Godzilla vs. Mothra (1992)

directed by Takao Okawara

Japan

102 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

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What an absolute delight this one was. How incredibly entertaining and beautifully crafted these 1990s films can be! It took me a long time to come around to them because I may be a bit of a Showa purist, but I've been rewatching some of the Heisei films lately and they're surprising me with how perfect they are. Kenpachirō Satsuma is a master of the suit, and this movie has some of the best and most extensive full-body shots of Godzilla I've seen thus far.

This film introduces us to a darker counterpart of Mothra called Battra, a sinister-looking entity who is prophesied to battle Mothra, yet is also intertwined with her in a complex, fascinating relationship. Mothra (and Battra too, to some extent) in this film represents not just the anger of the wronged inhabitants of Infant Island this time, but the will of the entire Earth, rebelling against the human race's cruelty and repeated betrayals. Like in Mothra vs. Godzilla, the question is raised of whether humans are deserving of Mothra's (and by extension, Earth's) mercy, and while ultimately the film takes the stance that we can be redeemable if we own our mistakes, the link between rampant greed and the destruction of the planet is made plain. Big businessmen debate over the buying and selling of Mothra's egg and the furnishing of more mining, testing, and depleting right up until (and while) their city is destroyed by the direct consequence of their unchecked greed. "How can it be my fault?" rages the CEO, kneeling and slamming his fists on the floor while beside him a television plays a live feed of the destruction he is responsible for, but refuses to see as his doing.

This film has possibly the most unlikeable lead character in a Godzilla movie that I can think of. I'm paying more attention to the human drama while rewatching these Heisei movies and finding that there is a lot more nuance there than I had given them credit for, but in this case, I actually think the lead guy is more of a dirtbag. He does go through a whole redemption arc (although he doesn't really do much to deserve it other than just, like, realize he should have been paying child support) and turns out as a decent father by the end, but wow, I did not care to see this guy on screen more than I absolutely had to. The first time or two I watched this, I applauded it for its character development, but now, even though I acknowledge that character development is there, I also acknowledge that I still don't like the characters.

When I rewatched this last night I couldn't stop thinking about how Mothra sometimes feels like she represents forgiveness. Especially in this movie. Godzilla is like the spectre of past mistakes, getting dragged up over and over, unable to stop haunting humanity, and Mothra is the possibility for forgiveness and healing and regrowth. And the important thing is that they coexist! They always coexist, in every film! Remembrance of past mistakes is both possible and essential for looking towards a future where we can make things better! I might have cried at the end of this movie.

Another thing I was noticing more on this most recent viewing was the parallels between Battra's creation story and Godzilla's. We're not given much detail, but the Cosmos explain that scientists from their civilization had created machines intended to deplete the Earth's life force (presumably for their own gain) and that the Earth, in response, gave birth to Battra as self-defense. Pitting a creature born from the Earth, tied to the Earth intimately, having come into existence due to human (I mean, "human", Cosmos, whatever) error but ultimately through the energy of the Earth itself, against Godzilla, a wretched horror dredged up from the bottom of the sea and cursed to haunt the land through no fault of its own by human hubris... I mean, that's mythologically compelling stuff, I think.

If there's anything I think is unusual about this film, it's that it throws a couple of plot points at us and then refuses utterly to elaborate on them. I'm thinking specifically about Battra's origin story (I feel like a flashback sequence might have been warranted at that point) but also about the almost jarringly sudden reveal at the end that Battra was supposed to go take care of a giant meteor that is on a course to destroy the planet but, whoops, now Mothra has to do it instead because Battra sacrificed himself trying to kill Godzilla. Like, why even mention that when the movie has five minutes left to go? I want to say it's because of the explanation of how SpaceGodzilla evolved (Godzilla cells that were stuck to Mothra as she flew into space fell into a wormhole on accident and somehow became SpaceGodzilla), but was that movie really even in the planning stages at this point? Not to mention the two films were written and directed by different people.

Now this is where I run into the limits of my vocabulary, because when I'm as deeply sucked in and transfixed by something as I was during that final battle, I have a hard time expressing with any degree of eloquence why it's so good or why I'm enjoying myself so much. I just know that I am. This is visually one of the best fights I've seen in the whole franchise - the expansive miniature work is just astounding, I have no idea how they were able to construct an entire city that looks perfectly in scale with Godzilla. Not to mention that this will make you feel real emotion towards Mothra and Battra - towards puppets, not even an actor with a suit, but puppets - which is some kind of magic. And there's just this tone to it all, this mood, Godzilla stomping through a nighttime cityscape full of PlayStation ads, neon signage, skyscrapers, and all the hallmarks of a comfortably excessive decade of economic growth, tearing it all down, exposing the wires, the fragility of it. Godzilla busting out of Mount Fuji because sure why not. Battra refusing to succumb to his nature and recognizing himself in Mothra, and vice versa. I think this movie represents a crowning achievement of technique in the Godzilla series, in how it's able to make us feel for every character, human or not.

Rebirth of Mothra III (1998)

directed by Okihiro Yoneda

Japan

99 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Wow, okay. I can't say I expected the third one to be the best of this trilogy, but to me this felt like it took care of almost everything I wished the previous two had. Maybe I was just a little more awake and alert this time. I think this genuinely is the best of them, though.

I was initially a little afraid going into this because of the time travel plot - anybody who's seen Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah will know that when Toho tries to deal with time travel, it can quickly turn into a convoluted mess. (For anyone who hasn't seen it... I really can't explain it to you because I don't fully understand it myself.) But therein lies the rub: very little in this movie is explained with any real depth, and as such, instead of becoming a headache-inducing tangle of threads you can barely follow, the time travel plot is as simple as "If Mothra goes back in time to kill King Ghidorah when he was a baby then the King Ghidorah that exists in the present will die". I think most people can grasp that one. Killing someone in the past to kill them in the future is kind of Time Travel 101. Exactly how or why Mothra is able to time travel is never elaborated upon, but doesn't really need to be - is there anything we'd be surprised to see her do at this point?

(I wish English had a neuter pronoun to refer to things that are not human, because "they" doesn't feel right for Mothra but neither does "it". We're going to refer to the concept of Mothra in general with she/her pronouns and the specific Mothra in this film with he/him pronouns, at least for the moment. It really, really, really doesn't matter, though.)

The pacing is drastically better here compared to the previous two films and it feels like this one actually has a plot. The battles are neither constant nor restricted to the finale, but spread out into skirmishes where one party usually needs to regroup after suffering grievous injury. Despite still being incredibly powerful (we'll get to that in a second), Mothra does take a beating - in almost all of her film appearances, but especially as Leo here. He gets chunks ripped out of his wings and is burnt almost to a crisp, but he never gives up. This is another big point in the film that remains unexplained because there's just no real way to explain it without detracting from it: How Mothra can continually get beaten almost to death, but revive every single time with nothing more than healing songs and dances from the Elias sisters (we'll get to that in a second too). The more sporadic battles followed by brief retreats for each party to hone their skills reminded me of some stuff that goes on in Ultraman, where a frequent theme is an Ultra having to pause to learn a new technique before they can go on fighting. It might be done simply as a way to fill time, but the actual progression of skills, rather than having a hero instantly know everything about how to fight from the get-go, makes for a more believable experience. That Mothra occasionally needs a minute to adapt to her circumstances only makes her feel more powerful and adept.

Another thing that this movie does that I was waiting for the previous two to do is address the Elias' more sinister older sister, Belvera, who spent the last two films glomming on to whatever nasty thing got woken up and tried to take over the Earth. She's tired of being evil in this one, and re-joins... if not the good side, then at least the side her sisters are on. The film does not treat her as an irredeemable villain or make it so that she has to change completely in order to be a character who fights to save the planet - in fact, her darker personality is presented as something crucial to the strength of the alliance between the three sisters. She herself says that their combined powers have to include rage and hatred, that they have to be able to harness her negative feelings to create a bond that is ultimately stronger for including her perspective. I did not expect her to be treated as such a faceted character who wasn't just there as a foil for Moll and Lora's good deeds.

Real quick I wanna talk about the work in making the sisters look realistically tiny, because while the CGI is still pretty dodgy, they do dedicate some serious time and attention to that part. One extremely small detail I caught and that I love is that Belvera's dress seems to have a zipper on the back - a human-sized zipper, and from some very quick visual math it looks like it's in scale. As in, assuming a zipper is the equivalent of maybe a little less than a foot in Elias terms, the zipper's size makes sense when you take into account how tall Belvera is supposed to be.

Mothra Leo is at the top of his game here. Besides looking absolutely beautiful in many new and colorful forms that debut for the first time, he takes on King Ghidorah - here envisioned as a 130-million-year-old menace that killed the dinosaurs (don't worry about it) - and physically picks him up at one point. Ghidorah canonically weighs 25,000 metric tons even in his younger form, and Mothra weighs somewhere between 3,500 and 5,900 metric tons. This establishes that Leo is a competent fighter in that he doesn't rely solely on his formidable beam attacks but also on sheer physical strength when it would suit the situation better.

I'll finish this unnecessarily long review by talking about how much I love the relationship between Mothra and her/his devotees, even though (and in fact, because) it's a little silly. Again, it's never explained because it's so far from being grounded in reality that there's no good logic to apply to it, but I genuinely enjoy the sense of a spiritual framework that exists around the Elias and Mothra. I love that singing the Mothra song and doing a little dance can provide Mothra with a power-up no matter how far apart both parties are from each other, or how beaten-down Mothra is. I love that it doesn't have to be hard to be back-up for Mothra, that the Elias don't have to go questing or recover some sacred object but are instead inherently imbued with the power to communicate with and heal Mothra through prayer and song. As silly as it is, I think this kind of captures something about the relationship between a god and their worshippers that Western Christianity often ignores: Devotion does not have to be hard, you do not necessarily have to suffer for it, but you have to keep doing it. You have to pray for Mothra every single time she needs you, and although it may not physically cost you to do so, it has to be constant, and you have to be unwavering, and you have to be there no matter what, because there is no alternative.

Rebirth of Mothra II (1997)

directed by Kunio Miyoshi

Japan

97 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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Unfortunately I was pretty asleep during this one, so I'm not going to talk about it with much depth and insight (do I ever?), but I still want to get some general thoughts about it down. Not the fault of the movie itself, I just fall asleep during movies a lot.

Where Rebirth of Mothra dealt with deforestation, II deals with the pollution of the ocean. I don't think there was any one sinister megacorp blamed this time, like how the logging industry was clearly under fire in the last film; humanity as a whole is framed as responsible for all the trash in the sea. The film is set in an Okinawan resort town that's supposed to be comparatively untouched and serene, but even they face the encroachment of careless tourists and plastic waste invading their waters. I didn't particularly like the heavy emphasis on Okinawan myth and spirituality here, especially not when mixed with stuff invented out of whole cloth, because to me it basically felt like the equivalent of when American movies use Indigenous spirituality as an aesthetic. But maybe there was actual research and consultation with real people done here - I don't know. The Okinawan motif doesn't seem to go much further than a bare surface level as a sort of woo-woo magic, but I'm not too familiar with these things.

If you were irritated by the kids in the first movie, I've got some bad news: most everyone in this is also a child. I don't know where their parents were, this time - certainly not as involved in their welfare as the last one. The main character here is much more reserved and mature than the two siblings before, and I felt like she carried the film impressively although she was flanked by two goof-offs who were her one-time bullies, as well as two thieving adults who weren't much better. The whole movie has a really heavy "for kids" vibe, and I haven't addressed that with regards to either the previous film or this one yet, because I just don't feel like it's something I need to bring up. These pretty much are children's movies, I'm not going to watch a children's movie and complain that it's too juvenile for me. But I do want to bring it up now because this is an example of children's media where real effort was put into it, which to me seems like a no-brainer - kids aren't stupid, they know when they're being pandered to or given the scraps no adult wants because adults think they won't care. But there's a cottage industry dedicated to churning out literal nonsense to glue kids' eyes to iPad screens and suck out ad money from them (see Elsagate), so when a movie like this is made with care and attention to detail and marketed towards kids, it unfortunately can feel like an exception rather than the rule.

Mothra's baby, referred to as Mothra Leo, is grown up and takes center stage in this one. For reasons unknown to me he is generally regarded as being male. One of my favorite things to point out to people is that Mothra is one of the most powerful kaiju in the Godzilla canon, and Leo takes after his mother (yes, yes, the Godzilla Mothra and this one are different, I'm just saying) in that at times he feels ridiculously overpowered. But we love him for it. He has a host of different beam attacks as well as some dexterity with his claws, and crucially he gains the ability to fight underwater - a major weak spot for the Mothra of the previous film. It's probably because I was loopy-tired during this, but I couldn't stop thinking about the significance of Leo learning to swim and fight underwater after having witnessed the drowning death of his mother. I mean, were they replaced by humans, this would be immediately recognized as a triumphant moment of character development: The child overcoming the thing that they watched kill their parent, not being held back by fear but instead honoring their parent's memory to become even stronger than them. 

I just love how Mothra is so cyclical, like many things in nature. One Mothra may die in the midst of battle but another one always takes up the mantle. This is exactly why Mothra is so unbeatable. She's less a single character, like most of her opponents are, and more an ongoing phenomenon. It's like trying to fight the spirit of renewal and rebirth itself. You just can't.

Pacing-wise, this is more what I expect from a kaiju film; the battle scenes don't feel like they take up as much time and we're expected to care about the human characters running around an undersea castle with some relics or whatever. I liked this aesthetically; the CGI is sort of middle-tier for its time and doesn't hold up very well at all, but there's a kind of vintage-computer-game sensibility to seeing everybody roam the obviously green-screened halls of a mystical, geometrically complex ancient ruin. I think possibly the battles were restricted a little more this time because of how powerful Mothra Leo is - he could have beat Dagahra (who I found almost wholly uninteresting, despite the nice suit design) in a single scene, but things needed to be spread out over the whole movie.

This definitely wasn't as good as the first one, but it is fun. You really have to turn your brain off for a lot of it. The ecological message is about as heavy-handed as you can get but I don't tend to view that as a bad thing. There's plenty of glorious puppetry and moth stuff for moth fans. I can't complain too much. It's just good, not quite great.

Rebirth of Mothra (1996)

directed by Okihiro Yoneda

Japan

104 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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A lot of people might not know that there was an entirely Mothra-centric trilogy of films released in the mid-1990s. Despite Mothra's popularity stateside, none of these films has ever gotten a wide release with subtitles. This is still very surprising to me, considering that there were still Godzilla films being produced to commercial success that did eventually end up being exported. 

This first entry into the trilogy expands upon Mothra's status as an environmental protector. The main characters - who are two very young children, so if kids in film annoy you, you may have a worse time with this than I did - have a father working in the logging industry, and while he's not as greedy and careless as his bosses up top, he doesn't exactly do anything to get out of the business or halt the destruction of pristine forests, either. I only realized later that he was the catalyst for the entire plot, because it really feels like this one guy as an individual doesn't have much to do with anything. Even though he was only one cog in the deforestation machine, it was him who prised up the seal keeping Desghidorah asleep, and triggered the immense destruction to follow. Even then, though, most of the story was controlled by external actors; an evil little lady bent on taming Desghidorah and using him to her own ends was watching in the wings and manipulating things the whole time. Humans are incidental to this, being used simply as a means to an end and then left to flounder in the ensuing chaos.

There's no better way I can describe this movie other than to say that if you are a Mothra fan this will be your jam. It introduces many new characters and concepts and explores the ones we already know. The Shobijin get yet another name change, being called collectively "Elias" in this trilogy, and they're implied in this first film to not be two unusually tiny people living on an island where everyone else is average-sized, but a whole race of that size. The three of them that we see are sisters: the good two standing in for the twins we all know and love, and one bad apple who, like I said, wants Desghidorah for her own purposes. It's also established that in the past there were many, many Mothras - that the Mothra who the Elias have communed with for years is now old, and not well; her time to die coming soon, she's lain an egg and is resting on the verge of death, but still ready to come to the rescue should an innocent planet under fire need her help.

It goes without saying that the kaiju designs are amazing here, as they always are. The big Mothra is a bit cuter than we're used to, less "buggy", with fluffier legs and brighter colors. The good two Elias sisters have a flying steed referred to as Fairy Mothra who is a much smaller but similarly adorable baby Mothra. And we even get to see an entirely new generation of Mothra that we've never seen before, opening up the truly exciting possibility of other members of Mothra's species who bear only a passing resemblance to her, with all the variation that real-life moths have between individuals. This is basically a moth party, but Desghidorah (who, if you haven't figured it out, is an updated King Ghidorah) looks good too. I was disappointed that he dropped his iconic bidibidibidibidibidi in this film, but I still like him, and the more "terrestrial", reptilian look makes him into almost a different monster than the dragonlike King Ghidorah.

And I just want to talk for a second about how much I love the fact that the Mothra larvae are a central player in both this and other kaiju films. The design of the larvae does not for a second shy away from the fact that this is a grub - a brown, slimy, writhing grub, with no classically endearing characteristics, who can't locomote other than by inching its way across the ground. This time they even add squelchy sound effects whenever it moves. And yet it is not made fun of or kept on the sidelines but is a vital force in almost every fight it enters. I honestly cannot think of any other movie in which a grub would be allowed to be heroic like this. It's never cast in a comedic light, Mothra's baby is as much of a savior as Mothra is, even when it's in wriggling grub form.

The pacing of this film is drastically different from what I'm used to in my Godzilla movies and I was not prepared for it at all. I'm used to anywhere from 70 to 100 minutes of humans faffing around until Godzilla shows up for a handful of moments, and the big battle being reserved until the very end, sometimes with a quick skirmish at the beginning before everyone goes back to their hideouts to await the final fight. This movie is the final fight. Like, the whole thing. There's a little silliness at the beginning where the Elias and their respective mounts completely trash the main characters' house and freak out their mom, but then Desghidorah wakes up and I'd say a solid 80% if not more of this whole film takes place while Mothra and her baby are fighting to stop him destroying the world. I say "the world", but in another contrast to your typical kaiju film, Desghidorah never leaves the forest reserve where he finishes off the deforestation that humans started. He never quite stomps his way into a city. He would have certainly done so if not stopped, but all we see of him is him rampaging around a forest. It's weird, a little, but again, this is a movie about the destruction of the natural world by humans, who trigger a series of events that inevitably ends with a runaway chain of continuing climate change and animal death. The stories of humans who might see their own lives complicated by Desghidorah is for another time.

I personally liked the way most of this film was taken up by action scenes. It may get tiring, but I guess it was such a change from what I typically see in kaiju media that I found it novel in this case. The human drama feels obligatory and somewhat forced, but the lore behind Mothra and her devotees is fresh and interesting when it gets squeezed in here and there. I am very interested in seeing where this series goes next especially if it moves into new territory other than having Mothra face Desghidorah.