Rebirth of Mothra II (1997)

directed by Kunio Miyoshi

Japan

97 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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Unfortunately I was pretty asleep during this one, so I'm not going to talk about it with much depth and insight (do I ever?), but I still want to get some general thoughts about it down. Not the fault of the movie itself, I just fall asleep during movies a lot.

Where Rebirth of Mothra dealt with deforestation, II deals with the pollution of the ocean. I don't think there was any one sinister megacorp blamed this time, like how the logging industry was clearly under fire in the last film; humanity as a whole is framed as responsible for all the trash in the sea. The film is set in an Okinawan resort town that's supposed to be comparatively untouched and serene, but even they face the encroachment of careless tourists and plastic waste invading their waters. I didn't particularly like the heavy emphasis on Okinawan myth and spirituality here, especially not when mixed with stuff invented out of whole cloth, because to me it basically felt like the equivalent of when American movies use Indigenous spirituality as an aesthetic. But maybe there was actual research and consultation with real people done here - I don't know. The Okinawan motif doesn't seem to go much further than a bare surface level as a sort of woo-woo magic, but I'm not too familiar with these things.

If you were irritated by the kids in the first movie, I've got some bad news: most everyone in this is also a child. I don't know where their parents were, this time - certainly not as involved in their welfare as the last one. The main character here is much more reserved and mature than the two siblings before, and I felt like she carried the film impressively although she was flanked by two goof-offs who were her one-time bullies, as well as two thieving adults who weren't much better. The whole movie has a really heavy "for kids" vibe, and I haven't addressed that with regards to either the previous film or this one yet, because I just don't feel like it's something I need to bring up. These pretty much are children's movies, I'm not going to watch a children's movie and complain that it's too juvenile for me. But I do want to bring it up now because this is an example of children's media where real effort was put into it, which to me seems like a no-brainer - kids aren't stupid, they know when they're being pandered to or given the scraps no adult wants because adults think they won't care. But there's a cottage industry dedicated to churning out literal nonsense to glue kids' eyes to iPad screens and suck out ad money from them (see Elsagate), so when a movie like this is made with care and attention to detail and marketed towards kids, it unfortunately can feel like an exception rather than the rule.

Mothra's baby, referred to as Mothra Leo, is grown up and takes center stage in this one. For reasons unknown to me he is generally regarded as being male. One of my favorite things to point out to people is that Mothra is one of the most powerful kaiju in the Godzilla canon, and Leo takes after his mother (yes, yes, the Godzilla Mothra and this one are different, I'm just saying) in that at times he feels ridiculously overpowered. But we love him for it. He has a host of different beam attacks as well as some dexterity with his claws, and crucially he gains the ability to fight underwater - a major weak spot for the Mothra of the previous film. It's probably because I was loopy-tired during this, but I couldn't stop thinking about the significance of Leo learning to swim and fight underwater after having witnessed the drowning death of his mother. I mean, were they replaced by humans, this would be immediately recognized as a triumphant moment of character development: The child overcoming the thing that they watched kill their parent, not being held back by fear but instead honoring their parent's memory to become even stronger than them. 

I just love how Mothra is so cyclical, like many things in nature. One Mothra may die in the midst of battle but another one always takes up the mantle. This is exactly why Mothra is so unbeatable. She's less a single character, like most of her opponents are, and more an ongoing phenomenon. It's like trying to fight the spirit of renewal and rebirth itself. You just can't.

Pacing-wise, this is more what I expect from a kaiju film; the battle scenes don't feel like they take up as much time and we're expected to care about the human characters running around an undersea castle with some relics or whatever. I liked this aesthetically; the CGI is sort of middle-tier for its time and doesn't hold up very well at all, but there's a kind of vintage-computer-game sensibility to seeing everybody roam the obviously green-screened halls of a mystical, geometrically complex ancient ruin. I think possibly the battles were restricted a little more this time because of how powerful Mothra Leo is - he could have beat Dagahra (who I found almost wholly uninteresting, despite the nice suit design) in a single scene, but things needed to be spread out over the whole movie.

This definitely wasn't as good as the first one, but it is fun. You really have to turn your brain off for a lot of it. The ecological message is about as heavy-handed as you can get but I don't tend to view that as a bad thing. There's plenty of glorious puppetry and moth stuff for moth fans. I can't complain too much. It's just good, not quite great.