godzilla, but that's how it ends up being used. Saegusa is a young but extremely powerful psychic whose presence I always appreciate because she's an alternative to the knee-jerk military response most typically seen in these films. In vs. Biollante, she provides one of my favorite scenes in the whole Heisei era, and I feel one of the most crucial moments in developing Godzilla as a character: when she attempts to confront him directly, standing on a dock only a short distance away as he wades through the sea, for a moment they each have the other's attention, observing each other directly, and when Saegusa establishes a psychic link with Godzilla she is immediately overwhelmed and loses consciousness. This is why, when people bring up the question of Godzilla's intellect relative to a human, I always say that I personally imagine him operating "at or above" a human level. Saegusa's physical response to linking up with him hints that there's an aspect to him that is incomprehensible to us. Also, that great scene where the kids in the psyonics institute are asked to draw what they dreamt about and they all simultaneously draw Godzilla - like Godzilla stirring inside Mt. Mihara is somehow sending out waves of psychic energy that blanket the surrounding area.

In general, this movie lacks a lot of the showiness that the franchise's other entries surrounding it have. It has an overarching feeling of slow decay for society, a dim premonition that we're going to continue down the path that leads to our own destruction because we keep our backs turned when we should be looking behind us to learn from the past. I think Saegusa is a ray of hope - a young person exploring alternative ways of communicating with the threat instead of just killing it - which is what makes her role in the later Godzilla vs. Destoroyah so heartrending. vs. Biollante is one of the best examples of why this franchise has remained so relevant throughout the years, and also an example of how it's survived for so long: by continually reinventing itself and playing off of the same themes to different ends.

Gamera vs. Barugon (1966)

directed by Shigeo Tanaka

Japan

106 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Full disclosure: I was drifting in and out of sleep pretty heavily for about the last half-hour of this movie, so this review may have some gaps where I could not stay awake. I highly, highly recommend watching this on archive.org if you're looking for it; they have the Blu-Ray rip which is in absolutely beautiful quality.

Anyway. After quickly recapping the events at the end of Gamera, we're told that midway through its journey to Mars, Gamera was hit by a random asteroid and knocked off-course, spiraling back to Earth. Convenient for us puny humans, who are in more need of rescue than we had cockily assumed, but probably very confusing for Gamera. There is a marked difference in tone between this film and its predecessor, which is partially due to this one being in (quite vivid) color, but also this somehow just feels more like a movie. Gamera was all about Gamera, and it felt like a slightly unsteady step into the world of kaiju film from a studio hoping to capitalize on the booming popularity of Godzilla and tokusatsu on television. It was both visually dark and had a tone of mild dread, though nothing near as suffocating as Gojira. This second entry rolls onto the scene well-rounded; fully equipped with subplots, a grip of different characters all prepared to backstab each other, nice cinematography, and, as the title gives away, a second kaiju.

For a long time, this does not feel like a monster movie at all. I'm used to this from the Godzilla series, which is fond of introducing Godzilla in a very roundabout and sometimes even completely unrelated way: We have to follow people doing other stuff before anything interesting happens just to get some plot so that the movie isn't 20 minutes of epic kaiju battle and no substance whatsoever. Oddly, though, and maybe this is just because I wasn't sitting there waiting impatiently for my beloved Godzilla to show up, it feels like vs. Barugon does this better. I was perfectly satisfied with the story, which concerns a couple of would-be jewel thieves trying to steal what they think is a huge, priceless opal but is actually the egg of a dangerous creature. I wasn't waiting for the action to arrive - this movie does non-action things perfectly fine.

The amount of blackface here just can't not be addressed, though. It casts a shadow over what is otherwise a really good film. The first movie had this same issue, with fake Arctic natives trying and failing to warn the main characters about Gamera, but where the people in brownface in that film were at least treated as intelligent and made part of the plot, in this one they're nothing but shield-toting stereotypes. It is quite disgusting, and tokusatsu at this period in time was rife with it. There's no excuse for it, and unfortunately when we remember the Gamera series for everything great that it is, we do have to remember that it had some moments that were, at best, ill-conceived.

After some time and a lot of people ignoring the advice of fake natives, the "opal" hatches. I was so impressed by the hatching sequence that I wanted to make sure I mentioned it, because it was done with such delicacy that I was immensely thankful for a beautifully clear picture so I could see it well. The steam rising from the inside of the egg, the way the infant Barugon looks slick and newborn... I thought it was all amazing. (Wikizilla says that the coating on the newborn Barugon was made of "special material imported from the United States", which... just sounds kind of ominous, honestly.) It's not 1:1 realistic; it doesn't look like documentary footage of a hatching egg, and it shouldn't. What makes practical effects scenes like this unique and admirable is that we can see the work that went into depicting a real-life event, and instead of criticizing it where it might not resemble real life, we should appreciate the skill that it takes to execute it. This goes for everything else effects-related in this film as well. Adult Barugon doesn't in any way resemble a real creature, and for that matter neither does Gamera, but it's the manufacturing of such elaborate, fantastical things that makes them beautiful, not whether or not they fool us into thinking they're real.

Longtime Gamera fans will probably read this and think "duh", but what is interesting to me about Gamera as a creature is that it really does feel like a large, confused animal. I've said this before, but my personal headcanon for Godzilla is that he operates at a level of cognition incomparable to humans, and while he is, like Gamera, also ultimately an animal who is not at fault for his destructive nature, he does feel like he has more agency. Gamera is pure instinct, at least in these early installments. Gamera wants to eat and is afraid of being awake in a world that is hostile to it. The same goes for Barugon. Barugon fights Gamera not as a hateful enemy but as a more aggressive animal versus a usually docile one. And this is where I lose the plot a bit, because I had fallen asleep by this point, but I don't remember Gamera even having that much of a role in defeating Barugon - from what I can recall, Gamera gets frozen by Barugon's rainbow beam (yeah) and spends a lot of the battle out of commission while the humans' defense and military forces try to figure out how to stop a huge lizard who can shoot rainbows out of its back.

This is getting lengthy, so I'll stop soon, but what also stuck out to me about this movie is that it is so much about greed - personal greed, not the kind of societal hubris and blindness that leads to Godzilla. Although I suppose the greed of individuals in this film suggests the presence of greed in all individuals, so maybe it's not so personal after all. But at least one (again, apologies, I was exhausted and not fully observant) of the characters who steal the "opal" spends the aftermath deeply regretting what he's done and taking basically the whole brunt of the responsibility for Barugon leveling Osaka. He's disgusted with himself and can't believe that he was so focused on his potential gains in the short term without considering anything else. There are a lot of moments I'm familiar with as a Godzilla fan where the nature of humanity itself is brought to light in all its occasional ugliness, but not since the very first film have we really seen someone personally saying "I am responsible for this, alone" and then dealing with the guilt of that.

There's an interesting mix of elements here, of things that we'd see more and less of in future Showa-era Gamera films; it's brighter and more colorful than the first but also carries a slight soberness to it. It has that weird in-between feeling where it's not quite a children's movie but could at any moment become one. I don't think this is one of the best of the series, but it is an integral one.

Godzilla: Tokyo S.O.S. (2003)

directed by Masaaki Tezuka

Japan

91 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

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I had to go some distance, but I managed to catch a screening of Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla on 11/3 for Godzilla Day and it was one of the best theater experiences I've had. My first time seeing any Godzilla movie on a true big screen, and my first time watching the Kiryu Saga in a while. It of course made me want to watch its sequel (notably, this is the only film in the franchise that is a direct sequel to its predecessor), and doing so last night only reaffirmed, and possibly even bolstered, my feelings about the Kiryu Saga being one of the most compelling parts of the entire franchise. It also must be mentioned that it has an incredible soundtrack.

I'm going to assume a basic familiarity with Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla and not re-tread the storyline too much, but for some quick background: The timeline here is that there was only one Godzilla, who was killed in 1954, until a second member of the species appears in 2003. The government, along with a special quasi-military division created for the sole purpose of defending against Godzilla (and other kaiju), develops a robotic replica of Godzilla, called Kiryu, using the bones and DNA of the original Godzilla, salvaged from the bottom of the sea. I have heard some people who are unfamiliar with the franchise assuming that these two films are remakes of the Mechagodzilla films from the 1970s, which is entirely untrue. Kiryu is a wholly different entity than that Mechagodzilla, who, while still having some interesting implications, is not tied to Godzilla itself in the way that Kiryu is. Watching Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla made me realize something that I have no better way of putting than to say that Kiryu is severely haunted. They built basically the world's largest ghost. Kiryu is essentially possessed by the spirit of the '54 Godzilla.

It was already a complicated and tacitly horrifying situation in the previous film to have Kiryu resurrected and forced to fight something that is as close to it as a brother, but now we see that somehow the implications of that have failed to reach humanity and we're still relying on - and upgrading, no less - Kiryu in case we have to force it into battle once again. Nobody seems to exactly be happy about this, and Kiryu is treated as kind of a weapon of last resort, but there are definitely people who see it as the newest, shiniest warplane, and their entire careers are based around the maintenance, enhancement, and piloting of it as a machine. Kiryu's "consciousness" has also apparently been fixed so that it no longer has trauma flashbacks when hearing Godzilla's roar, and for much of Tokyo S.O.S., it seems like Kiryu is pretty much stripped of its association with its kin, serving as a good war robot and not much more. But Kiryu remembers, in the end. Kiryu always remembers.

The human side of things is far less interesting here than in the prior film. Akane was a faceted character with emotional depth, whose reasons for doing things were understandable and who, despite the strength of her convictions, did undergo a small change once she started to see Kiryu as a living entity. Chûjō, it must be said, is, unfortunately, just some guy. It is really great that they got somebody back from the first Mothra film forty-some years later, but aside from that, there's nobody in this who's even half as well-developed as Akane or the little girl she befriends in the first film. I'm also not too fond of the emphasis on militarization in these two films.

I also want to take a minute to talk about suit design, as I generally always do. There were two separate Godzilla suits made for both of these two movies, although they are both very similar to each other. I am a fan of the Millennium-era designs, because I particularly like the more streamlined, almost catlike look of the head and face, and also the changes to the way Godzilla uses its atomic breath, how there's a moment or two where it has to "charge" before it can be fired. Although the color scheme overall is back to charcoal gray, the bright blue of its dorsal plates and the subtle shading in its eyes makes this Godzilla look much more than monochrome. I also think Kiryu's damaged right eye is very significant. And I admit that having noticed this puts me in as-yet-uncharted nerd territory, but the amount of detail put into sculpting the suit meant that I could clearly see in at least one shot that Godzilla has palatine rugae - these are the ridges in the mouth of a mammal, on the hard palate. This has interesting implications for Godzilla as a species because the primary function of the palatine rugae is to assist in swallowing food. Personally I've always assumed that Godzilla does not actually need to eat and just feeds off of radioactivity for energy, but if Godzilla is evolved (or mutated) from an already extant species, it would make sense that it might have them as a vestigial trait. The other reason why this is very interesting is because lizards are not mammals and therefore I don't know if they have palatine rugae in real life, pointing to Godzilla as some kind of weird, new, hybridized species, existing somewhere between amphibian and mammal.

It's generally true that by the time Mothra arrives to warn humanity that we're going down the wrong course, things are already pretty dire. This is the case again in Tokyo S.O.S. when the Shobijin pick up on the whole Kiryu situation and come to give us a warning that we're messing with forces beyond our control in trying to force-awaken a ghost to pilot a robot as a superweapon. Mothra herself is treated with suspicion, as our sole encounter with her in this timeline was when she destroyed much of Tokyo after her devotees, the Shobijin, were stolen, but ultimately she's recognized as an ally. Mothra in this film represents the continual renewal of nature and the need to learn from past mistakes and use them to develop a more interconnected way of living.

As I said, Kiryu spends most of this film as an upgraded mecha with not much in the way of independent thought. But the film still ends with what I personally believe to be one of the most powerful images in the whole franchise. Seeing Godzilla, or a Godzilla, so stripped of power after being beaten down by Kiryu and then restrained by the Mothra larvae is already very strange, but when Kiryu takes over and makes its own decision to return itself and the second Godzilla to the bottom of the sea where they both should have remained in the first place, it really hits me. I mean it really hits me. The establishment of Kiryu as a conscious entity with the soul of the '54 Godzilla inhabiting it just has such resonance in all of its implications. That Kiryu recognizes itself as something that should never have been born, and that after lying at the bottom of the sea for 50 years, all it wants to do is not fight. It wants to end things, to put things back the way they should have been. I've thought constantly about Kiryu picking up the almost-dead second Godzilla and plunging them both into the ocean since the first time I saw this movie and I will probably continue thinking about it for a long time. I think its display screen changing to read "Sayonara Chûjō" as its pilot ejects himself from it is also a last, fascinating detail as it can be argued that this is, for the first time ever, the real, actual 1954 Godzilla directly speaking to a human.