The Return of Godzilla (1984)

directed by Koji Hashimoto

Japan

103 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I'm noticing a pattern that's emerging every time I rewatch any given Godzilla movie, which I've done, for most of them, at least three times now: the first time I don't give it much thought, or I come at it with an attitude of inherent skepticism; the second time I think "what was I thinking when I said I didn't like this"; the third time I'm in love with it enough that I have a hard time saying anything bad about it. What this says about me as a film critic, I don't know, but I'm having a good time. Let me have fun.

I guess "fun" might be the wrong word to use in relation to this, one of the most serious Godzilla films.

Throughout all 70 years of the franchise's existence, there's only been four mainline films in which Godzilla carries the story alone, not fighting an opponent; all four of those have a markedly different fan response than the others. Having Godzilla be the sole monster in the film signifies, in large part, that the film is going to be responding to the original 1954 movie in particular. (Not that Godzilla's "vs." films don't also do this, but it's the solo ones that really allow for contemplation of the series as a concept.) Shin Godzilla takes a lot of its DNA from this movie, expanding upon the idea of bureaucracy during a time of crisis; Minus One involves the idea of war and survivor's guilt, and I don't have space here to talk about what the original does. So I'll move on to The Return of Godzilla.

One of the complaints - not always really a "complaint", but something people are definitely aware of - I hear about Godzilla films is that Godzilla itself is only in them for a few minutes. This is objectively true, but I think it's only an issue if you're unfamiliar with the series. In my opinion, and in the right hands, a Godzilla movie can be at its most terrifying when Godzilla is not in the frame, but only exists as a shadow haunting the story. Return of Godzilla was in precisely the right position to achieve this, because it was building on the massive hype of the first return to the franchise since 1975's Terror of Mechagodzilla, and it was releasing to an audience who, themselves, were at an age where many of them did not experience Godzilla firsthand in 1954, but had a concept of it that was formed through later films and secondhand knowledge. Godzilla lurking just outside the frame is all the more powerful when Godzilla has been lurking just outside the frame of real life for the past 30 years.

And I would argue that the most terrifying parts of Return of Godzilla come not when Godzilla is actively destroying cities but when the people who may have the power to influence a response to it are tasked to act. The tensest, most nerve-wracking scene in this film is when the representatives of both America and Russia are practically begging the Prime Minister of Japan (played brilliantly by Keiju Kobayashi) to let them nuke the country again. These are representatives of countries who Japan had clashed variously with at different times in the not-too-distant past, and while they may espouse peace during peacetime, as soon as they see the opportunity, they're disturbingly eager to drop bombs again. It's even worse when you consider that Japan's PM seems to be older than the both of them - I don't know what his age was meant to be, specifically, but he's certainly older than 40 and probably has firsthand memories of the last time his country was nuked. Now he's in a room with men bowling each other over to be the first to persuade him to let them do it again.

The character of Godzilla in this film is also reworked in a way that's very interesting. The continuity here totally ignores all the other films of the past 30 years save for the original and establishes Godzilla as, at the basest level, an animal. This Godzilla has almost no intelligence and operates solely on instinct, not hostility. For a long time I thought that scene where Godzilla is siphoning off steam from a nuclear power plant and then gets distracted by some birds and wanders off was just really silly, but when I rewatched it this time I found it incredibly poignant. This is the enemy, this is the thing that returns to haunt humankind perennially, with no end, and it's so absent-minded that a flock of birds can make it forget what it was doing. This is the creature we're nuking. A big animal. A cat with a laser pointer. This is not lost on the film: Godzilla's death in Mt. Mihara is treated with a weighty solemnity, and the fact that the plan to lure him into the volcano is even possible - that Godzilla is so instinctual, so unintelligent, that you can get it to walk straight into an active volcano if you play the right sounds - itself serves as an admonishment to the humans who have to do it in the first place.

The only thing I still don't like about this movie is Godzilla's physical appearance. There's something - I don't know what it is exactly, maybe the eyes are too big, the arms too long. It just doesn't look right. This is all purely on the aesthetic level, of course; the cybot Godzilla is a technical feat and I appreciate the time and work that goes into constructing a Godzilla suit even if it's one I personally don't like. But I'm somebody who will defend even the goofy appearance of the '54 and Raids Again suits, and I'll readily admit that this suit... I just don't like it.

The deep human tension and political strife that signified really the first time the franchise had experimented with those things make this movie stand out from the others. I don't think it's a perfect movie - for example, on my third rewatch I noticed that there's literally one woman in the entire film - but it showed that the franchise could do new things and head in a direction vastly different from the heroic, child-friendly Godzilla it left off on - and that people wanted to see it. This film kicked off the most critically-successful era of Godzilla, a string of story-driven, technically masterful films that remain some of the best in the series, and its ideas would go on to inspire future films as well. I don't know how other people feel about it but I don't think I gave it enough credit the first time I saw it. I hope Minus One isn't the last solo Godzilla film we get for another long span of time.

ESPY (1974)

directed by Jun Fukuda

Japan

94 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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Another incredibly good international tagline: "PARANORMALISTS CRUSH A STUPENDOUS PLOT TO DESTROY MANKIND".

I don't know why I held off on watching this for so long. I mean, it should have bothered me a lot more that there was a tokusatsu movie directed by Jun Fukuda that I was basically ignoring. (There's a lot of his other non-toku movies that I desperately need to see, but I digress.) It may have been the length; 95 minutes is just about my threshold for how long I can watch something without falling asleep. But it was Fukuda's birthday recently, so I decided to give this a watch.

The film centers around an organization made up of five people with strong psychic and telekinetic abilities who use their powers to fight crime. You're kind of dropped in the middle of the action; the captain of the organization (played by Yūzō Kayama, who looks faintly out-of-place in a sci-fi movie) recruits their fifth and newest member, Miki, after he uses his powers to avoid wrecking his race car, and from then on stuff just happens, there's not a ton of backstory. I've read at least one review referring to Miki as an "audience surrogate" and I think that's an interesting way to put it. Miki is basically only there as a way to introduce the concept of the ESPY group in a manner that feels like you're approaching it from the outside, rather than being confronted with confusing internal politics right away.

The group takes on their toughest challenge yet: foiling an assassination plot that has so far claimed the lives of several important politicos already. Their main objective is to stop the prime minister of Baltonia, a fake eastern-European country, from being assassinated. The actual story is very thin on the ground, but it's padded out to a(n arguably overlong) 94 minutes with no shortage of action scenes, location-hopping, psychic fights, regular fights, and a cute dog.

I watch a lot of sentai and one thing that's essentially a constant is that the villains are always more interesting than the good guys. Maybe this is just my bias as a big fan of Tomisaburō Wakayama speaking, but I think that's the case with ESPY too. Wakayama plays a mysterious character named Urlov, head of a rival organization just referred to as "enemies", and I wish more time had been spent on his opaque and sinister motives than on... whatever else this movie was doing in the meantime. At his death scene during the climax of the film, the plot decides to get a little freaky with it and suggest - basically imply, really - that Urlov either was or was possessed by some kind of extraterrestrial force, which was the reason behind his animosity towards all of humankind. Urlov the human tells a story about watching his father, a psychic, be imprisoned and eventually executed for no actual reason, and it's easy to imagine that maybe this is where that possessing force came in: he struck a bargain with something that gave him immense psychic power, because the two of them had the same grudge against humans. But this is total speculation based on about five minutes of film. Wakayama's compelling performance gave me more to think about than the actual psychic stuff.

This feels like a movie that a lot of people would probably just be watching for the actors who are in it. It's a who's-who of charismatic Showa guys; Kayama is the captain, as I said, and he's joined by Hiroshi Fujioka, Goro Mutsumi, and Masao Kusakari, who I'm really not familiar with (I think the only thing I've ever seen him in was a movie called Invitation of Lust, but we're not going to get into that here). The team's token female member is played by Kaoru Yumi, and her character predictably gets the shaft as the sole woman in the film.

All in all, it's just kind of an odd thing. It reminds me really strongly of Dengeki!!! Strada-5: team of people with special abilities who fight crime, all of them men except for one woman, captain played by a guy who was really famous 10-15 years ago and doesn't usually do tokusatsu stuff. The whole affair has more of a "TV series" vibe than anything. The script apparently existed as far back as 1966, but the boom in popularity of psychic media due to Uri Geller (ugh) was the impetus for finally getting it made in the '70s. Shooting took a month, which... yeah, it feels like a movie that was shot in a month. It's fun, but I still like Fukuda's Godzilla movies much, much better. There's a sense of energy and youthfulness to those that I personally felt was absent in ESPY when compared to things like Ebirah, Horror of the Deep and Son of Godzilla, although that could be because those films were openly aimed at children. Either way, I still think Fukuda's directorial style is better suited to the aesthetic of the 1960s.

As a final note, Toho Kingdom cites a quote from Fukuda where he says he was disappointed that audiences weren't as surprised by Fujioka's teleportation scene as he'd hoped. I gotta say I was NOT part of the crowd who wasn't phased by that. All the other business happening in this movie and I still didn't expect somebody to straight up teleport.

The Great Buddha: Arrival (2018)

directed by Hiroto Yokokawa

Japan

60 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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This is going to be a short, quick review because I have other stuff to do, but I liked this film so much that I would feel bad if I didn't say something about it. The version with English subtitles that I watched will give you some background before the film, but basically, to recap, The Giant Buddha Statue's Travel Through The Country (sometimes also known as "The Great Buddha Arrival") was a film, made and released in 1934, that is important to the history of tokusatsu. It doesn't feature any kaiju, but as the title would imply, it concerns a giant buddha statue that becomes animate, and the work put into miniatures and presence of a human in costume as a giant being means that it's generally considered the "first"* tokusatsu movie. Unfortunately it is also lost due to the Pacific War; no one alive has seen footage of it, but a few tantalizing still pictures do survive.

There's something really striking about how important and respected the 1934 Giant Buddha is, despite being almost entirely lost with no chance of ever being found. It's something that at this point is so far in the past that no one living has any memory of it. Of course modern art - including film - learns from older art, but typically we learn from it because we still have older art to look at and interpret. Nobody has any way of viewing The Giant Buddha anymore, but it's still part of the tokusatsu canon.

So this film posits itself to be a remake, but in reality what it is is weirder and more difficult to pin down than that. It opens with Akira Takarada (RIP - it's great to see him here, and he doesn't remotely look 84) talking about The Giant Buddha, which was released the year he was born. In the fictional version of events The Great Buddha: Arrival sets up, the earlier film was apparently a recreation of a time when the director witnessed firsthand the Great Buddha of Shugakuen (currently in Tokai City) standing up and walking about. This does not happen in a vacuum, there are historical events occurring at the time that are important to the plot, but that I am not familiar with; evidently there was a rash of suicides around this time that are also covered in the 1934 film, and the director was about to become one of them when the Buddha became animate. So it's not like the statue is walking for no reason, there is a connection between it and the sphere of human activity. I would go further into that if I could, but I'm not aware of it beyond what this film explains to me.

In The Great Buddha: Arrival, the main character - played by the real-life writer of the film - works at a film studio and is compiling all of these snippets of research together to make something like a documentary about the lost film. So this is a half-documentary, half-sequel; again, the way it's so hard to classify is why I loved this film so much. It doesn't simply take an idea and expand upon it. It does that and it takes the existence of the original film itself and envelops it in its own concept, bringing the lost film into something a little different from reality, creating this story where - because there is now nothing left to dispute it - the existence of the film is itself an element in the film's mythos. And while all of this is unfolding, the Buddha statue once again begins to walk.

Narratively, I will admit this film is all over the place. There really aren't any "characters" since it's filmed with something close to a faux-documentary style, and the characters that are there don't actually talk to each other much about what's going on. The two film studio workers have more dialogue about the bike one of them is trying to strap a jet engine onto(???) than the Buddha, or the lost film. Much of the dialogue here is sound bites of Takarada and an huge cast of famous tokusatsu actors from the previous century talking about the Buddha, or about the lost film. And honestly, I wouldn't have it any other way. I didn't need more plot, or more intriguing characters. It is enough for this movie to be exactly how it is.

I guess I'm really not even talking about this movie itself, now. I've been thinking a lot recently about how important it is that there is a current generation making movies like this. I may be overstepping here, as my home country's film industry sucks and I can't lay any claim to tokusatsu other than being a huge fan of it, but I just feel like it's absolutely crucial as time goes on that the memory of the origins of the medium are not forgotten, and are continually retold and reinvented. And I mean, this really goes for any type of film from anywhere in the world. The people who made the movies are going to be outlived by them, and so preserving them and continuing to learn from them and keeping an open dialogue between films from the past and today's culture is what we have to do. Even a film that is lost can remain "alive" if we keep engaging with it.

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*With some qualifications. Reminder that "tokusatsu" just means "special effects", and it's a technique, not a genre; saying this is not like saying something is "the first horror film" or "the first spy flick". It's just one of the earliest movies from Japan to utilize the kind of techniques that would become popular later in the 20th century.

I have a new blog.

Clap your eyes on it.

Regular updates will continue here as well, of course. Unfortunately.

Atragon (1963)

directed by Ishirō Honda

Japan

95 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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Alright. I'm finally reviewing Atragon. I've seen this movie more times by far than anything else (except for maybe Banshee Chapter and the original Jurassic Park) but I've never managed to review it because every time I watch it I seem to get a bit distracted.

Upon my latest rewatch, I've come to realize this is my favorite movie of all time. I've always been the kind of person who doesn't have a single favorite movie because there's so many, how can you ask me to pick just one? But I'm pretty confident now that it's this one. And not only that, this is also the movie I would pick if somebody asked me to explain why I love tokusatsu. It's a perfect example of the use of incredibly detailed miniatures and practical effects to execute a story that is also extremely well-written and resonant, a balance that not every tokusatsu film achieves. I think this movie is basically flawless in every way. It's something that feels like it accomplished 100% of what it set out to do.

I also want to quickly say that one of the only times I've ever gotten really mad at another film reviewer was when I saw this film referred to as "jingoistic". I just don't know how far in the sand your head must be to watch this entire thing and not get a strong anti-war message from it. I'm not sure if maybe the English dub casts it in a different light; the extent of my experience with the dub is accidentally renting it on DVD, going "aw man, this is a dub" and returning it. But the film itself is possibly Honda's most explicit anti-war statement aside from Farewell Rabaul (and Godzilla, of course).

The initial setup of the film is almost reminiscent of Toho's hardboiled crime flicks of the late 1950s until it begins taking a different tack with the slow reveal of multiple factions within society working in opposition to a peacetime Japan. The central conflict of the film is between the undersea empire of Mu, sunk 12,000 years ago and now returning to reclaim their "colonies" - the rest of the Earth - and humanity, but this also contains a conflict between a group of former military personnel holed up on an island after the Pacific War, refusing to accept the new constitution and disarmament of Japan. The leader of this group, Admiral Jinguji, has been secretly building a massive multi-terrain warship (the Gōtengō, or "Roaring Heaven") unlike anything any country has ever seen, and wants to keep it solely for Japan - Imperial Japan - when it becomes militarily active again. As the threat from Mu becomes greater, Jinguji's old commanding officer as well as his daughter attempt to convince him to let the Gōtengō be used for the good of the whole world.

Jinguji embodies Honda's critique of nationalism, and the role is possibly Jun Tazaki's best. In retreating to his island, Jinguji separated himself from his daughter Makoto, a toddler at the time, and when the two finally reunite, Makoto is horrified to find her father so dedicated to his ideology that he refuses to accept reality and shuns the rest of the world. One of the others who come to the island refers to Jinguji as a "ghost wearing rusty armor called patriotism". The specific word used here that gets translated as "ghost" is "bōrei", and I want to take a minute to talk about that because there are a lot of different concepts within Japanese culture that are translated en masse as "ghost". "Bōrei" is a term that is synonymous with other, more common ghost words, but is a little more antiquated and Gothic, and refers to a departed or ruined spirit that has left their physical form. It has literary overtones as well. Referring to Jinguji as a ghost is itself a very evocative turn of phrase, but I wanted to mention the term originally used because in its original language there would have to have been thought behind what kind of spirit, specifically, to reference. Jinguji does eventually come around, and personally, I love how little focus is given to this moment: the entirety of Jinguji's change of mind takes place in one sentence: "I think I'd been wearing rusty armor. I took it off, and I feel fine." It's not emphasized that this is a radical shift in ideology; Jinguji is the same person, but he's been confronted with the error of his ways in a manner that finally got through to him. That the film itself doesn't dwell on this allows me to imagine Jinguji's inner conflict more acutely than if he'd been given a protracted redemption arc.

(I do kind of feel like the subs on the 2006 Media Blasters release leave something to be desired, and I was wondering at some points if they were using dubtitles. I generally try to stay away from complaining about subtitles unless they're egregiously bad, because I'm not fluent in Japanese, but... did I catch them translating "mokusatsu suru" as "ignore"? Were there not some significant real-world repercussions to doing that exact same thing at one point in history?)

Let's move on to the practical effects, which are stunning and I love them. You really can't get any better than the enormous Gōtengō prop. It was a functional drill, and if I remember correctly, was at least partially built by a hardware company. There is something so magnificent about the Gōtengō that never gets old no matter what film it reappears in or how many times I watch this one: that first scene of it rising out of the water, accompanied by Ifukube's massive, swelling orchestral score, is impressive every time. The ship is the centerpiece of the film (literally - the original Japanese title is "Kaitei Gunkan", or "Undersea Warship"), but Atragon also contains enough beautiful matte paintings and miniatures to ensure that the undersea Mu empire feels like a real, fleshed-out location. I've always been captivated by the interior view of Mu's engine room, those massive, spinning rotors that completely dwarf any human being give off such a sense of scale that it's difficult for me to remember they're just miniatures in real life.

And there's Manda. I never really thought the inclusion of Manda was as jarring as it seems to be for some people, but maybe that's because I love this movie so much that I don't think about it enough. There's such a focus on military grandstanding and who has the best submarines that I guess if you look at it one way it could be a little silly to see Mu suddenly pull out their giant underwater dragon that they feed people to. But I love Manda and I hate when they freeze it after it attacks the Gōtengō. Manda did nothing wrong.

I'm going to try to end this review here because I could talk at length about this movie for much longer than I already have. It's just one of those things that's perfect from start to finish and never gets old. It is dated but its message isn't. I'll say one last thing before I wrap this up: every time I watch this I notice something new about it, and this time what struck me was how much the supporting cast gives to it. Yū Fujiki being a ham and Kenji Sahara wearing the most obvious disguise ever (perhaps rehearsing for his future stint wearing the most obvious disguise ever in Space Amoeba) add a little humor to a very serious and heavy film. The Empress of Mu, played by Tetsuko Kobayashi (who apparently also did her own makeup for the film), has few spoken lines but a screen presence that supercedes her. Every part of this movie is so good. I can't believe people think it's boring. I want to get everybody to watch this with me.

The Great Yokai War: Guardians (2021)

directed by Takashi Miike

Japan

118 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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After enjoying Takashi Miike's first reboot of/tribute to the Yokai Monsters series, I definitely wanted to check out the second, which at the time I watched it was still very new. Neither of these movies seem particularly well-known outside of Japan, so I didn't know what I was getting into. Immediately, it became very apparent that where the previous movie had only a handful of moments that felt a little too sinister for a young audience, Guardians is wholly for the kids. If I didn't already know that Miike directed this, I would have had no idea; save for some of the humor, there's no trace of the director of Visitor Q and Audition here. Which is good - to be that versatile is an asset for any creator. But to me as a fan of Miike as a horror director first and foremost, it's surprising.

So the thing about this movie is that it kicks ass. I'm going to apologize right here and now for not viewing it objectively, because my unshakable opinion is that this movie kicks ass. I'm able to recognize that it has many flaws, and with a certain mindset it could be slightly embarrassing and overwrought. But I still think it's aces. The tone of it is pure, classic children's adventure story: like the first film, it's a coming-of-age thing, but with more emphasis on themes of protecting your family and being kind above all else. I haven't seen a movie this untaintedly joyful in a long time (and again, this is coming from the guy whose episode of Masters of Horror got banned for being too freaky). Saccharine, censored, cautious children's media is a dime a dozen, but it's rare to see something with a message about caring and trying to be a good person that's executed and written this well.

In classic fantasy movie fashion, our protagonist is a little boy who finds out he comes from a powerful lineage, going back a thousand years to his ancestor, Watanabe no Tsuna, an accomplished yōkai fighter. His bloodline grants him powers that can help him fulfill his destiny, but he needs to learn some courage first. Like in the first film, the main character's initial encounter with yōkai after finding out he has the ability to see them when most people don't is pure gold. There's an incredible variety of yōkai, from the humanoid to the weird, and I never get tired of seeing them all assembled in such masses that I couldn't possibly register every single one of them even if I paused the movie and stared at it for a while. In a funnier moment, the yōkai of Japan assemble other "yōkai" from across the world at a yōkai summit (a "Yammit") to ask for their assistance, and honestly, I'm obsessed with the idea that Pennywise is a yōkai. Many of the same creatures from the last movie are in it again, but as this seems to have little to do with its predecessor, they have a slightly different appearance and characterization. There are also more oni, who serve as kind of antagonistic figures, but they're less cut-and-dry Bad Guys than they are obstacles for the main character to figure out how to help and apply his philosophy of relentless goodness to.

The real antagonist isn't even an antagonist either. This movie, in more ways than one, ditches the good/evil dichotomy so inherent in modern Western interpretations of folklore and replaces it with something more nuanced, something that asks the viewer to take more than a few moments to judge a character. The threat that the main character, Kei, is called upon to face is a gigantic human/crustacean ghost hybrid that is in the process of rolling its way across Japan, directly through Tokyo, in an attempt to go back to the unspeakably ancient sea it remembers as its home. It has no ill intent, but it is born of grudges, an assemblage of unfulfilled dreams and a deep longing that causes it to coalesce, like a pearl by way of irritation. This is not an evil monster that has to be destroyed, this is an aching, homesick being.

At every stop, even though he gets a cool sword and then another, cooler sword, Kei faces his opponents with an eye towards understanding them and getting on their level rather than defeating them outright. Everything and everyone around him is as scheming and underhanded as usual, but he evades all of that by simply going through life asking what he can do to help. When his kitsune companion and their party are betrayed by a yōkai-oni double agent, and a horde of oni outnumber them by several orders of magnitude, he does not want to fight them, because "We don't fight friends of our friends". His initial reaction to the arrival of a huge number of enemies is not fear, in fact, but gladness to see that his two-timing new friend has other friends outside of his cell phone.

I don't even hate the CGI. There's much more of it than in the previous film, and it's much more noticeable, but the costumes still manage to take center stage. And like I said, it kicks ass. There are just so many moments in this where I was thinking "oh my god, yes". This movie is awesome in the way that a ten-year-old boy might use the word. Awesoooome!!!! as in radical, as in a cool skateboard trick, as in saving the city whilst being in the fifth grade. I loved every moment where this movie went over the top. I love the lengthy musical number at the end. I love Daimajin (yes, Daimajin) being swayed by the power of brotherly love. I love the tiny sideplot about the yuki-onna having a big old crush on Inugami Gyōbu, even though she's a creature of the cold and he's fiery and hot. I love the army of tanuki. This is a good movie because I liked it. It has problems but I'm too busy liking it to talk about them. Sorry.