All Monsters Attack (1969)

directed by Ishirō Honda

Japan

70 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I was lucky enough to catch a screening of the '54 original Godzilla on a nice big screen at my city's art museum last week. It's a masterpiece, a defining moment in 20th century cinema, and one of the best movies ever made. Watching it again cemented my feelings on this. I came home and I found that I wanted to do nothing but watch another Godzilla movie before sleep overtook me, so I obviously chose one that would go well with the dour, almost hopeless tone of the original...

...All Monsters Attack.

In all seriousness, it's easy to make fun of this movie, and I'll admit I do it sometimes too, but I'm strongly with the camp that advocates for the film's redemption and critical re-examination. Yes, it's the one that uses probably 15-20 minutes of stock footage (in a film that's only 70 minutes long). Yes, it got one of the most infamously horrendous English dubs of any Godzilla movie, which is largely responsible for people thinking the Godzilla series as a whole is stupid and juvenile. Yes, the suits look bad. But for every point All Monsters Attack has against it, I would argue that it should not be viewed as anything less or "separate" from Honda's filmography, because it retains the same moral and emotional core that all of his films share. In fact, Honda - notoriously hard on his own work - considers this one of his favorite Godzilla films that he made.

It's hard for me to imagine anybody could watch this and not immediately catch on to the depressing undertones of it. The happy, oblivious fantasies the main character Ichiro (played by Tomonori Yazaki, who's great in this but didn't continue acting past childhood) engages in throughout the film distract from a harsh reality, but that's exactly the point. Ichiro is a latchkey kid growing up in a heavily industrialized, polluted area, whose parents both work and who spends much of his time either getting bullied by other children or daydreaming about his favorite monsters. Hell, the theme song that plays over the opening credits - written by Shinichi Sekizawa, who wrote the film itself - talks about how the Earth is a hard place to live. Maybe we don't notice so much today because we're more used to it, but seeing Ichiro and all the other kids playing among piles of coal and a landscape of concrete and smog gets a little more upsetting every time I watch it. The kids themselves are totally unaware of the increasingly dangerous landscape and their disconnection from the natural world, but as adults, we get a better sense of what they're missing.

As other people have noted, you can't even really say the film ends on a high note, because while Ichiro finally gets into his bullies' good graces, he does it by accepting a mean-spirited dare. The implication seems to be that Ichiro is going to grow up to be an even more poorly-adjusted little boy than he already is if his parents don't start paying attention to him. If there's anything optimistic about this whole story, it's that Ichiro has kind of a "cool uncle" neighbor, a toymaker (Hideyo Amamoto playing severely against type) who is the only character to actually treat him like a person instead of as a child to be dismissed and dealt with.

I always like to use this movie as an example of how widely varied all of the different continuities within the Godzilla series are: no two Godzilla movies agree about much of anything - look, there's even one where Godzilla doesn't actually exist. Honda always used Godzilla films as a vehicle to talk about social issues of the time, and this is no exception. Although Godzilla itself isn't used as an allegory for anything really dark and dire this time (if anything it's an allegory for just... being a good dad), the socially relevant message is still present in Ichiro's real life and the world around him.

I'll admit that this is definitely not a perfect film. The kaiju battles feel incredibly low-stakes. The mishmash of stock footage means the appearance of the Godzilla suit is not consistent, and none of them are Godzilla at its best. Minilla, on the other hand, looks a tiny bit better than in Son of Godzilla, and is almost cute (or at least not hideous) from some angles. And I've always liked the appearance of Gabara, although on my most recent rewatch I've realized not having a tail makes it look really weird and unbalanced. But this is probably one of the only Godzilla movies where I've felt a little bored during the action scenes, just because they're trying so hard to be kid-friendly. I think this movie could have been a lot better if the odds hadn't been stacked against it (poor budget resulting in the reluctant decision to use stock footage, an ailing Eiji Tsuburaya's absence from the production, a studio increasingly choosing profit over creativity, etc). That being said, though, I just don't get the real hate so many people feel towards this. I like it. It's good. It's not my favorite, but I get what it's trying to say and I take it at face value.