Ultraman Blazar The Movie: Tokyo Kaiju Showdown (2024)

directed by Kiyotaka Taguchi
75 minutes
Japan
4 stars out of 5

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I watched this immediately after episode 19 of Ultraman Arc aired because it made me realize how much I'd been missing Blazar. Did you know that, for no clear reason, Tsuburaya still has not released Ultraman Blazar The Movie: Tokyo Kaiju Showdown, the best Ultra movie from the late Heisei and Reiwa era, internationally?

Yes, I said "the best". I know Blazar hype may be a bit overplayed - there were people calling it the best series in recent memory back when all we had was clips and trailers - but it really is remarkable how much it feels like it revitalized the franchise. Coming right off of Decker, which was utterly unoriginal and middling (although fun), Blazar was such a breath of fresh air. Finally, an Ultra series felt genuinely unique, with themes that extended beyond a surface level, actors who brought range to the cast, and humor that didn't feel like it was aimed specifically at children. And it segued perfectly into Arc, which is, at least currently, shaping up to be almost as good as Blazar.

Tokyo Kaiju Showdown was sort of intended to be the final episode of Blazar, but things didn't work out that way because of runtime restrictions. I think this is palpable from the tone of the film: instead of the apocalyptic, let's-end-this-once-and-for-all sendoff that a lot of post-series Ultra films are (let's say Gaia Again, for an example), this just feels like an episode. And the series itself had such strong stand-alone episodes that this is a good thing. The movie doesn't feel like it's overextending itself: it doesn't try to add deep lore or cast any of the characters as being even more heroic than they already are. Instead it gives us what we want out of a Blazar movie: more Blazar.

There is no clear villain in the film. There is instead a concatenation of people inflicting pain on each other, mostly unknowingly, always selfishly, and sometimes at a societal level, that leads to a crescendo of destruction, embodied in the mindless artificial lifeform Gongilgan. Gongilgan is the result of an accident at a storage facility housing a new chemical (damudoxin) which is highly unstable and has the unfortunate tendency to coalesce into some kind of physical being if too much of it is in the same place. It's surprisingly creepy, with shades of Belyudra and Beast THE ONE; if you stare at it too long, you realize it has faces all over, and its spines look like limbs all mashed together. Which makes sense, since it's a chimera, made from kaiju and inorganic materials.

What animates Gongilgan is the soul of Yuki, its unwitting creator's son, who is absolutely furious with his father and by extension with all adults in the world. Here's the fascinating thing about this movie: it gives me the same feeling as Showa Ultra did, where the kaiju is very clearly not in the wrong but is destroyed anyway. It's been a long time since I've left an Ultra battle feeling like the Ultra really didn't do the right thing by killing the kaiju. I don't know, man, there's just something about Gongilgan - it's an angry child, basically, an angry child throwing a tantrum, but it's a child whose anger is righteous, whose point - that adults thrust the responsibility for the future of the planet onto children for their own sake - is completely valid. Yuki is preyed on by the damudoxin, which amplifies his frustration and anger into fuel for Gongilgan's rampage, and Gongilgan doesn't really have a mind of its own, but it's still all valid. Yuki's dad does have a change of heart when he finally realizes just how badly his son needs his respect and attention, but there's no real catharsis here. Gongilgan still has to die.

It's... it's really something. Visually stunning, shot more like a Shin film than a post-series Ultra movie, it's like an upgraded episode of the series. It's got all the intricate detail and superb suit acting that filled out the show itself, but shot with a cinematic eye. The action is exciting but the emotional core of the movie is what drives it - I want to emphasize, again, that this really gave me a feeling I haven't experienced since watching, like, My Home is Earth or something. Ultraman is good, y'all. It's really good.

Mothra vs. Godzilla (1964)

directed by Ishirō Honda

Japan

89 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Three years after her debut film, Mothra goes up against Godzilla in an obligatory test of mettle for any kaiju worth their salt, but the real enemy, as usual, is humanity.

While Godzilla was definitely not the apocalyptic destruction god that he had been in his debut film, Mothra vs. Godzilla is still a strong "good monster vs. bad monster" story. It was the first movie where Godzilla had fought an original kaiju who had debuted in their own movie, and Mothra has in fact proved so enduring that she remains the only Godzilla-series kaiju to continue getting solo movies even after her appearance in this film. 

Godzilla vs. Mothra also introduces what would become really a cornerstone of Mothra as a character: her intimate connection to ecological concerns. In this film, Mothra's home, Infant Island, is reduced to a barren, radioactive wasteland by bomb testing. The government either didn't notice or, more likely, didn't care that there was a native population living on the island at the time. It sucks that he used people in brownface to do it, but what Honda is saying here is surprisingly deep: native populations have had their trust betrayed time and time again and have been ignored and stepped on in the name of capitalism and "scientific progress" in a multitude of ways. Should they - and by extension, in this case, Mothra - really have to forgive anybody for that? If forgiveness is at all possible, it can only be done by improving the world in a material sense, which is a sentiment all of the main human characters share by the end of the film.

About those human characters: it isn't their show. I tend to disagree strongly when people talk about how the human side of Godzilla movies doesn't matter, but in this case I really struggled to even remember any details about the human cast between the last time I watched this movie and now. They're fine - nobody phones it in, and I'm glad they're there (especially egg guy), but aside from Yoshifumi Tajima doing great in one of his only performances where he gets more than a few lines, none of them felt that interesting.

All the tokusatsu in this movie is extremely well-crafted. This is Toho at their best, even when the budget shows. They may reuse the same footage of people evacuating until they wring the life out of it, but it's the macro details rather than the micro ones that are important here. Even though logically I know humans can't be ten inches tall, my brain just refuses to believe that the Shobijin are not real tiny people because they're integrated into the scenery so well. The miniature work on the buildings and cityscapes is top-notch too, as always. The MosuGoji suit is fantastically expressive, part of which apparently came by accident: Godzilla's jowly-bulldog look is a result of an accident where Haruo Nakajima tripped and fell while in the suit and knocked a few of its teeth out. It's very endearing.

I screened this to a group, and one of my friends said afterward that her only hang-up with a lot of kaiju movies is how drawn-out the fight scenes are, which is a valid complaint; I'd like to point out that it's really easy to take special effects for granted nowadays, but when this movie was released, nobody had done this stuff before. It makes sense that they want to show you every single tank and every single plane because this was the first time anybody was seeing effects like this. I also think it's very important to remember that tokusatsu is inextricable from war movies: the technique was essentially born out of Eiji Tsuburaya and his crew making propaganda. Toku has always been made by and for the boat/plane/vehicle nerds.

It's such a joy to watch these earlier Godzilla movies, the way they just flow from start to finish - it kind of feels like watching somebody do a magic trick and really pull it off, so seamlessly you have no idea how they did it. There are rough parts (some iffy compositing, mostly) but there's something about those that feels diegetic; it doesn't take me out of the film. I think I forgot how good this one was. Happy 60th.

Island of Lost Souls (1932)

directed by Erle C. Kenton

USA

71 minutes

2.5 stars out of 5

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I recently read H.G. Wells' The Island of Dr. Moreau for the first time and was curious if any of the film adaptations made over the years have managed to get it right (or at least fail and be entertaining in the process) and while I do respect this for being an early sci-fi/horror film, I wasn't moved by it. I feel like disliking any movie from the 1930s immediately gets you branded as un-intellectual, or something like that, but this just didn't grab me. I appreciate the early practical effects, but in terms of actually conveying the feeling that I got from reading the book, Island of Lost Souls falls short.

Dispensing with the opening of the story within a whirlwind minute or two, the film introduces us to our soggy-cardboard-quality protagonist, Parker, as he's "rescued" after his ship goes down and only he survives. The drunkard captain of the ship that picked him up decides he no longer wants to have anything to do with him or the cargo he's been tasked to deliver to Dr. Moreau's isolated South Seas island, and essentially chucks it all overboard. Moreau is introduced earlier in the film than he is in the book, but it doesn't make that much of a difference; neither builds up much of an air of mystery around him; we know that he's morally bankrupt and delusional and there's no real need for a big reveal. Charles Laughton as Moreau is really the best thing about this particular adaptation, and although Laughton really doesn't have any kind of "mad scientist" vibe per se, he's still entertaining to watch and I wouldn't have picked anybody else to play Moreau.

This film also introduces an extremely boring love triangle between Parker, his fiancée Ruth, and Lota, the Panther Woman, one of Dr. Moreau's creations (she is actually credited as "the Panther Woman"). Nothing like this is present in the book, if I'm remembering correctly. There's not the kind of fixation on gender difference that there is in this film: at no point does Dr. Moreau focus on creating a woman in contrast to creating a man; he seems to have experimented with creating different genders, and it is at least mentioned that some of his creations are women, but the whole "can she love like a woman? does she have a woman's impulses?" thing is not a plot point in the book at all. This is why I said that this movie is really nothing special - it has cheap, borderline misogynistic elements inserted purely to meet studio demands of a love story. (Not to mention the hints of racism and exoticism, which actually are there - and a bit worse - in the book as well.)

I'm really just not getting anything out of this. Maybe it's my fault for comparing it to the book. I see reviews on Letterboxd referring to the storyline as "compelling and multifaceted" and praising the actors' performances. I don't get it. I will say that the moment where this actually stood out from the book was at the climax when Moreau's creations realize that he can die - this is more straightforward than the ending of the book, and much more powerful for it. I think restrictions in both content and production kept this from being all that it could (this is technically pre-Hayes Code, but very tame), but I have seen tons of horror movies from this time that still manage to be creepy and atmospheric without utilizing what would eventually become canonized as traditional horror imagery, so there's no inherent reason why Island of Lost Souls should feel like it lacks the ambiance of the book. Although The Island of Dr. Moreau is quite short, it needs something a bit more expansive than a 71-minute movie to get its message across on anything further than a surface level.

Shin Godzilla (2016)

directed by Shinji Higuchi, Hideaki Anno

Japan

121 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

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In 2016, this was the first Godzilla movie I ever watched. I'm wondering if that decision is what led to me appreciating Godzilla on its own merits instead of having to go through the process of "hey, this goofy rubber monster stuff I watched as bad dubs on TV when I was a kid is actually good" to rediscover Godzilla like a lot of people do. A recent podcast episode that some people I know in meatspace put together made me want to revisit it, since I realized it had been a couple of years since my last rewatch, and I have to say I think this is one of my favorite Godzilla movies now.

Every time I rewatch this I feel like Higuchi and Anno are doing something with this movie that I understand on a subconscious level but that my brain can't fully parse. There's so many layers to it. It's a Godzilla movie, right? It's about Godzilla. But actually, it's about the inability of the Japanese government to respond to a natural disaster and the resultant loss of life and property. But actually, it's about nuclear waste dumping. But actually, it's about foreign relations. But actually, it's about the fact that humanity might have grown too big for its britches, that the immensity of the response we mount to Godzilla may be an indication that we've doomed ourselves to a perpetual arms race through which more and more horrifying weapons are brought into existence with no way to ever stop it until we all die. We could choose to stop it, of course, but will we?

But actually, it's about Godzilla, because Godzilla is about all of those things.

The entire first half of this movie is almost really funny. The stark contrast between humans running from boardroom to boardroom, volleying decisions around from government official to government official, and the actual on-the-ground reality of a giant monster destroying Tokyo is unavoidably comical. It only gets worse the more Shin evolves: eventually you have this devil-creature who looks like the most evil thing ever born inexorably making its way through the city while shooting lasers out of its back, and you still have to have boardroom meetings about it. None of the human characters are likeable in an individual sense (except, maybe, Patterson; she starts out looking vain and power-hungry, but she does eventually show that she really seems to have a personal connection to what she's trying to protect that goes beyond politics). All of them feel more like titles than people. You get the sense that some - maybe even a lot - of them are trying very hard to do what they believe is right, and that fact is the only shred of optimism the movie leaves us with, but for the most part, even the ones who do genuinely want to unite and help have to put up with bureaucratic labyrinths, if not within their own country, then with other country's governments.

And then there's the big sea creature who is sick and in constant pain from eating radioactive garbage. It's wandered onto land in a place that's not safe for it. It's bigger than us, and much more powerful than us, but it doesn't hate us. It doesn't want to hurt us. It doesn't want anything other than to not be in pain anymore. I can't conceive of a way you could find Shin scary. The whole "man is the real monster" thing gets bandied about all the time in these movies, but this is one of the first times I've really understood it: is it not horrifying that we have the ability to bring skyscrapers down upon a hurt and confused animal, and to freeze its blood? Hell, was it not horrifying 70 years ago that we (briefly, anyway) had the ability to rip it apart at the atomic level? I won't argue whether every effort to kill Godzilla has been the "right" decision or not, but wouldn't we mourn at least a little for the beauty of a man-eating tiger after it had been shot?

Watching Minus One and this movie in quick succession has made me so excited about the state of Godzilla. We can do so much more with it now. I am at least a little bit an annoying Showa purist, it doesn't get much better than Godzilla '54 to me, but the world has changed so much and there are so many new people around now who have lived with Godzilla their whole lives and are ready to bring their own skills and perspectives to the table. It's riveting! To have seen how this whole thing has grown and changed over the last 70 years, and to know it's got a vibrant future.

Happy Birthday Godzilla!

Here's to the next 70 years. Personally, I would love nothing more than to live as long as possible but still not see the end of the Godzilla series within my lifetime.

Like many people, I'm going to be seeing Godzilla Minus One this weekend. But I'm doing it while fully conscious that decisions by Toho - extremely deliberate decisions - regarding the international distribution of Minus One have led to huge swaths of the world having no way to see this movie in theaters. Toho is blatantly favoring North America (and the UK, to a lesser extent) because they know North American fans are where the money is. Putting profits over what people want from them, they ignore fans in other parts of Asia. One Twitter user has been very vocal about this situation ever since the first release of Minus One, and I won't name names since he's understandably tired of being dragged into debates about it, but you can find his posts about the matter on the r/godzilla subreddit as well.

I'm saying all of this because I love Godzilla. I know that there are people elsewhere in the world who also love Godzilla and just want to watch as many Godzilla movies as possible. I'm not an economist so I'm not going to get on here and pretend to advise Japan's largest film studio about distribution tactics, but it seems frankly stupid to be this stubborn about Minus One. They did this last year and now they're doing it all over again. Keeping Minus One out of theaters isn't going to stop anyone from watching it - they're just going to do it through avenues that Toho won't profit off of, which is the opposite of what they want. And yet this keeps happening. With the announcement that a new Godzilla movie has been greenlit, I sincerely hope Toho will make a change next time.

If you're celebrating 70 years of Godzilla this month (like I am), I would encourage you to celebrate 70 years of Godzilla, not Toho. They're a corporation just like any other, and are going to continue to make preposterous business decisions that don't reflect what fans really want out of them. Celebrate the incredibly talented people who have brought us seven decades of Godzilla movies. Celebrate the staff who've worked for Toho as artists and craftspeople - not the ones trying to decide who can and can't watch the movies. Celebrate the complexity of Godzilla's story and the ways it has been interpreted. Celebrate the beautiful art that comes out of every single Godzilla movie. Don't celebrate a corporation that doesn't care about the same things as you.

(I most certainly have some Godzilla '54 posts up on my other blog.)