The Return of Godzilla (1984)

directed by Koji Hashimoto

Japan

103 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I'm noticing a pattern that's emerging every time I rewatch any given Godzilla movie, which I've done, for most of them, at least three times now: the first time I don't give it much thought, or I come at it with an attitude of inherent skepticism; the second time I think "what was I thinking when I said I didn't like this"; the third time I'm in love with it enough that I have a hard time saying anything bad about it. What this says about me as a film critic, I don't know, but I'm having a good time. Let me have fun.

I guess "fun" might be the wrong word to use in relation to this, one of the most serious Godzilla films.

Throughout all 70 years of the franchise's existence, there's only been four mainline films in which Godzilla carries the story alone, not fighting an opponent; all four of those have a markedly different fan response than the others. Having Godzilla be the sole monster in the film signifies, in large part, that the film is going to be responding to the original 1954 movie in particular. (Not that Godzilla's "vs." films don't also do this, but it's the solo ones that really allow for contemplation of the series as a concept.) Shin Godzilla takes a lot of its DNA from this movie, expanding upon the idea of bureaucracy during a time of crisis; Minus One involves the idea of war and survivor's guilt, and I don't have space here to talk about what the original does. So I'll move on to The Return of Godzilla.

One of the complaints - not always really a "complaint", but something people are definitely aware of - I hear about Godzilla films is that Godzilla itself is only in them for a few minutes. This is objectively true, but I think it's only an issue if you're unfamiliar with the series. In my opinion, and in the right hands, a Godzilla movie can be at its most terrifying when Godzilla is not in the frame, but only exists as a shadow haunting the story. Return of Godzilla was in precisely the right position to achieve this, because it was building on the massive hype of the first return to the franchise since 1975's Terror of Mechagodzilla, and it was releasing to an audience who, themselves, were at an age where many of them did not experience Godzilla firsthand in 1954, but had a concept of it that was formed through later films and secondhand knowledge. Godzilla lurking just outside the frame is all the more powerful when Godzilla has been lurking just outside the frame of real life for the past 30 years.

And I would argue that the most terrifying parts of Return of Godzilla come not when Godzilla is actively destroying cities but when the people who may have the power to influence a response to it are tasked to act. The tensest, most nerve-wracking scene in this film is when the representatives of both America and Russia are practically begging the Prime Minister of Japan (played brilliantly by Keiju Kobayashi) to let them nuke the country again. These are representatives of countries who Japan had clashed variously with at different times in the not-too-distant past, and while they may espouse peace during peacetime, as soon as they see the opportunity, they're disturbingly eager to drop bombs again. It's even worse when you consider that Japan's PM seems to be older than the both of them - I don't know what his age was meant to be, specifically, but he's certainly older than 40 and probably has firsthand memories of the last time his country was nuked. Now he's in a room with men bowling each other over to be the first to persuade him to let them do it again.

The character of Godzilla in this film is also reworked in a way that's very interesting. The continuity here totally ignores all the other films of the past 30 years save for the original and establishes Godzilla as, at the basest level, an animal. This Godzilla has almost no intelligence and operates solely on instinct, not hostility. For a long time I thought that scene where Godzilla is siphoning off steam from a nuclear power plant and then gets distracted by some birds and wanders off was just really silly, but when I rewatched it this time I found it incredibly poignant. This is the enemy, this is the thing that returns to haunt humankind perennially, with no end, and it's so absent-minded that a flock of birds can make it forget what it was doing. This is the creature we're nuking. A big animal. A cat with a laser pointer. This is not lost on the film: Godzilla's death in Mt. Mihara is treated with a weighty solemnity, and the fact that the plan to lure him into the volcano is even possible - that Godzilla is so instinctual, so unintelligent, that you can get it to walk straight into an active volcano if you play the right sounds - itself serves as an admonishment to the humans who have to do it in the first place.

The only thing I still don't like about this movie is Godzilla's physical appearance. There's something - I don't know what it is exactly, maybe the eyes are too big, the arms too long. It just doesn't look right. This is all purely on the aesthetic level, of course; the cybot Godzilla is a technical feat and I appreciate the time and work that goes into constructing a Godzilla suit even if it's one I personally don't like. But I'm somebody who will defend even the goofy appearance of the '54 and Raids Again suits, and I'll readily admit that this suit... I just don't like it.

The deep human tension and political strife that signified really the first time the franchise had experimented with those things make this movie stand out from the others. I don't think it's a perfect movie - for example, on my third rewatch I noticed that there's literally one woman in the entire film - but it showed that the franchise could do new things and head in a direction vastly different from the heroic, child-friendly Godzilla it left off on - and that people wanted to see it. This film kicked off the most critically-successful era of Godzilla, a string of story-driven, technically masterful films that remain some of the best in the series, and its ideas would go on to inspire future films as well. I don't know how other people feel about it but I don't think I gave it enough credit the first time I saw it. I hope Minus One isn't the last solo Godzilla film we get for another long span of time.