directed by Takao Okawara
107 minutes
Japan
4 stars out of 5
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This is an older review, but since I rewatched this film last night in the theater and it's Godzilla Day, I'm going to try to edit it to be comprehensible enough to post. I have some thoughts about what is, unexpectedly, possibly my favorite of this era of Godzilla films. Yes, jellyfish Orga looks silly, and the CGI in some of the shots of Godzilla superimposed over land is dodgy at best, but there's something really special here that took a couple of viewings for me to appreciate.
This movie introduces us to a slightly updated version of Godzilla. Everything we're used to is all still there, of course - the roar, the atomic breath, the overall vibe - but made newer and shinier. Godzilla himself is spikier than ever, oddly slope-shouldered and distinctly green. He feels more calculating in this one, too. He seems to strategize and look at things from every angle before deciding on a plan of action, even being visibly weirded out at one point when Orga starts to transform. A newer suit actor (Tsutomu Kitagawa) may have had a lot to do with Godzilla's different mannerisms and body language in this film. I think Kitagawa does really well in the suit - he gives Godzilla a kind of fluidity of motion, as well as a distinct sense of scale, and you notice that Godzilla never really stands still.
In the opening scene, when we see Godzilla at sea, crunching up a boat, he does it with an uncharacteristic quiet. The first time I reviewed this, I remarked on how I thought that Godzilla being introduced in total silence like this instead of announcing his presence with a roar was probably a deliberate move to try and present him a little differently in this film than in others, but the thing I noticed more than that upon second viewing was that the boat Godzilla has in his mouth feels like a direct callback to the infamous train scene in the 1954 original. This whole scene is fascinating because it shows us Godzilla as something you could miss. We are of course used to his chaos and noise, his trail of destruction, but this shows us that Godzilla is a creature who is also capable of stealth. We see this two more times in the movie: When Shinoda, his daughter Io, and their unwilling photographer partner Ichinose come face-to-face with Godzilla in a tunnel, he's quiet and calculating, breath fogging up the windshield before he breaks it with his roar. Also, at the end, of the film, he confronts Hiroshi Abe's character Katagiri directly, one of the only times to this day that Godzilla has interacted with a single, specific person. Neither of these two instances display any of the wanton, indiscriminate destruction that has been Godzilla's signature for much of his history.
But I still think that this film, above all (or at least many) others might be my favorite example of Godzilla's creatureliness. The way humankind interacts with him and he interacts with humankind is handled in a deeply faceted and interesting way. We have two perspectives presented here regarding how to deal with him: A scientist who dropped out of his field due to clashes with colleagues over how immoral he felt his discipline was becoming, who wants to research Godzilla, and the leader of a defense organization, who only wants to kill Godzilla. You can see where both of them are coming from, because no one is going to argue that attempting to stop something causing unfathomable loss of life and material damage is a bad idea, but the message here is one of the essential core principles of this entire franchise: We shouldn't kill because we don't understand. It's not up to us to decide what lives and what dies just because we struggle with our place in the world next to it. We have to take responsibility for what we've made. We don't get to blindly eliminate what we wish we could forget.
The CGI is rough. Orga is a very strange enemy in general and the less I say about it, the better. I think this was the first or one of the first times that CGI was used so heavily to render a kaiju that Godzilla fought against, and it does not hold up to today's technical abilities, but again, it took a second viewing for me to be okay with that, and now I am. It is what it is, basically. The idea is there, and I don't like dismissing it just because the method of conveying that idea isn't up to my standards as a viewer in 2023. It's interesting, too, the way Godzilla fights Orga's "creature" form animal-to-animal at first, instead of just blasting it with atomic breath. For some reason his first idea is to go over and just slap the shit out of Orga. A lot of people make fun of this, but I interpreted it as Godzilla testing the waters, hitting his unusual opponent lightly at first to see how it would react.
I really appreciated the human characters in this one, which is a rare thing to say for these films. The characters we spend the most time with are not members of the military, or a cadre of scientists, but a father (who is, granted, an out-of-work scientist) and daughter who, along with some other scattered individuals across the country, make up a stormchaser-like network that tracks Godzilla and alerts the populated areas in his path so that they can have the most possible time to evacuate. The goal of this is to find a way of living with Godzilla, like adapting to life in an area prone to natural disasters. I was greatly thankful for this new outlook that wasn't from the perspective of the military, as that plot was getting a little long in the tooth from being hammered in practically every film. The military is there too as a foil to the GPN, but the focus is on smaller-scale attempts at finding a better solution than shooting Godzilla with masers and throwing fighter jets at him.
Hiroshi Abe's character provides genuinely one of my favorite scenes in this entire franchise when he faces down Godzilla one-on-one at the end of this film. Like, I could talk about this forever because it literally gives me chills, everything about it is so striking and powerful to me. The naming of things: What is "Gojira", as a name, in the context of this film? Godzilla 2000 exists in the same continuity as the 1954 original, so the people of this film would know "Gojira" as an indigenous language's name for the creature haunting their country. But, in that context as well as arguably in real life, it's a nonsense word. Any name we give an animal is only indicative of the way we interpret its nature; it says nothing of its true nature as an entity. It's like facing down a tiger and saying "Tiger!" It's putting a name to something that is so of itself that any puny human label we apply to it fails to adhere. Katagiri looks right at Godzilla and acknowledges the inextricable relationship between Godzilla and himself as a human by using the only word he's ever known to describe the creature. There is mutual recognition in that moment. The most important thing this movie does is make extraordinarily clear that we are a part of Godzilla and he is a part of us.
I once brought up Frankenstein in one of my Godzilla reviews because I felt like it was the closest Western equivalent: a creature who is not just a creature, but who stands for something more, who has a depth to them outside of their physical appearance. In Frankenstein, the monster's creator is horrified by his creation and rejects him, leaving the monster in a state of anguish and turmoil, as he doesn't fit in with human civilization, but is all too aware that he is still a thinking, feeling being. Is this not similar to Godzilla's own creation? Did we not bring him about ourselves, only to immediately begin searching for ways to destroy him? This film asks: even though he always brings such destruction, why does Godzilla end up protecting us in the end? The answer to this is almost at the level of parody - "Maybe there's a bit of Godzilla inside each and every one of us" - but I think I realized for maybe the first time that even if Godzilla has no respect whatsoever for human civilization, he does seem to do things that ultimately serve to protect human life as a whole, despite massive casualties in the process. And I think maybe he keeps us (most of us) alive because he doesn't think we deserve to forget him. It's this cycle of trying to live with the ghosts of our past, of trying desperately and failing repeatedly to learn from them and stop committing the same mistakes, and ultimately the realization that we cannot begin to move on if we don't recognize ourselves in the monster and the monster in ourselves.
Edit: Why on Earth does this review currently have over 250 views.
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