From Odo Island to the Big Island: 70 Years of Godzilla in Hawai'i

(I'm publishing this simultaneously to my other blog.)

Last year, we celebrated 70 years of the first Godzilla film, and next year, we'll celebrate 70 years of its American recut, Godzilla! King of the Monsters. But this year was the 70th anniversary of something that, I would argue, is even more interesting: the opening of the Hawaiian run of the original Godzilla. The newspaper clippings I'm going to present below are the very first English-language reviews of the film, and the version of it that critics were watching was uncut, un-Raymond-Burred, and English-subtitled. 

I'm going to do my best to cover some of Hawai'i's rich theater heritage in this post, but for a wider exploration of the subject, you absolutely must read Lowell Angell's Theaters of Hawai'i.

Part I: Hawaii Times

On October 3rd, the first rumblings began... a tiny ad on the second page of the paper indicated that something unusual was on its way. In recent years, Hawaii Times had reviewed contemporary American sci-fi and horror movies: Creature from the Black Lagoon, Invaders from Mars, etc, but the Japanese films that were being shown at the three theaters covered by the paper's film department (the Kokusai/International, the Toyo, and the Nippon) were markedly different. Mother dramas were overwhelmingly popular, as were musical comedies starring the likes of Hibari Misora and Chiemi Eri, and if there was any hint of genre fare, it was in the form of kaidan films; many starring Takako Irie, all jidaigeki. This was the first modern Japanese monster movie, set in modern times, and it must have come as a shock.

On opening night, Hawaii Times previewed the film. In both the preview and the review from a few days later, the face of the film is Takashi Shimura, the only member of the cast who Hawaiian audiences would have been familiar with. HT's film reviewer, James T. Hamada, conjectures that the film's cast of young unknowns may have contributed to the theater being fairly empty during the premiere. (If I may interject, Hamada had seen Akihiko Hirata three months earlier in Itsuko and Her Mother, and Hamada's review marks the first time Hirata's name appeared in an English-language publication.)

Us Godzilla fans tend to have great respect for Raymond Burr for reprising his Steve Martin role in Godzilla 1985 because he genuinely cared for Godzilla, despite warnings that it would be bad for his image, and I don't think it would be too much of a reach to say we could probably feel the same way about Takashi Shimura. I don't know Shimura's personal feelings about being in the movie, but without a recognizable actor like him, Godzilla's initial appeal in the West may have been even lower.

Hamada's review of the film appeared in the October 6th edition, in a much longer column than was usually given to film reviews. It is fascinating. Hamada had some qualms about the movie's realism in practical terms, but praised its special effects right off the bat.

The most interesting thing to me here is that Hamada seems to understand that the film intends to present Godzilla as one of a species, and accordingly he uses the word "godzilla" without capitalization and as a plural, the way one would say "dogs" or "cats". Hamada comes away from the movie with the idea that "a godzilla" is something like a made-up species of dinosaur. The takeaway: Godzilla is not a character yet. Godzilla is just a big animal.

As someone who has not infrequently been the only person seeing a movie, when Hamada says "70 or 80 persons" attended the screening, that sounds like a fair amount to me. But the Kokusai could seat 1,200 people. Announced in 1939 and opening officially in 1941 with design by Hego Fuchino, it was one of many theaters in Honolulu, sitting in the 'A'ala Park district right next door to the Toyo, which also showed Japanese films, including some produced by Toho. After and during the war the theater was often referred to as the "International", the English translation of its name.

photo courtesy of Edna Kijinami, from the flickr account of Chie Gondo

The Kokusai, at its opening, was owned by Sanji Abe, president of Kokusai Kogyō. In September of 1942, Abe was arrested and placed into an internment camp for allegedly owning a Japanese flag. He was transferred between three different internment camps until being paroled in 1944 and released from parole in February of 1945. He would return to promoting and importing Japanese films after the war.

Part II: Honolulu Star-Advertiser

I include this as it does fit the scope of this article, but I should note that the balloon was not a strictly Hawaiian story. The above clipping was actually taken from the October 19th, 1954 edition of The Plain Speaker, published in Hazleton, Pennsylvania; Honolulu Star-Bulletin re-ran it in December of that year. You will notice that the publication date is several weeks before even the first limited-release screenings of Godzilla within Japan. This means that Americans were aware of Godzilla from the very, very beginning. Photos of the balloon must have made their way from Tokyo to American newspaper offices within days.

As for Honolulu Star-Advertiser's coverage of the film itself, it was fairly extensive. William W. Davenport writes about the film after having seen a showing at the Kokusai, the same theater featured above. This clipping is from the October 7th, 1955 edition.

Although this article feels more sensational than Hamada's, several takeaways can be made. Davenport, for whatever reason, does not seem to be aware of the Romanized spelling "Godzilla" and uses "Gojira" throughout his review. He baldly spoils the film's ending but refuses to describe the Oxygen Destroyer in detail. We also learn that an advertising short film played after Godzilla: a "musical documentary on the soft drink industry" produced by your friend and mine Bireley's. I have to say, I can't really tell what the critic makes of the film itself, but he seems impressed with Godzilla as a monster.

Part III: Hawaii Tribune-Herald

The first Hawaii Tribune-Herald mention of the film is used on Wikipedia to claim that the earliest English usage of the name "Godzilla" occurred on November 20th, 1955, which, as we have seen from the Hawaii Times material above, is not true at all.

Not to get personal or anything, but when I read "Walked home afterward under comforting stars, never so big and brilliant. Hua caught up with me presently. 'I saw Godzilla, too,' he said." I wanted to cry. Imagine walking home under the beautiful night sky in Hawai'i with your friend after being one of the first people to watch Godzilla outside of Japan.

This second mention is vanishingly small, only an ad, but it introduces us to our next theater. I want to mention the Mooheau Theater because it only existed for a scant six years after showing Godzilla and was then destroyed in a tsunami. As this ad is from November 5th, either the writer of the above review saw the film in another theater, or was recollecting his experience after the film had left local theaters. The author would not have seen it at the Kokusai as this paper was published in Hilo, not Honolulu.

Because the theater was destroyed such a long time ago, most information I have about it is anecdotal. It apparently existed as far back as the late 1910s, and it seems that it began showing Filipino and Japanese imports sometime around the 1940s. One Lawrence Akutagawa writes in a Google Groups post (that I'm really not even sure should be public) that the Mooheau catered to "more formal Japanese dance" and was, like the Kokusai, situated on a street with several other theaters.

Wreckage of Mooheau Street, credit to Craig Miyamoto

Part IV: Further Historical Context

Most theaters during this time were single-screen. Movies rotated in and out of Hawaii's theaters relatively quickly, since, basically, if you can't show a bunch of movies at the same time, you have to show a bunch of movies in rapid succession instead. From my own research, I found that some films would become massively popular (such as Hideo Ōba's Always in My Heart, which was evidently a smash success) and be held over or return for several repeat runs, but this was fairly rare during the 1953-1955 years that my research focused on. It's frustrating that we can't get a clear picture of attendance for Godzilla during its original run, and anything I come up with would be total conjecture, but if we assume that attendance was low at the Kokusai and probably much lower at the Mooheau (Hilo circa 1950 had some 200,000+ less people living there than Honolulu), allowing for a week-long run in both theaters would give us numbers perhaps in the low- to mid-thousands.

I unfortunately couldn't drag up any interior photos of either the Kokusai or the Mooheau, but this is the Waikiki Theater, which sat 1,353 people, and so would have been a roughly similar size to the Kokusai.

The interior of Honolulu's Toyo theater. From State Historic Preservation Office.

Another solution to not having multiple screens within one theater was to just have a lot of theaters. It may seem odd to us today to think of a street with several movie theaters on it, sometimes right next door to each other, but again, we have to consider that these theaters were single-screen and often specific film companies would have vested interest in them - so one theater would specialize in Daiei films and rarely show anything else, or another theater would frequently host traditional dance performances along with movies, et cetera.

(I am, out of necessity, focusing on theaters that showed Japanese films mostly or exclusively, but I don't want to make it sound like these were the only theaters in Hawai'i; due to its incredibly diverse population, theaters showed imported films in a multitude of languages, as well as your usual run-of-the-mill American oaters and sweeping melodramas.)

Another early Japanese theater, the Honolulu-za, ca. late 1930s-early 1940s. From Hawai'i State Archives.

One last thing to consider is that the concept of a movie having English subtitles was, at least in this specific time and place, fairly new. From context it seems like the bulk of the audience for imported Japanese features during the early- to mid-1950s were people who could actually understand Japanese - unlike today, when it's easy for anybody who doesn't speak a lick of the language to see subtitled features in a theater. The following is an article from mid-1954 concerning the recent introduction of English subtitles to the Japanese features playing at the Nippon Theater, and it takes possibly the most logical tack towards subtitles that I've ever heard: if you don't need 'em, don't read 'em.

Therefore, despite what may seem like a very small and limited run, Godzilla arrived at a time where the odds were actually more in its favor in terms of reaching a larger audience than they may have been just a few years prior, when it would not have been subtitled.

Conclusions

I know this was a boring one. Thanks for reading. I have to go to bed now.

No, really. The popular opinion of the Godzilla series in America has historically been a matter of clueless Westerners poking fun at the sweaty guys in rubber suits bonking each other around while ineffectual miniature planes on visible wires fly overhead. We have held that opinion because what of Godzilla that has reached our shores has largely been an adulterated form of the original work: ever since Godzilla, King of the Monsters! we've been fed recuts and bad dubs, pan-and-scans and late-nite TV reruns. We are of course in the kaiju renaissance now: "tokusatsu" is a word in the dictionary, Minus One won an Oscar, Eiji Tsuburaya has been inducted into the Special Effects Hall of Fame, there is a vague sense within academia that Japanese monster movies may be worth looking at closely.

But I want us to remember that there has always been an undercurrent of admiration for these films. From the very earliest days, there have been people appreciating Godzilla films. I want us to know that before the SNL skits and the MST3k episodes there were people like James T. Hamada who saw that something respectable was being done - that the effects were, in fact, good. I want us to think about walking home under the stars in the late autumn cool, talking to our friends about the giant lizard we just saw level Tokyo, the paleontologist and his empathy for the creature, the star-crossed lovers, the scientist fighting with his own conscience, and what it all meant.

Godzilla vs. Hedorah (1971)

directed by Yoshimitsu Banno

Japan

85 minutes

4 out of 5 stars

----

Godzilla vs. Hedorah is a tonal nightmare. Environmental horror presented through a lens of dancing hippies, random Mt. Fuji jam sessions, giant flying sludge piles, and a cuddly, heroic Godzilla. While focusing on the things that make vs. Hedorah such a distinct entry within the series is useful for talking about it as an individual film, I think emphasizing those traits can have a tendency to make it seem like this film does not fit with the overall tone of the Godzilla series. Especially on my most recent rewatch, it's very obvious to me that Banno and everyone involved with the film was - while creating something a lot more bombastic and trippy than the series had yet seen - keeping very closely to the message of the original 1954 Godzilla in their own weird way.

One of the first things we see in the film is a kid playing with some Godzilla toys. We're at full commercialization at this point (not that we haven't always been - there was a lot more marketing done around the time of G '54 than a lot of people may think) and Godzilla is explicitly a hero, suitable for the fantasies of children. But rather than see this as a horrific aberration, as the character being mishandled and fundamentally altered from what it was originally intended to have been, I feel like there's also a way to see some bitterness and irony in this. The simplest way to put it is that in the face of a threat like Hedorah, Godzilla really doesn't look that bad. When one of the characters remarks on the awful state of the planet, how polluted and dirty it is, and says that "if Godzilla saw this, I bet he'd be mad" - I honestly thought "yeah, I bet he would". I think if Godzilla saw that humanity had continued to ruin the planet, not with nuclear power this time but with chemical smog, poisoned earth, and uninhabitable oceans, he probably would be pretty mad. 

I think this movie totally knows what it's doing. On the outside it looks like a stark departure from the roots of the Godzilla series, but I really think it's not. There's an obvious callback to the original movie in the fact that one of the main human characters (insofar as any of the human characters are "main", humans are remarkably useless here, even for this series) is a scientist who ends up spending much of the movie with bandages over his right eye. Even more to the point is that he keeps fish in his lab, like Dr. Serizawa also did. The movie really wants to show us that fish tank, and I have to admit that I can't figure out why the fish were made to feel so important - maybe there was an implication that even these perfect creatures, kept isolated from the toxic slime that was choking their non-captive-bred counterparts in the open ocean, would eventually fall victim to sludge like all the rest of the planet, given enough time. Nothing is safe.

This movie is scary. It deals with scary things. It may not seem like it, because it's so colorful and wild that you almost get distracted from the imagery of people dismembered and buried under stifling piles of sludge. But there is a solid philosophy here, under the fish masks and the dancing girls in bodysuits. The younger characters take the view that the good green Earth their parents grew up with is gone, so the only thing to do is sing and dance: the planet is dying, we are all dying, what else can we do? It's the same core concept of revulsion at what humanity is capable of that fueled a lot of the original Godzilla, but instead of getting all mopey, Banno decides to have his characters party about it.

I also think Hedorah rules. Kenpachiro Satsuma knocks it out of the park with this performance (and so does Nakajima in the Godzilla suit, as always). There's something that really clicked with me about Hedorah's overall vibe this time; I just love its silhouette, how lumpy and blobby it is, how its body plan is so totally opposite from Godzilla. It drives home the point that Hedorah is not a creature born from Earth, even though it may be breeding here. Hedorah looks and acts like an alien. I love its static facial expression in contrast to Godzilla, who had been becoming more and more human-like in his expressions since the 1960s.

Yeah, man, the movie's good. This had been one of my least-frequently-rewatched Godzilla movies because it does feel like such an outlier on the surface. But watching it last night made me realize how good it is and how well it fits with the rest of the series. Banno is often maligned for the choices he made in this film, but imagine a continuity where outside directors were invited into the Godzilla series more often. We could have had a few more super artsy, daring films like this at a time when the series was mostly sticking to an increasingly child-oriented vibe.

Godzilla vs. Megalon (1973)

directed by Jun Fukuda

Japan

81 minutes

4 stars out of 5

----

This is probably the Godzilla movie that most fans would agree is the most notorious for being "bad", aside from, perhaps, All Monsters Attack. Maybe if its international distribution had gone differently, this wouldn't be the case. If someone hadn't mistakenly thought the film was in the public domain and began releasing a slurry of low-quality, badly-dubbed VHS tapes and TV broadcasts, allowing much of the Anglosphere's impression of the Godzilla series to be this low-budget entry that showcases the series at its goofiest, maybe this movie would have a better reputation. It certainly deserves it.

Godzilla vs. Megalon begins with a nuclear test. It's never specified who sets it off, but the reverberations are felt immediately: first on Monster Island, and then on a lake somewhere in Japan where people are just trying to have a nice afternoon outing. The weight of this opening nuclear test really hit me during that scene where Goro, Jinko (a nickname, his full name is Jinkawa... not beating the allegations with that one) and Roku are driving home. The Godzilla series has done a lot more looking at the large-scale, long-term effects of nuclear energy - Godzilla himself is a "large-scale, long-term effect of nuclear energy" - than it has bringing it down to a personal level, so in a way, seeing our trio have to cancel their fun trip early feels almost more affecting than a scene of city-level devastation. We've seen destruction and misery inflicted upon the masses, but I don't think the series has ever made it more personal than making us watch this gay couple and their kid have to abandon their afternoon plans and go home because of earthquakes caused by some distant nuclear test, conducted by people we never even see.

I don't want to make it seem like I think this movie should be taken deadly serious, because it's very obviously not intended to be. This was meant to be an entertaining movie that kids would like. It's actually because of that that including a part where the main characters are personally affected by nuclear testing feels like such a smart choice.

The characters in Godzilla vs. Megalon live in a cool house covered with colorful artwork and seem to spend their free time messing around with robots. I love how vibrant this movie is, like almost all of Jun Fukuda's work that is in color. One thing that stands out to me is how the Seatopian agents are dressed: both of them, especially Kotaro Tomita's character, look like something out of Yellow Submarine. The movie plays it fast and loose with the idea of science and invention, and that can come off a little silly (Jet Jaguar developing a personality and deciding to save the day through sheer force of will, Goro Ibuki and boyfriend having the technology to casually deduce trace evidence left behind after the Seatopians break in, even just random side details like the Baby-Rider), but I just love the world this takes place in. I love the contrast between the nuclear test at the start of the film and the understated optimism of Goro Ibuki's work as an inventor.

The thing this movie gets absolutely pitch-perfect is kaiju fights. Am I brave enough to say that this has some of the best fights in the series? No, I'd get pilloried in the streets. But I do kind of think it does. The way you can almost imagine dialogue being exchanged between the monsters: Megalon and Gigan trading "why I oughta" gestures when they first meet, then teaming up and taking great delight in torturing Jet Jaguar and Godzilla as a gruesome twosome. Megalon, Gigan, Jet Jaguar and Godzilla all feel like such distinct personalities, it's hard not to cheer for them even as an adult. (And I wouldn't fault anybody for cheering for the bad guys: they're just so diabolical and gleeful about it that you almost want to see them beat on Godzilla and Jet Jaguar.)

Fukuda himself may have hated his Godzilla movies, but he had the touch that was necessary to bring this kind of super-modern, energetic, lovable Godzilla to life. Is it the Godzilla that Honda envisioned? Certainly not, but I personally have gotten over my hangups about the idea of Godzilla having to be only one thing. We all understand where Godzilla comes from, and the best Godzilla movies are the ones that return to that origin, but there's room to mess around a little in the margins.

Terror of Mechagodzilla (1975)

directed by Ishirō Honda

Japan

84 minutes

5 stars out of 5

----

I'm a few days late, but happy birthday to possibly my favorite Godzilla movie aside from the original. This is one of several Godzilla movies (including the original) that I don't rewatch that often because it puts me in a bad mood every time I do. Rewatching it last night, though, I didn't have time to be put in a bad mood, because I was too busy thinking "Ah, this is the best movie ever made".

(Please read this review which sums up the movie in one paragraph better than I could if I wrote an entire book.)

While I think it's a masterpiece, Terror of Mechagodzilla had the lowest box office attendance of the Showa-era films. I tend to wonder whether the dour tone of the film had something to do with that. The previous year's Godzilla film, Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla, was one of the most bombastic, colorful, high-energy entries in the franchise, so to follow it up with a deadly serious, character-driven story where the monsters don't have any big funny moments - directed by master of melancholy films Ishirō Honda, no less - is a bit of an abrupt change of pace.

The film carries over a lot of plot elements from the previous film, the most central of which is an in-progress invasion by the Black Hole Planet 3 aliens and their most formidable weapon, Mechagodzilla, which they develop by abducting/coercing humans into working for them. The timeline of vs. Mechagodzilla is much more brief, however, and more traditional to the way these films are usually laid out, with the bulk of the story occurring in a linear fashion, and events unfolding as we watch the characters experience them. One of the intriguing things about Terror of Mechagodzilla, by contrast, is that the invasion had been going on in the background for a very long time: at least 20 years, as implied by the flashback of Katsura Mafune's accidental death and immediate revival by the aliens.

The thought I kept having while watching this film was that, on a surface level, a lot of what happens can be blamed on Dr. Mafune for being too stubborn to let go of an old grudge after being slighted by the scientific community. But despite this, despite him being written as a bitter old man who turns traitor to humanity as a whole, I can't do anything but feel bad for him. Both he and his daughter are manipulated at every turn by the Black Hole Planet 3 Aliens. He and Katsura are both victims. Watching this movie again I was struck by how abrupt the scene where Katsura dies for the first time is: the aliens don't give Dr. Mafune any time whatsoever to process it or even to find out who they are or what they want, they just immediately ingratiate themselves to his entire life in such a way that he's dependent on them for the continued preservation of the only thing really keeping him going - his daughter. To me - and this is a point I've never seen brought up before, so I'm probably wrong - it feels like Katsura's death had to have been pre-planned. For the aliens to be able to know the exact time that she would be electrocuted and be able to enter the scene right away as soon as she had died, they would have to have been watching. Using Katsura to manipulate her father was the plan right from the start.

The dub will let you forget this, and becoming jaded to kaiju movies in general will let you forget this, but the Black Hole Planet 3 aliens are incredibly brutal. There's kind of a cult indoctrination thing going on here. They insert themselves into Dr. Mafune's life and give him everything that he ever wanted: his daughter's life, the opportunity to prove himself right to his detractors, and access to what he wanted to research all along (Titanosaurus). Meanwhile they see him as so disposable that one of them uses him as a human shield without a second thought. (I remain salty that the English dub cuts out the part where he gets shot.) We also see that they abduct other humans for slave labor and cut their vocal cords. These may be, in name, the same aliens as the previous film, but the air of sinister coolness that Kuronuma had is replaced here by pure evil.

I'm still going. This is my review, I can make it as long as I want.

I would be remiss not to talk about Tomoko Ai's performance as Katsura, because she really is what holds the movie together; she's the most sympathetic character and the one who we're rooting for the whole time. She was at this point a very young actress with not a lot of experience, she had been playing a semi-regular role on Ultraman Leo prior to this and as the story goes she ran over while still in her uniform from that show to try out for the part of Katsura. She's really good at conveying that Katsura still has human emotions despite being a cyborg, but that those emotions are deeply buried. I love one specific moment after Katsura is resurrected for the second time, where Ichinose is tied up in the control room and Katsura gets up to adjust something on a panel in front of him; when he begs her to see reason, she says "Be silent", but why did she get up in the first place? Did that one knob really need to be fiddled with in that exact spot that would put her right in front of him?

I also want to talk about Akihiko Hirata's performance in this because I think he knocks it out of the park. I continue to maintain that he wasn't given enough roles where he got to actually act. (You all should watch Saga of the Vagabonds or Farewell Rabaul or something.) He adopts a specific set of mannerisms for this role that make the fake glasses and mediocre old age makeup they put him in forgettable. It's hard not to compare Mafune to Dr. Serizawa, since they were both played by Hirata - bookending his appearances in the Godzilla series - and in a lot of ways I feel like the stuff Mafune gets up to is exactly the kind of thing Serizawa would have been afraid would happen to him: Mafune's weakness is exploited by an interloper who seeks to use research of his for destructive purposes. I can see a reading of Mafune as an older version of Serizawa whose staunch refusal to let his invention fall into the wrong hands wavered after life treated him poorly.

So, yeah, this is a contender for my second-favorite Godzilla movie. Above all, the way I feel about this movie is that it is just phenomenally well-made, easily on par with anything and everything that came after it. Tonally, it's more akin to one of the Heisei films, like vs. Biollante or vs. Destoroyah. Every inch of this movie looks incredibly good. That first shot of Titanosaurus from below, set against the backdrop of a bright and sunny sky, is an all-timer. There's something sad about the way the film ends on a shot of Godzilla wading off into the sea when you consider that this was really the end of "old Godzilla": the series would return from its hiatus, and is still going strong even now, but everything would be different. This movie just means so much as an achievement in the series' history that I cannot understand why anybody wouldn't consider it one of the best.

Godzilla vs. Megaguirus (2000)

directed by Masaaki Tezuka

Japan

105 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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As its full title ("The G Extermination Strategy") suggests, this is one of those Godzilla films in which the goal is simple eradication - not finding a way to live with Godzilla through psychic mediation, not putting him somewhere where he can never be a problem again, just killing him dead, no nuance. This straightforward approach reflects Godzilla's role in the film as well. However, even though he is a cut-and-dry villain here, this is one of the more comedic Godzilla iterations. I was actually surprised by how comedic he is on my most recent rewatch; some of the fight scenes are Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster-level goofy.

Some of these movies give Godzilla a real "jealous boyfriend" attitude: on the one hand, when humanity does anything he doesn't like - such as developing nuclear weapons - he comes to put us in our place. But on the other hand, if any other kaiju emerge to threaten humanity, he'll also come and dispatch them. Not to protect us, but because Godzilla can only ever be the sole arbiter of humanity's fate, and no potential usurpers will be tolerated. This film in particular takes place in a neatly explained timeline in which the original Godzilla was the beginning of a series of attacks, where any time a milestone of scientific development was reached, Godzilla would appear and destroy it. There is a human villain at the end who is unscrupulous enough to risk getting Japan stomped in favor of financial gain, but humans on the whole are not the bad guys per se. Still, the human characters are too thinly developed to really root for: the protagonist is given the most predictable of backstories (her mentor was killed by falling debris during a Godzilla attack in front of her, now she swears vengeance), and Godzilla is just doing what he usually does in knocking humanity down a peg when they get too high and mighty.

I really don't like bug kaiju. Not because I'm afraid of bugs but because I think "thing, but huge" is a really silly and uninteresting format for a monster (this is also why I dislike King Kong). Megaguirus is no exception. I appreciate the level of detail put into her (her?) design, and the puppetry was so good I kept forgetting it was puppetry, but as a character she doesn't compel me nearly as much as other Godzilla antagonists, especially considering this movie was sandwiched between Godzilla 2000 and GMK, which - and you can dislike 2000 as much as you like, but Orga was a cool idea - both have great kaiju casts.

This kind of feels like a Godzilla movie for people who don't particularly want to watch a Godzilla movie. It is good, and I enjoy it whenever I watch it, but it's a movie I watch and then don't think about very much, whereas every other Godzilla movie occupies a permanent spot in my brain. The black hole gun is an interesting idea but it becomes almost laughable when Godzilla repeatedly shrugs it off almost every time they fire it at him. Killing Godzilla for real at the end of the film was basically not ever going to happen, so even the big moment where they seemingly blast Godzilla into the crust of the Earth has its impact dulled by the final scene implying the Dimension Tide didn't work so well after all.

This is not my favorite Godzilla movie, but I rewatched it on New Year's Eve, and - without timing it at all - it hit midnight almost exactly as they fired the Dimension Tide for the last time, and let me tell you, it got me hype as hell.

Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II (1993)

directed by Takao Okawara

Japan

108 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

----

Yeah, four and a half stars. Objective film ratings are a sham. I'm finding that I've yet to rewatch a Godzilla movie and see it as being worse than I thought it was the first time. It's funny, I can look back on certain films - especially the Heisei ones - and remember not liking things about them, but then it comes time to rewatch them and I don't know what I was thinking. This was definitely the case upon my third rewatch of vs. Mechagodzilla II, one of the Godzilla movies I frequently forgot existed, and a film that I feel is possibly hampered by being marketed as a Mechagodzilla movie while containing the most sauceless Mechagodzilla in the series. (Unbelievable soundtrack, too - those drums hit right in your soul.)

vs. Mechagodzilla II takes place in the Heisei continuity where humans have, if not a firm grasp, then at least some vague ideas and plans about how we might be able to live with Godzilla, born out of repeated encounters that end in disaster for both parties (but largely for us). The anchor for this timeline is of course Miki Saegusa, whose psychic abilities and emotional link to Godzilla represent an alternative way of looking at humanity's relationship with him. In this film, Saegusa - as well as Azusa Gojo, a biologist and BabyGodzilla's foster mom - are essentially blocked at every opportunity by a faction of hard-nosed military men who seem increasingly less tolerant of both Saegusa and Gojo's attempts to seek a nonviolent resolution to the threat of Godzilla.

I think the human characters in this one are interesting because this is one of those times where you really get the sense that humanity is starting to get a little too big for their britches. I probably shouldn't say this because it is outright blasphemy but looking at BabyGodzilla gave me a feeling like you're supposed to get when you look at icon paintings of Christ with the Virgin Mary that contain allusions to Jesus' eventual crucifixion. What should be a picture of an adorable baby instead betrays the foreknowledge that the child is born to be a sacrifice. Movies that involve a juvenile Godzilla always also involve people trying to use it to manipulate the adult Godzilla: no matter how cute and friendly Baby is, Gojo can't keep him under lock and key forever, not only because his appearance lures Godzilla into whatever area he's being housed in, but also because the government will never stop coming after him and trying to enlist him into their plan to defeat Godzilla.

I know this is really weird but I kind of get a feeling like Godzilla is ashamed of himself in this one. I think "ashamed" is maybe too light of a word, actually. Godzilla is grappling with what he is. He is drawn magnetically to the presence of an infant member of his species only to sense psychically that said infant is terrified of him, at which point he sulks his way back through the city he just stomped. I feel like there's even an allusion to Godzilla (or a Godzilla) having placed the egg in Rodan's territory on purpose when Gojo mentions how some birds will lay eggs in other birds' nests if they feel they can't care for them.

The weakest part of this movie is Mechagodzilla. Its origin story is by far the least compelling out of every other Mechagodzilla. We've got a ruthless killing machine constructed by aliens, a haunted fortress made to fight its own brother against its will, and basically a big flying warship shaped like Godzilla, piloted by a bunch of guys whose only personality traits are "cocky and irritating". The two other main-line Mechagodzillas have some aspect that makes them feel narratively interesting and, to put it plainly, worth keeping around: '74/5 Mechagodzilla is the first of its kind put to film and is such a formidable threat with its boundless supply of missiles that it's an outright joy to watch, and Kiryu is just horrifying to think about. But what is this Mechagodzilla? Human hubris given the form of our most enduring enemy. We keep building superweapons, we never learn. This Mechagodzilla is just another mistake.

I'm not sure what my problem was with this movie that made me remember it as one of the least good of the Heisei era. There's something so comforting about these movies - everything about them is so familiar and welcoming to me now, even the fuzzy, warm colors of the un-remastered DVD rip. We've also lost some people since I last watched this - Akira Nakao, Kenpachirō Satsuma - so I think it's even more important to keep watching these movies even as it seems like the Godzilla series might finally be moving forward again. Every Godzilla movie is good. That's that about that.

Mothra vs. Godzilla (1964)

directed by Ishirō Honda

Japan

89 minutes

4 stars out of 5

----

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.

Shin Godzilla (2016)

directed by Shinji Higuchi, Hideaki Anno

Japan

121 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

----

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.)

Famous Monsters of Filmland "Godzilla vs Bionic Monster" Special

I'm not sure that full photos of this article have ever been posted online, so let's take a look at the July 1977 issue of Famous Monsters of Filmland. This is a "filmbook": a quick recap of the events of a film intended for people who haven't yet seen it. I've seen these done for older Godzilla movies in magazines like G-Fan since, for most of the franchise's history, a lot of it was wholly inaccessible to English-speaking fans. That isn't the case here, though: this issue is promoting CinemaShares' U.S. re-cut of Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla, retitled Godzilla vs. Bionic Monster.

This issue pre-dates the lawsuit Universal Pictures brought against CinemaShares, alleging that the title was too similar to their TV series The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman. This is obviously a little ridiculous, but they do pun off of it in the filmbook, so there may have been some merit to the suit. The film was retitled Godzilla vs. Cosmic Monster afterwards.

Some highlights:

• Whoever wrote this may not have seen the film directly as they describe King Ghidorah being the one to attack Fake Godzilla instead of Anguirus.
• The article has a generally positive outlook on the film, which is surprising considering that it's an American review of a '70s Godzilla movie. It does lean into the "check out those ZAAANY monsters!" angle, but to be fair, the movie is kind of just like that.
• "Hey guys, should we credit the original director or any of the cast or staff?" "Nah, don't worry about it."
• Repeated references to Godzilla as being 21 years old, disregarding the original film in favor of King of the Monsters. I don't like that, to say the least.
• Excuse you, that's space titanium, not just regular titanium. Professor Miyajima didn't become a leading expert in the distinguished field of space titanium studies for you to disrespect it like that.
• King Seesaw.
• "At this point he could no doubt rip it clean off with one huge yank. But Godzilla is not a Yank, he is a Japanese." 🤮

Son of Godzilla (1967)

directed by Jun Fukuda

Japan

85 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

----

Son of Godzilla, despite being a bombastic, colorful, and incredibly well-made movie, was apparently disliked by audiences enough that Toho considered ending the series afterward. This was the height of the kaiju boom in Japan: as I mentioned in my Space Monster Wangmagwi review, 1967 saw every major film studio produce a kaiju movie. But every bubble must burst, and the burgeoning success of Ultraman and Ultraseven signaled a shift towards television that would leave film studios struggling to raise theater attendance. For now, though, this is Toho at the top of their game.

Visually - and sonically, Masaru Satō's score is genuinely one of the best soundtracks ever put to film - this movie is such a delight. It was filmed on location in Guam (you can tell because everybody is really tan), so there's no shortage of jungle scenes that are more convincing than anything achieved even on one of Toho's reality-defying open sets, but it's the miniatures that shine the most here. I love the cohesive look of it all. There's something about the brightly-colored structures the scientists live and work in that almost feels a little... dreamlike, perhaps, like an idea that a child might have of what doing science is like.

The editing and compositing here is some of Toho's finest, I believe. This is my fourth rewatch of the film, and it seems like lately when I've been rewatching Godzilla movies I've really been taking notice of the way scale is achieved. I'm thinking about a scene where Godzilla blasts one of the Kamacuras with his atomic breath and a piece of it goes flying off and lands, flaming, while the tiny-in-comparison human characters flee. The optical printing is remarkably well done here, and shots of puppets - small in reality but made convincingly huge - superimposed over the jungle landscape look great. The creative editing even extends to the human story too: I love that scene after the weather balloon experiment fails spectacularly where we hear Fujisaki narrate everything that's gone wrong on the island over a montage of floods and storms, and then it cuts to him writing about it in a journal. That was just such a unique way to structure a narrative moment meant to immerse us further in the environs of the film.

I recently read an article talking about the way science has been used throughout the Godzilla series that I thought was really interesting, and it highlighted this movie in specific and how it has a very different view on the use of science to assert mastery over nature than a lot of previous films. In short, while doing experiments does give rise to monsters - Kamacuras and Kumonga - and cause the weather on the island to go haywire, the thing that stops all of that is just doing more science. The solution to messing things up through your experimentation is to experiment harder. This is a strikingly optimistic viewpoint in contrast to the often dismal opinion of scientific interference with nature that many Godzilla films hold, although if you think too hard about what the people on Solgel Island are doing, they do still seem a little arrogant: it's for the greater good, but they are wrecking the ecosystem of an island which had up until then been in balance, and that includes the other living creatures on it. Kamacuras is as much a product of man's meddling with nature as the original Godzilla was, but Kamacuras is portrayed in a far less sympathetic light than Godzilla.

I will admit this is not my favorite Godzilla suit, but Hiroshi Sekita's performance makes me not care about how the suit looks. Sekita was chosen instead of Haruo Nakajima - Godzilla's default suit actor, pretty much - because he was taller than Nakajima and the film's producers wanted to create more contrast between Godzilla and Minilla. I can't source this because I don't recall where I read it, but apparently Sekita would speak to Minilla while in the suit (either out loud or in his head), narrating what Godzilla would be saying to his son: instructions on how to use his atomic breath, admonishments on venturing into dangerous parts of the island, et cetera. There is consistently so much effort put into bringing Godzilla to life as a character. I will talk about this until I'm blue in the face because for so long bad dubs and a lack of attention caused the Godzilla series to be regarded as "goofy rubber monster movies".

I understand how jarring this movie must seem when you consider the idea of Godzilla as a bringer of misery and pain, as he had been in his first two films (and would be again). But to me the thing that's so, so fascinating about Godzilla as a character, and why he has proved so enduring, is this: there's what Godzilla is - a stand-in for the looming threat of nuclear annihilation, depicted as such with varying degrees of fervency depending on whether you're going off Kayama's original idea for him or Honda's interpretation - and then there's what you do with him. In large part, this transition away from Godzilla as a force of terror and dread was due to Toho recognizing that their biggest audience was children, and so the people who made movies like this maybe did not necessarily want to make them this way - but they did. Godzilla as a cultural icon survived this long precisely because he has changed, and will continue to, but at the same time, there's always been a core concept that has remained throughout all of his iterations. There's no denying that there is a solid idea of What Godzilla Is, but, conversely, it also must be recognized that there's a What Godzilla Can Be.

Destroy All Monsters (1968)

directed by Ishirō Honda

Japan

89 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

----

Somehow it's been three years since the last time I saw this. I watch most of the other Godzilla movies yearly if not bi-yearly, but this one slipped through the cracks.

This film begins by fleshing out the idea of Monster Island, something which continues to pop up within Godzilla media to this day: a remote island where the world's most notorious monsters get sent for being very naughty, able to live in seeming harmony with each other while being kept away from civilization. I'm honestly surprised that more isn't made of this within the film, but it's established that Monster Island has been a thing for at least the past 20 years by the time the story begins, so I guess people had time to get used to it. But to me, creating a place where every monster that had once terrorized the world can live in peace, away from humankind, is one of the most monumental achievements within this franchise - and of course it all goes wrong, because this is an Ishirō Honda film and no hubris can go unpunished.

When an invading race of aliens, the Kilaaks, put the monsters of Monster Island - as well as some human scientists - under mind control, the obvious flaw in keeping all those monsters in such close proximity to one another becomes apparent. The monsters scatter across the planet, wreaking havoc in every major city as commanded by the Kilaaks. What exactly the Kilaaks want with Earth is never explained in great detail, but we all know the genre conventions by now. It's enough to see aliens show up and announce that they plan to take over the world, we don't need to know why.

The thing that struck me upon rewatching this was that the human characters are shockingly competent. In general, the human story is mixed with the kaiju action in a superb way, and I'll talk about that in a minute, but I want to dedicate this paragraph to appreciating the fact that everybody in this movie just gets stuff done. There's not a lot of depth to the character development (the old man, played by Ikio Sawamura, who accidentally retrieves the Kilaak's homing beacon and mentions that his son works on the moon base has more character development than any of the main cast) and so most of the characters mainly exist as embodiments of whatever their job description is than individual personalities, but it works really, really well. The film doesn't even allow the mind-control plot to overstay its welcome when it comes to the human scientists who the Kilaaks use to spread their message. They get their mind-control implants removed and it's immediately back to business. No messing around. The military has their obligatory confrontations here and there, but for the most part it's the Monster Island crew, the moon base workers, and some associated scientists, who know exactly what has to be done and exactly how to do it.

This is really Toho at the peak of their special-effects prowess. Sadamasa Arikawa was director of special effects, and you can see the influence of Teruyoshi Nakano starting to become apparent in the prominence of missile-barrage sequences and other explosions. What I'm impressed by the most is the way scale is established, and how huge, impossible things - not just the kaiju but also scenes like the Kilaak home base - are integrated within the human world. There's no moment where it feels like the human actors and the fantastical space-age world around them are separate, even though they are; the cuts between a monster showing up and everybody standing around goggling at it all feel like they were shot at the same time. Destroy All Monsters establishes its world so well that, even though it's intended to be the future, it fits right in with the time it was released. The film invites you to believe everything in it is plausible, and makes you forget that it isn't. This is, I believe, a perfect example of tokusatsu as an art form.

The plot is pretty thin when you actually sit down and consider it, but when the visual storytelling is this good, that all feels like it's not a big deal.

I think this is a movie to recommend to people - of which there are many, for some reason - who are unconvinced of the importance of human characters in kaiju film. No, there's no intricate personal storylines like in the first Godzilla film, or in Terror of Mechagodzilla or Minus One, but this movie shows that just having characters who are good at their jobs is more than satisfying enough. Watching a clear, crisp print of it where you can appreciate the cinematography and beautiful lighting and color palette is a really rewarding experience, even for me as somebody who already knows they like Godzilla a lot.

Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla (1974)

directed by Jun Fukuda

Japan

84 minutes

4 stars out of 5

----

This year is the 50th birthday of one of my favorite Godzilla films, which also means it's the 50th birthday of Mechagodzilla itself. I used to talk about how I didn't particularly like Mechagodzilla, but somehow I've come around to it, to the point where I think it's genuinely one of the most fascinating aspects of the series to think about. Pitting something created artificially against something created by accident brings a new angle to the "man vs. nature" question that often comes up within the narrative of a Godzilla film.

In fact, thinking about "man vs. nature" provides an interesting lens through which to examine Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla, because it's really man and nature tag-teaming it in this one. Mechagodzilla looks insurmountable at some points: that final battle where the real Godzilla and King Caesar are up against it and it's firing off weapons from every single part of its body is one of the most breathtaking battles in the series - yes, from any era, even beating out some Heisei stuff, IMO - because it's a moment where there's really nothing Godzilla can do, save for standing there and enduring the constant barrage of missiles and hoping to outlast it. But, all of this being said - and this is something I really only realized on my fourth rewatch - Mechagodzilla, and by extension its creators, the Black Hole Planet 3 aliens, were defeated by our friendly local irradiated dinosaur and a big guy who lives in a mountain who can only be summoned by a lady singing a song.

It's the chthonic vs. the invasive species. The whole "defenders of Earth" theme would be more explicitly developed in Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack, but Godzilla and King Caesar being guardians of the Earth is the de-facto backbone of Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla. 

There's ongoing debate - and probably always will be - about which Godzilla movie best balances its human story with its kaiju business. I don't see this one brought up to argue for the merits of its human characters, but personally (and this could just be because I've seen it four times and I know everything I can expect out of it) the mix between human/kaiju storylines feels totally satisfying here. It's not like the human characters have any depth, or relatable backstories that make me root for them as people, but they're still fun and interesting to watch. You don't want to see them get killed by aliens, which is, honestly, the bare minimum standard for any given character in fiction. Everybody's also dressed really nice all the time. Nobody looks like they woke up that day and just threw something on. I admire how put-together the whole cast of characters looks throughout the entire film.

You can't not talk about this one without talking about the practical effects. Teruyoshi Nakano's fingerprints are all over the thing. Even if you're a new fan who isn't familiar with the team behind the movies, you would easily be able to tell a Nakano movie apart from something else based on the sheer quantity of explosions. It's because of him that that final battle looks so unique; it's because of him that Mechagodzilla's entire body being a weapon is executed so flawlessly onscreen. There's a quote from him about how he wanted to blow the roof off one of Toho's soundstages but Toho didn't let him, and I gotta say I think they should have let him cook.

Another thing I realized on this rewatch is how jarring the Fake Godzilla scenes are. At this point they'd really perfected the "friendly Godzilla" design, and seeing that chubby, affable, cartoonishly-proportioned version of Godzilla break Anguirus' jaw so badly it starts spewing blood and limps away (and out of the series for the next 30 years) feels wrong. I think it was kind of a bold move to have a character who'd become pretty much explicitly a children's superhero look like it was committing brutal acts of violence. With Eiji Tsuburaya's death, they went to some weird places with this one, and I do love it. I do.

I don't really have much to say about this that other people haven't said better. I like this one more with every rewatch. There's something so pitch-perfect about it. I love every Godzilla movie, but I will admit that some of them do have moments where it feels like nothing is happening. This isn't one of them: I'm always either focusing on the wacky artifact-stealing/INTERPOL/ancient prophecy/ferry ride/kidnapping stuff or on the fieriest kaiju battle ever put to film. I wouldn't cut anything from this. It's all good.

Godzilla Raids Again (1955)

directed by Motoyoshi Oda

Japan

82 minutes

2.5 stars out of 5

----

Of every Godzilla movie, this was the last one I'd only watched once since I saw it for the first time four years ago. I don't think I'm alone in considering it possibly the worst Godzilla movie (certainly, if I may get on my soapbox, worse than the Heisei movies that people tend to deride, like vs. Megaguirus or 2000), which was an opinion I'd had ever since I first watched it, but enough time had passed that I wanted to see if maybe I liked it better this time. As it turns out, the opposite happened: I think I actually like it less. But I do, at least, have more to say about it now.

I think the most obvious area where Raids Again is lacking is in the human story. There are human characters there, but they don't have the kind of depth to them that the human cast in the '54 film did; however, I don't dislike the characters in this one, because even if they aren't fleshed out on a personal level, they're interesting for the position that they occupy. All of the main players in this are military pilots who are actually fighting Godzilla up close and personally. Many Godzilla movies following this one have focused on members of the military or of a defense team, but usually when this happens in later films it's because there's something special about the team itself: maybe they're a newly-formed splinter operation with a unique superweapon and skills specifically created to combat Godzilla, or they work closely with an outsider scientist/psychic to come up with the best possible strategy to defeat Godzilla. Not the guys in Raids Again. These are just JADF pilots, and god damn, they're good pilots. It took the most frightening weapon the world had yet seen to kill Godzilla in the first film, and this crew buries - not kills, but buries - Godzilla by shooting at it with a bunch of normal planes. It's been interesting post-Minus One to go back through the franchise and appreciate all the things that influenced MO, of which I think this movie was one.

The other thing I really like about this movie is the way the kaiju fights are filmed. Raids Again introduces fan favorite (if not Toho favorite) Anguirus for the first time, and the scuffles Anguirus and Godzilla get into are remarkably violent and animalistic. This is because, while kaiju scenes are usually slowed down in post to give a sense of enormous scale, the fight scenes in Raids Again are instead either at normal speed or actually sped up. I don't know if it's true or not, but I've heard that this was an error on the part of the camera operators that got left in because the crew thought it looked cool. And it does! It's possibly the only interesting and unique part of the film.

There are other moments, too, where this feels like it gets close to capturing some of the magic of the first movie. Mostly these moments come when individual characters are focused on. I really enjoyed the scenes when Hidemi (Setsuko Wakayama) is alone with the radio on, listening to radio coverage of Godzilla and Anguirus' fight and the JSDF's attempts to stop it, and she looks out her window and sees a massive cloud of dust and debris out over the sea where the fight is happening in real life. That was a really neat trick of perspective and made the action feel massive but also real and close to home. The aerial combat scenes are also very well done, but Eiji Tsuburaya was special effects director, so "well done aerial combat scenes" are basically a given.

All in all, though, this is just not a great movie. It's a decent movie, but it's not great. I honestly think a lot of this might be down to Motoyoshi Oda as a director. I like his other movies, but he mostly did either lighthearted comedies or slightly scandalous horror-mysteries. Oda seemed like a cool guy personally and I think he's a good director, but Honda's direct experience with war gave the '54 Godzilla a weight and direness that's totally lacking in Raids Again. And it's a shame, because this is the only one of his movies to have any kind of release outside of Japan. His most internationally-famous film and it's the one that reflects the most poorly on him as a director. Someday we will see A Texan in Tokyo. I bet it's better than this.

The storyline also just faffs around a lot. The prison-break subplot is flat-out bizarre and I forgot it was in here. Like almost every Godzilla fan, I bought a copy of the novelization of Shigeru Kayama's Godzilla/Godzilla Raids Again story treatments, and I'm really curious to read it and see if the prison break is there.

I'll end this by saying that it's essentially impossible for me not to like a Godzilla movie. I just love Godzilla and everything it represents so much that if you stick Godzilla in a movie I will watch that movie and enjoy it, no exceptions. But there's just something off about Raids Again. It's absolutely, undoubtedly an attempt to cash in on the popularity of the first film - I mean, this came out six months after the first one, six months - which doesn't inherently doom it; the same crew were working on it, for the most part, so it comes from the same talented hands as the first movie. But it still comes out lacking. The first Godzilla was an allegory, and an incredibly sober, haunting one. Raids Again is a monster movie. I love monster movies with my whole heart, and they can be as deep as the '54 Godzilla if they want to be, but this rushed, awkward sequel does not seem like a "wants to be" situation.