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Review

My favorite building! Noooo!

Gojira – the original Godzilla – was a serious and gripping film, a grim and powerful one. Its sequel, not so much. There really isn’t much to Gojira no Gyakushu. There’s Godzilla fighting another monster – oh, man, there is that! – and that is, of course, just fine. But the things that aren’t Godzilla fighting another monster (which is to say, the human plotlines) have little or nothing to do with the monsters. Godzilla destroys Osaka, and out heroes have to relocate. Relocate! Oh, what hath the march of mankind wrought? Perhaps more importantly, the human plotlines don’t even have very much to do with themselves. Kobayashi suddenly, inexplicably has an off-screen girlfriend toward the end of the movie; much of the narrative hangs on coincidence – it just happens to be Tsukioka’s car commandeered to chase the escaped convicts who accidentally summon Godzilla back; Godzilla just happens to follow our heroes north after Osaka. Why wouldn’t he? There’s nothin’ better goin’ on. Really, there isn’t; we are hard-put to care about our heroes, because nothing’s really happening to them. And this makes for a slow movie, a movie that gets tiresome. Why are we watching convicts escape for so long? Why are the planes attacking Godzilla returning to base to talk about it? And so on.

It’s hard to say just who to pin this boredom, this disconnect, upon. The actors do their best with what they’ve got. The chaste and polite nature of Tsukioka and Hidemi’s romance is more an artifact of Japanese cinema of the time than a mistake. Hidemi actually manages to look honestly concerned about the destruction of Osaka, which is more than the others – or the narrative itself – can manage. Masaru Sato’s score is decent, but consistently upbeat, which certainly sucks away the gravitas of things. Sato has said, of his work here, that hearing it is “like listening to a kid, trying to learn.” The special effects are much as in the first film, and the collapsing buildings do look good (although at one point, a building in the background suddenly collapses as the monsters fight in the foreground, as if it were committing suicide in fear). The script is a problem, with its reliance on coincidence and its placement of the big monster-fight halfway through the film, leaving us with nothing to which to look forward. But really, most of the blame should probably be placed on Motoyoshi Oda’s direction. Oda doesn’t seem interested in the awesome destructive potential of his creatures. Or in anything else, really. Screenwriter Takeo Murata has said that he intended for the escaped-convict sequence to be about the looting and chaos in the wake of Godzilla; Oda makes it into interminable light comedy.

Colossal radioactive horrors are destroying everything we’ve ever loved!

Now all this must not be taken as saying that this is a terrible film. It has its good bits. The evacuated Osaka, silent and dark, with only military vehicles moving about, is quite effectively ominous. And then there are these two giant monsters, and they fight.

This Godzilla – a second Godzilla, just as Dr. Yamane warned in the first movie – looks much like the first (he was sculpted by the same man, Teizo Toshimitsu), only not as good. His canines, nose, and small ears have all become much more prominent, and it’s ugly. From the front, he looks faintly like a hairless cat with some sort of skin disease. Also, he is considerably thinner in the legs and lower body, which makes him look less like a dinosaur and more like a giant lizard-man, or, perhaps, a human in a suit. He has more of an emotional life than the first Godzilla; we hear of light making him angry, and of his calming down after the fight. First steps, perhaps, to the humanizing of the monster of which we will be seeing a good deal more in future films? And finally, he is not very smart; much has been said of his failure to use his fire breath on the ice that traps him in the end. In the DVD commentary, Ed Godziszewski proposes that maybe the ice has made him lethargic and stupid, being a cold-blooded reptile and all that, and this is a nice try, but it raises its own questions. Is Godzilla actually cold-blooded? If so, what’s he doing up north? And it ignores a larger point: Throughout these films, there are dozens of places where Godzilla would benefit by using his ranged attack, where he yet fails to do so. Should we think about this sort of thing too much, in this context? No we should not.

Anguirus is a very popular monster in the Godzilla fandom, and your reviewer has never fully understood why. Perhaps it’s because he’s a bit of an underdog; he emits neither ray nor beam, he’s not from outer space, none of that. In any case, he looks perfectly okay here. He is usually cunningly framed so as to obscure his rear legs, so that we cannot see that he’s crawling around on his hands and knees much of the time, though the modern hipster will, of course, be on constant vigil for glimpses of the crawling Anguirus. He’s not crawling when he comes up on land in Osaka, and this is actually a very good quadruped-shot. His motivation, we should add, is to fight Godzilla. Seems they were natural enemies back in the prehistoric times. Good enough!

Oh, man! My car keys were in my pocket the whole time!

Their fight – the first-ever fight between prehistoric creatures in a city – has its good parts. They pause at one point, and face off, and it’s cool. Godzilla finishes Anguirus off with a startlingly bloody bite to the neck, and that’s cool too. But there’s a problem, and that problem is speed. Godzilla and Anguirus tear into each other like fighting dogs, and this totally robs them of any illusion of weight, of size. Even the buildings they knock over go down too fast, much of the time. Apparently, this originated in a mistake; one of the cameras recording the fight was set at the wrong speed, but effects-master Tsuburaya decided he liked the savage effect. He apparently thought the better of it later; we’ll never see another such fight in this series.

When we watch the monsters fight, there is a focus – by both ourselves and the director – on the fight, rather than the damage it happens to cause. And so Godzilla isn’t quite so much an atomic bomb as he was before; his destructive potential is not really center stage. The atomic allegory is still there, in part: We start with fishermen again, and the Daigo Fukuryu Maru disaster was still fresh in the minds of the Japanese. Godzilla is said to hate light due to his memories of h-bomb testing. And the cloud of destruction that hangs over Osaka, as Hidemi views it from a distance, does have a mushroom-like quality. But there’s no talk of radiation, very little real human consequence, and we linger for but a few seconds on the destruction these monsters cause. Similarly, though a human sacrificing himself again thwarts Godzilla, this now comes out of nowhere, and there is no ethical dilemma attached to it. In short, symbolically as well as narratively, there’s a good deal of emptiness here.

Gojira no Gyakushu is not a terrible movie, not an offensive movie. But the awe and gravitas of Gojira have been abandoned, and the gonzo craziness to come has not yet manifested. What you’re left with is not much.