A dinosaur egg is brought to a lab, and hatches a “godzillasaur.” Godzilla comes looking for his relative, but is met by Mechagodzilla, a robot constructed by the Japanese government using technology from the remains of Mecha-Giderah. Rodan also comes seeking the baby dinosaur, setting up a three way battle.
The monsters have quite a fight on their hands, but so do you, if you choose to watch. You see, parts of your brain are going to be throttling other parts as scenes switch from exciting, top notch action to mind numbingly stupid, with no time between to breath.
The monster battles and building-crunching are the best that you’ll find in the first twenty-two Godzilla films. They are fast paced, varied, and never slide into the ridiculous (assuming you’re OK with giant monsters and a military that builds their secret weapon in the shape of a bipedal lizard). If you’ve watched other giant monster films and asked “why can’t they just keep the creatures fighting?” you’ll be happy. The climatic monster mash lasts for twenty minutes. The Godzilla suit looks good, though the Big-G’s packed some pounds on his legs (time for a thigh-master). Rodan is a marionette, but it’s a huge improvement from every previous incarnation. “Baby” is a bit on the fake and silly side, but compared to the Son of Godzilla from the 70s, he’s not too bad, and he’s not in the fights anyway. At least he is generally shaped like his larger relative. The effects, particularly the lightning, fire, and atomic beams are better than the monsters. If you like your destruction in the form of colorful rays, you’ll be in heaven.
But there is another side to the film, one filled with embarrassing excuses for “science” and “mythology.” There’s too much to write it all down, but a few of the choicer elements include: the baby godzillasaur is a vegetarian (although he’s fed a hamburger anyway, which has got to cause him no end of digestive problems). Although the baby is a different species, he has a psychic call (that is not limited by distance) that Godzilla can hear. He also can psychically send an SOS to Rodan because their eggs were next to each other. And I can’t forget that ancient ferns can somehow store music, which can be extracted by computer. When the fern-music is sung by school children, it can be heard by a dead monster hundreds of miles away, and resurrect him into a super version of himself. The list goes on.
Worse than the new rules on how dinosaurs behaved and what level of psychic power was around a hundred million years ago, are the characters. They are foolish (beyond any normal level of human folly) and a mixture of annoying and dull (the last being the greatest cinema crime). One character does slapstick routines, which would be fine if this was a Three Stooges picture. And two of the females slobber all over the baby Godzilla, and the big one as well. They don’t notice that people are dying everywhere; they just think it would be swell for Godzilla to stick around, and the baby to grow up to be a giant monster that squishes citizens as he marches through Tokyo. I guess Toho felt they had to bring back some of the old, “Gosh, Godzilla is swell” sentiment that filled the 1970s films. They were wrong.
Watching the Japanese version is interesting for an English speaker, as the G-Force “pilots” speak English. There are a few Americans sprinkled in (the Caucasian actor playing the scientist is bad as only an actor speaking in a language his director doesn’t understand can be), but most of the cast is Japanese, and they are allowed to speak with harsh accents. It adds to the realism of an international force that must communicate.
Purely on an action scale, Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II (the “II” was added to the title for the American release, and has no meaning) is great entertainment. Too bad doesn’t have a script worthy of the combat.