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

directed by Masaaki Tezuka

Japan

91 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

----

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.