Okay, so last night I watched my latest Netflix rental, Godzilla: Tokyo SOS, which came out in 2003. I rented it because a friend had assured me that Godzilla movies had gotten much, much better than they were when I was a kid.
Turns out he was half right. The special effects are significantly better, though it is still obvious that you're looking at miniature sets and men in suits. Still, it's nice to see some good old-fashioned effects work in an age of computer-generated imagery. A lot of craftsmanship goes into creating - and destroying - those elaborate miniatures.
That's the upside. The downside is, well, everything else. The story, dialogue, acting, etc. are all as weirdly amateurish as ever. I ended up fast-forwarding through most of the dialogue scenes, unable to take the pain.
Those movies are strange, anyway. The human characters generally act as if Godzilla and Mothra are personal friends or old acquaintances. "Hey, look, it's Godzilla!" They sound almost happy to see him. If I saw a 500-foot radioactive lizard trudging toward me, I wouldn't be smiling. I would be in need of a change of underpants.
The characters' bizarre nonchalance extends to other areas. At one point two "fairies" - insipid, simpering women who come in pairs, hold hands constantly, talk in unison, and are about ten inches tall - appear out of nowhere in a man's home. The guy's grandson comes in as the old man is talking to them. "Hey," says the kid, "who are those girls?"
Now, given the fact that the girls in question are, as I may have mentioned, ten inches tall, wouldn't a more appropriate reaction have been, "What the !%$!??"
The fairies tell the old man that unless a certain action is taken, Mothra will declare war on Tokyo. The action is not taken, but when Mothra shows up, he defends Tokyo against Godzilla. What happened to the declaration of war? I suppose you can't expect much logical consistency from a giant moth.
Anyway, if Mothra did declare war on Tokyo, couldn't they just launch a few giant mothballs at him? Or deploy a giant flyswatter?
The fight scenes between monsters are strange, as well. The rubber suits are so cumbersome that the stuntmen inside can't really maneuver very well, so all they end up doing is walking toward each other and locking arms, then falling into a variety of miniature buildings. They look sort of like drunken sumo wrestlers.
There was a complicated back story to this film that I didn't understand. Apparently a giant mechanical Godzilla (Mecha-Godzilla) has been constructed over a framework of "Godzilla's bones." But Godzilla himself is still very much alive. How can Godzilla be walking around breathing radioactive halitosis on people, without his bones? I'm sure there's a logical explanation, but ...
No, on second thought, I'm sure there's not a logical explanation. Nothing about these movies is logical.*
And while we're on the subject, why would the Japanese government build Mecha-Godzilla anyway? It's supposed to be the ultimate weapon against Godzilla, but all it does is lock arms with the big reptile and then fall into buildings. Not unlike a drunken sumo wrestler.
Whose bright idea was it to build a mechanical replica of Godzilla as a defensive weapon? This is like building a big mechanical King Kong to fight off the real Kong. Oh, wait. You know, I think one of the old Toho movies actually did use a plot along those lines. Must be a cultural thing. Something is getting lost in translation.
The first Godzilla movie, released in 1956, is very different from all the rest. Unfortunately the DVD is the Americanized version featuring Raymond Burr. The scenes with Burr were filmed in Hollywood and inserted into the original film to make it more palatable for US audiences, but they distract and detract from the story.
I saw the Japanese version, sans Burr, on TV a few years ago and was struck by how superior it was. Made on a very low budget, the film takes advantage of moody black-and-white cinematography to show the giant lizard - Gojira, not Godzilla, in Japanese - advancing slowly through the burning ruins of Tokyo at night. There is nothing kid-friendly about this Godzilla; he - or it - is simply a force of nature, risen from the deep to crush mankind. Images of Japanese victims suffering from radioactive burns amid the rubble cannot help but call to mind the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which was inflicted only ten years earlier.
The film has flaws, and the effects vary from genuinely impressive to crudely amateurish, but somehow the overall experience of the original Godzilla sticks in my memory in a way that few monster movies do. Maybe someday it will come out on DVD in its unadulterated form.
In the meantime, there's always Godzilla: Tokyo SOS. Or the one with Matthew Broderick and the giant gila monster. Take your pick.
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* To be fair, one possible explanation is that there's more than one Godzilla. This seems to be implied by a line of dialogue in the film. Pointing to an unhealed scar in the reptile's hide, a military man says the injury proves that this is "the same Godzilla" who was seen in a previous movie. So maybe the term Godzilla is generic, and there are a whole bunch of Godzillas out there. I don't know, and I lack the motivation to find out.
Everything you may want to know about Godzilla
Posted by: Henry James | February 11, 2006 at 06:13 PM