Godzilla vs. SpaceGodzilla (1994)

directed by Kensho Yamashita

Japan

107 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

----

As usual, revisiting this after having seen every Godzilla movie finds me with a changed opinion of it. I'm rewriting my review a little to reflect that. Previously I opened by saying that I had limited interest in Godzilla fighting different versions of himself, and while it's true that the 1990s did see a lot of Godzilla movies with that scenario, I don't feel like it's inherently bad just because it gets done a lot of times. I also called M.O.G.U.E.R.A "slightly ridiculous", which I apologize profusely for, because both here as M.O.G.U.E.R.A (this stands for Mobile Operated G-Universal Expert Robot Aero-type, and don't you forget it) and in The Mysterians, that mole robot is my best beloved.

I really feel like this span of Heisei-era Godzilla movies that all took place in the same timeline (meaning the ones that have Miki Saegusa as their connecting thread), rather than starting over from scratch every time like most other Godzilla movies do, is a high period for the franchise as a whole. I'm not saying that they're my favorites, but they're some of the most consistent. Individually they work well, but together they present this collection of ideas and events that feels a lot more solidly grounded than a lot of other Godzilla timelines - again, this is because they don't jump around and re-start every so often.

The crowd response to Godzilla vs. Biollante seems to have had a lot of influence on the tone of the movies that came after it. Evidently its darker feel and more complex storyline wasn't very popular with kids, so many of the movies afterwards have a distinctly more child-friendly vibe. I don't really have an opinion on this; I might be too biased here, because to me, the Godzilla franchise has never bent so severely towards being For Kids™ that it's lost other things in sacrifice to being tame. But I may only have that opinion because I am too in love with the Godzilla movies we did get to be caught up in thoughts of what might have been. Aside from a story or two here and there, we'll never know how much incredibly cool stuff might have been cut behind the scenes for being too dark.

Onto the actual movie. The strategy for dealing with Godzilla that the best and brightest minds have thought up this time is to get Miki Saegusa (not just her, eventually the technologically is meant to be adapted so that anyone can use it, but she's the one who has to kick it off) to control Godzilla psychically using her powerful ESP. This is a nonviolent concept, but it still holds moral and ethical quandaries that the people who came up with it apparently don't see as too big of an issue: Is it right to dominate another creature with your mind and force it to act against its will? Is it ever right to just wrest control of another conscious, feeling being, even if that being is something as lethally destructive as Godzilla? These are unsaid implications, they don't really get dealt with outright in the film - which is another reason why I love Godzilla: These films feel like they respect the viewer enough to bring up topics and let you explore them yourself. At the same time, there's a lone-wolf type who's trying to kill Godzilla as revenge for the death of his brother. Like the concept of Godzilla fighting a second, slightly different Godzilla, this has been done before, many times. I don't feel that it's particularly compelling in this case, certainly not as much as it has been before, because the lone revenge-minded character feels like he was only brought in because the writers wanted a foil to the ESP institute, or perhaps another human faction to act as the "bad guys" instead of having SpaceGodzilla be the sole villain. A baby Godzilla is also hanging around, and whether this is Godzilla's biological child or just another member of his species is not important; Godzilla is going to parent the absolute hell out of this kid and god help you if you get in the way.

So what is SpaceGodzilla? He's actually kind of fascinating to me. I have an image saved to my computer of a note from the extras in the back of one of the Godzilla comics that says "The thing you need to know about SpaceGodzilla is that he's a Godzilla from space". One of the most memorable scenes in this film is when one of its peripherally-important scientist characters explains the origin of SpaceGodzilla, which is really just deeply wacky and sounds more like something somebody would come up with for their weird fanfiction than an actual, canonical thing that happened. Basically we're expected to believe that after the carnage of Godzilla fighting Biollante, some of his cells drifted up into the atmosphere and eventually escaped to find their way into a black hole, get spit out by a white hole (?) and combine with an unknown alien life form (??) to create a sort of bootleg clone of Godzilla. Okay. Sure. They also add that it's possible Godzilla's cells stuck onto Mothra to travel out of the atmosphere instead of being ejected after the Biollante fight, but however his biological material got into space doesn't seem to be relevant.

But what makes SpaceGodzilla interesting to me is that he seems to exist for no reason other than to be evil. Like, we all know by now that it's not Godzilla's fault that he's the way he is. We only have ourselves to blame for that. But SpaceGodzilla was created by forces that humanity doesn't understand, millions or billions or even trillions of miles removed from Earth. He was born from some bizarre cosmic influence that shaped him into a being with no sympathy and either no motivation behind killing or a motivation that's unknown to us. He steals Godzilla's maybe-child and then just rampages around causing the maximum amount of destruction possible; he's ruthless. There's a cold alien menace to SpaceGodzilla that makes up for his corny name. I love the scene of the final battle in Fukuoka, how SpaceGodzilla uses his crystals to mutate the entire city into something as alien as he is. I was thinking about it and realized for the first time that while most kaiju destroy cities, no kaiju (at least in the mainstream Godzilla canon) has specifically transformed a city like that. For a movie that is superficially so rote and uses old ideas over again, there are some things in this that are extremely original.

Well, I didn't mean to write this entire review over again, but I guess I did. My opinions and feelings have changed - not by much, but enough that I approach this with a different mindset now. I was too caught up before on how nothing about this movie makes sense, but now I know that being a Godzilla fan means letting go of the idea of making sense as you know it and allowing any given movie you're watching to inject you with its own version of making sense. That brings me back to why I think the Saegusa-connected span of Godzilla movies are so much fun. Instead of presenting ideas that only exist within one movie and then get overwritten when the next one comes out, we're invited to see a continuous timeline where characters deal with events with the benefit of knowledge of what came before. A lot of people don't like this movie and I specifically have seen people picking on the effects, which I don't really get, because to me they look fine for this time period. But again, I am biased. I love to see the wires, I love to see the shadows on the painted backdrop. It's not important to me that things look perfect, I enjoy it more when I can see what work was put into it.