Yuri (Chiharu Nîyama), a faux reporter for a fake documentary TV series, stumbles upon information about three guardian monsters, Baragon, Mothra, and Ghidorah, who will rise up to defend Japan when Godzilla returns. Obsessed with reporting real news, she sets out to film the monster combat. Her father is an admiral who lived through Godzilla’s 1954 attack, and is in charge of making plans for defeating him, with insufficient aid from the government. When Godzilla does rise out of the sea, there is little the military can do, because he is a mystical creature, filled with the angry souls of those who died in Asia during WWII.
Forget everything you know about Godzilla. The filmmakers have. Forget all previous Godzilla films except the 1954 original, and even that one has the “wrong.” perspective. Forget that Godzilla is a physical creature created or transformed by nuclear testing, and that he represents the horror of the atomic bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Certainly forget his friend-to-children phase. Forget that Mothra is the god of a primitive tribe of Pacific Islanders and that Ghidorah is an evil space monster. All that forgetting may be difficult for long time fans, but intransigence is hardly a good starting point for judging any movie.
Shusuke Kaneko had reinvented the Gamera series, transforming it from an embarrassment to a respectable part of the genre. Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack (thankfully shortened to GMK by people who hate excessively long titles) was his shot at revitalizing the Godzilla franchise, and, he certainly did shoot something.
Kaneko didn’t make an atomic monster movie at all. He made a ghost story, with some loose Shinto mysticism tossed in. Godzilla is a ghost (possessed by the souls of the dead…same thing), a nearly mindless spirit of destruction, taking revenge for the pain caused long ago, or more accurately, for how modern Japanese have forgotten that pain and refuse to take responsibility for it. Yeah! Now that’s a metaphor I can get behind. It’s pretty heavy stuff, and just what fantasy is so good at. It tangles with questions of respect, which are important to the Japanese, as well as those of morality, that are universal. The guardians are a nice touch as well, and they are ripe for symbolic representation. It’s an interesting concept; the most interesting the series had seen in 47 years. It should have produced the best film since 1954. It didn’t.
Kaneko set up a very serious film, as dark if not darker than the original. Thus, like the original, we need to see believable pain and suffering, and empathize with it. There needs to be a focus on humans who can sweep us into the tragedy, and jokes and camp elements need to be kept distant. GMK is headed in that direction, but it all falls apart once Baragon (who first popped up in Frankenstein Conquers the World, but doesn’t manage to make the title of this flick) sticks his glowing horned head into the picture. He’s obviously a guy on his hands and knees, covered in devil-red foam, and waggling two puppy-dog ears. This is not an image for a solemn film about possible war crimes. Even dim lighting wouldn’t have helped much, and he’s shot bright as day.
With the steadily improving Godzilla suits from film to film, I hoped he’d be able to keep things on the proper somber note, but the costume is a step backwards. His new look, with the white, pupil-less eyes, gives him an evil continence, but the body, with its rolls of rubber fat, is the least realistic since the early ’80s. It is far too clearly a guy in a suit. Every step isn’t the step of a malevolent bipedal lizard, but a 37-year-old guy wearing oversized shoes. Adding to that problem is the relatively poor optical effects. The Big-G’s atomic breath is animated in a much simpler style than it had been in the last eight movies (even curving upward at one point as it had in the ’70s); a very strange development considering the impressive look of Gamera’s fire balls in all three of Kaneko’s Gamera films.
Mothra and Ghidorah are little better. These two had been forced on Kaneko, who had wanted less known monsters as his guardians (completely new monsters would have been cleverer), but then he’d chosen Baragon the Puppy Muppet, so it’s hard to stand by a claim that the studio screwed up the project. Ghidorah is the only good choice since he is an oriental dragon—traditional protectors in the East. Sure beats a big Moth. That Moth isn’t too bad when computer generated, but the CGI work doesn’t blend well with the puppetry. Ghidorah has never looked worse. He was slicker in 1964’s Ghidrah, the Three-Headed Monster. He’s passable when CGI, but his initial guy-in-suit entrance will only inspire laughs. It’s clear that the suit is sitting on a little cart which someone is tugging across the set. Do three-headed dragons have wheels?
The monsters fight endlessly without causing much excitement. Normally, lots of monster-on-monster action is what these films are for, but this isn’t supposed to be a fun, adventure romp. It’s a weighty morality play, and the silly rubber suits and slug-outs break the mood. There are also a string of in-jokes and homages (a comment on the American Godzilla feature, numerous cameos including twin girls looking upward as Mothra flies over, etc.) which would be great in a lighter film. If the point was to tell jokes and show men in preposterous outfits rolling about to give the audience a frivolous good time, great (that’s the intent of most Godzilla films). But that wasn’t what Kaneko started to make. A sincere examination of the horrors of war and the massacre of innocents doesn’t go well with a floppy-eared plush toy. It’s like watching Shindler’s List and finding Kermit the Frog in a concentration camp while Robin Williams pitches one-liners.
Even if this was another monster-rumble pic, the big fight would be tedious. The damn critters won’t stay dead. One dies, comes back to life (in a scene stolen from an earlier Godzilla movie), dies again, and comes back again. For God’s sake, when something dies, leave it alone. Then there is the matter of the internal submarine (“internal” as in inside Godzilla’s stomach), and Godzilla shooting a beam through his side. It’s pretty good comedy, at a moment when the last thing the movie needed was a laugh.
I’ve written a lot about the monsters, but nothing about the humans. That’s because they don’t matter. Yuri is the main character and gets the bulk of the screen time (more than the monsters), but she doesn’t do anything. She follows around the giants and comments on them. There’s a little romantic three-way going on, but like the old ’50s American giant monster flicks, it doesn’t go anywhere. I was happy that there wasn’t some convoluted human subplot, but I would have like to see Yuri do something with the main plot. Maybe wake the guardians, or die and become a restless soul to power them, or get everyone to recognize the sins of the past so all those angry ghosts in Godzilla could rest in peace. Oh well.
Since there’s always some fun to be had in Godzilla stomping about (a girl in a hospital watching as Godzilla walks by almost makes the whole thing worthwhile), I’m not recommending that you skip GMK. Just wait till it shows up on cable on a day you happen to be home and bored. Too bad. It could have been much more.