flash-hammer's Full Review: Godzilla Vs. King Ghidora
Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.
While it was easily the best Godzilla movie in years, Godzilla Vs. Biollante was a box-office disaster for Toho studios, and one that put the future of their major cash-cow in jeopardy. Prior to that film, series producer Tomoyuki Tanaka had promised that the new Godzilla films would see him taking on all new foes, a promise he was forced to take back when it became clear that audiences had to be won back to the cinemas, and Godzilla needed another 'name' monster to help draw attention to the picture.
In one of those rare occasions when a company actually decides to listen to it's fans, Toho's researchers discovered that Godzilla's two most popular enemies were Ghidorah and Mothra, the former was especially popular with male audiences, and the latter with females. It was decided that a re-imagined King Ghidorah would be the next nemesis the King of the monsters would be facing up to, and the director of the last movie, Kazuki Omori, was brought back in to not only direct, but also fully write the movie. Omori, who confessed to not really holding much interest in the series heritage, would not only wholesale alter the origin of King Ghidorah, but, in an unpopular move with Godzilla's many fans, would also change his origin(twice in the one movie!). It would be 2 years until Godzilla Vs. King Ghidorah debuted, and the 1991 movie would start a trend of a series entry every year until it's demise with 1995's Godzilla Vs. Destoroyah.
The film is probably best known as being the film that wasn't brought to America until 1998, because it was deemed anti-American, with various US TV shows even bringing the director to call demanding an explanation for the anti-American content of the film. Ironically, it was one of the 8 Godzilla movies available on VHS in the UK prior to 1998, as it was released by Manga Live shortly after it's release in Japan. While I've subsequently attained the Region 1 DVD of the film from Columbia Tristar, it's the exact same version contained within, so this, seemingly universal, dubbed Western print is the one I shall be looking at for the purpose of this review.
The movie opens as a mysterious UFO is seen to fly over Tokyo one evening, and a journalist for a fortean-times style newspaper named Terasawa(Kosuke Toyohara - Aegis) is asked to look at it by his boss. He, however, refuses, instead opting to interview a lunatic who fought in World War II, and claims that his garrison were saved by a dinosaur on the remote South Pacific Island of Ragos. Terasawa, after consulting his dinosaur expert friend Professor Mazaki(Katsuhiko Sasaki - Godzilla Vs. Megalon) Terasawa comes to the theory that the dinosaur was, in fact, mutated when atomic tests were carried out on Bikini Atoll, and became the creature known as Godzilla. His theory falls upon the ears of a tycoon named Shindo(Yoshio Tsuchiya - Invasion of the Astro Monsters), who actually has photos of the garrison with the dinosaur, wounded by American troops, which he shares with them.
Meanwhile, the UFO, as it turns out, is actually a time machine, and inside it are 4 people. Emmy Kano(Anna Nakagawa - The Silk Road), Wilson(Chuck Wilson - Capone Cries A Lot) and Grenchiko(Richard Berger) appear, with their android M-11(Robert Scott Field), asking for council with Japan's Prime Minister. They inform him that in their time, 2204, Japan no longer exists, as in 1991, Godzilla will go on a rampage, destroying every nuclear power-plant in the country, causing horrendous pollution. They have come back to help the people of Japan stop Godzilla from ever existing, but they want to enlist the aid of a few people from our time, who are deemed 'more familiar' with the beast. Terasawa, who it turns out writes a book about Godzilla, with a foreward by Mazaki, who is also on their short list, are joined by Miki Sagusa(Megumi Odaka - Godzilla Vs. Biollante) who has ESP powers that have detected the monster before.
Emmy, Miki, M-11, Mazaki and Terasawa all set off for 1944 Ragos Island in the time machine, where they witness Shindo's garrison, pinned down, yet saved from the onslaught of the American military by a giant dinosaur. The creature is greatly wounded by a US Navy battleship, but all of the American forces on the Island are killed, leaving Shindo, then the Major of the garrison, and his company to thank the creature and leave.
The time-travellers transport the wounded dinosaur to an area of the sea, but Emmy released 3 man-made gremlin creatures named Dorats onto the Island. When they return to their time, they discover that Godzilla has been successfully eradicated, but in his place is a 3-Headed Golden monster named King Ghidorah, which is under the control of Wilson, who is letting it loose to destroy Japan.
Emmy, who now feels remorse for her actions, informs Terasawa that everything they have been told is lies. Godzilla never destroys Japan, Wilson stole the time-machine to stop Japan's economic growth. Apparently in the future, Japan is the most powerful nation on the Earth, and owns South America and Africa. Wilson wanted to stop them from becoming so powerful, and the only way to do so was by executing this plan.
The Japanese Government, with the aid of Terasawa, Mazaki and co, come to the conclusion that theoretically they could make another Godzilla, by nuking the dinosaur at the bottom of the sea. As it turns out, Shindo illegally has a nuclear sub, a short distance outside of Japanese waters, which is ordered to blast the dinosaur with enough radiation to cause the rebirth of Godzilla. However, Miki has a bad feeling about this. She still senses Godzilla's presence as it was before, and Terasawa discovers that near the place the dinosaur lay dormant, a nuclear sub had crashed, leaving an ample supply of nuclear waste to mutate the dinosaur. He doesn't manage to get this information to Shindo in time, and it isn't long before Godzilla has devoured the sub, and now, thanks to the influx of nuclear power from the sub, is 100 feet tall, and very, very angry.
Godzilla comes ashore, and Wilson, defiant, sicks King Ghidorah on him. However, a combination of this new and more powerful Godzilla's strength, as well as Emmy, Terasawa and a reprogrammed M-11's tampering, their main time machine is destroyed, and King Ghidorah has one of it's heads blown off and it's wings mauled before it falls into the ocean.
Godzilla, still in nuclear powered fury, continues to wage war, now on Japan's cities, and M-11's computer declares there is a 91% chance of him attacking Tokyo. Emmy and M-11, in the small Time Machine that they escaped in, return to the 23rd Century to see if they can do anything with King Ghidorah's body to try and make him useful. Just as Godzilla is laying waste to Tokyo, she returns in the Bio-Mechanical Mecha-King Ghidorah to try and stop Godzilla, but will this new creation be enough to stop Japan's demise?
While the plot to Godzilla Vs. King Ghidorah wins points for ambition, it's far from perfect, or even very good, and suffers from not only pit-falls caused by a time-travel plot, but also faults held over from a prior movie, not to mention Omori's habit of cluttering the film with too many human characters and far too prominent habit of telegraphing his influences too blatantly, as well as messing up King Ghidorah.
First of all, I will start with what's good about the movie. A recurring character is a good start, and while Miki Sagusa still feels like a last minute addition to the script, serving very little purpose, some continuity with the last movie is appreciated. The plot also ends in a very action-packed manner, and more than the last half-hour is a collection of action sequences, including Godzilla fighting King Ghidorah, Emmy,M-11 and Terasawa's shoot-out with Wilson's android army, Godzilla attacking Japan and his final showdown with Mecha-King Ghidorah.
Shindo is a pretty nice character, and a unique entry into the human element of Godzilla films. He's neither heroic nor evil, and generally unlike any of the cookie-cut characters the series has forced fans to adjust to. As with the last movie's one standout character, he is naturally killed in this movie, meaning we won't see him again.
Now problems, oh dear god. To begin with, the film has plot holes large enough for Godzilla, King Ghidorah, and the entire Toho monster ensemble to jump through, at once, without coming close to the edges. Most blatant, is that the mission is to remove Godzilla from history, the characters even reference this by saying something to the effect that the modern day Mr.Shindo will disappear. However, even when Godzilla is erased from history, everyone still remembers him. It also raises the point that Godzilla 1985 never did truly address, in that it's unclear if the Godzilla from that film was the same beast that attacked in 1954. I preferred to think otherwise, but Omori clearly decided to go on a route that somehow the monster regenerated from being reduced to a skeleton at the end of the first film, to re-emerge in 1985. It also raises the point of exactly how the new Godzilla survived under the sea for 50 years, doing nothing. Exactly why King Ghidorah first appeared in 1991 instead of the 50s is also up in the air. Where the hell was he for all those years?
The time-travel flubs also carry on when Emmy goes back to the future to cyborg-ize Ghidorah, and the man she is talking to refers to Japan as being "that corrupt country". Surely if Godzilla ran riot for all those years, Japan would be nothing like the nation Emmy was used to?
What I dislike even less, is the fact that not only has Godzilla's origin been screwed with, but King Ghidorah's character in total has been messed up. Originally an almost demonic alien which travelled space, destroying all life on the planets it encountered, here the great Golden demon has been relegated to a lame remote control bi-product of 3 furby-Gremlins hit by an H-Bomb.
Mecha-Ghidorah creates a contradiction of character not again encountered until Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah in 2002, in that we are supposed to root for a character that's history is evil. Changes like this don't sit well with me. I realise Godzilla is now an anti-hero, and not exactly fighting for the Earth's safety, but making Ghidorah, in any form, a good guy, is just a no. I regard that idea in the same light I would regard the concept of Marvel Comics making a movie out of it's great anti-hero Venom, and trying to make his nemesis Carnage seem heroic, simply on the grounds he is fighting him. It's not on. I realise the Toho folks had to bring in a familiar name, and Ghidorah is popular, but messing up a character like this just annoys me.
As with Omori's first film in the series, his influences from Western movies are far too blatantly presented to appear as homages, and instead come accross as nothing but rip-offs. The Time-Machine, and it's entrance, harks back too closesly to Close Encounters, Omori's Spielberg fandom made all the more clear by a sailor who thinks he sees a UFO during the WWII sequences named Major Spielberg. This isn't where the plagiarisation ends, there is an incredibly painful scene in which the M-11, still under Wilson's control, basically turns into a one-man Terminator 2 clone, complete with partially exposed inner robotics, and the most horrible T-1000-esque run ever.
The plot also suffers from plain old stupidity. Emmy seems disgusted at Wilson for planning to destroy Japan but, uh, she let the Dorats out and knew the plan all along. There is also a very bizarre, and completely ill-thought chemistry between Terasawa and Emmy, who reveals at the end that it's pretty incestrous. What makes this so dumb, is that Terasawa already has a girlfriend character, who disappears for about an hour in the film, only to re-appear out of nowhere when Emmy returns to the future. I'll have to get me a job writing for trashy newspapers, apparently the girls just line up for you.
While I'm not going to jump on the 'Anti-American' bandwagon, the WWII sequences are pretty stupid. For a start, the 'heroic' Japanese troops. I realise they probably did feel heroic, serving their country, but, uh, it's pretty settled that they were the bad guys. What's more painful is the American soldiers, but that's more an acting issue. The entire subject of the film's 'Anti-American Sentiment' is completely overblown. Basically because the head villain is American, the film is labelled racist. OK, so the whole 'Japan takes over the world in the future' plot is a bit silly and egotistical, but come on, how many American movies have portrayed foreign characters as villains, and made American out to be the greatest nation on all of the Earth? Surely that makes them just as bad?
This may not be a complaint about the film itself, and may actually be a fault of the dubbing job, but the film also seems littered with utterly pointless dialogue. See the scene where Godzilla is attacking Tokyo, and Terasawa randomly exclames "Emmy..." and Miki chirps in with "how can this be possible?". Neither comment serves any purpose whatsoever, and it makes me wonder if something was erased from the Western version of the story.
This, and a few more issues that seem to be caused by reading literal translations instead of equivalent phrases, the dubbing is actually pretty good. The voices all fit the characters fairly well, all apart from 2 that is. I'm not sure if Wilson and Gretchinko have dubbed voices, or if that's how they sound, but it doesn't sound right anyway. Gretchinko, for supposedly being Russian, has the most comical accent ever, it's one of those voices that should only be applied to dubbing in 70s Kung Fu flicks. Wilson either has another hilarious voice, or the actor is hamming it up to extremes.
My issues with criticising dubbed actors are well documented, but to be honest, the main players in Godzilla Vs. King Ghidorah don't seem to have much going against them. Determining a great performance is impossible, and unlikely, but they all seem to do well. The film also boasts a nice trend in returning series veterans like Tsuchiya and Sasaki, who it's good to see again.
Where the film's acting falls apart is the Western actors actually. I'm not one of these people who declares everything Asian is automatically better, but going on the merits of this film, it would look that way. Granted this is because the Western cast weren't even proper actors, but Scott Field, Wilson and Berger do at least put in passable shifts, in a B-Movie way, it's the actors who play the American soldiers who are laugh-out-loud terrible. In their defence, they didn't have a script to work with, but if you don't laugh during the delivery of the line I've used for my title, chances are you never will.
Koichi Kawakita won a Japanese Academy Award for his Special Effects in this movie, but, if I'm being honest, it's probably his most uneven movie in the Godzilla series.
In his favour, Kawakita's miniatures are at least on par with the Godzilla series effects legend Eiji Tsuburaya, with his miniature buildings and tanks looking incredibly good. His time machine is also nicely executed.
The Godzilla suit employed in the movie, as with in all of Kawakita's Heisei films, is awesome. Taking the already good suit from the first movie, the head was altered a little to make it look even more fearsome, and his skin is now darker, a bi-product of the increased nuclear power.
However, not only is King Ghidorah's story been messed up, his first appearance since the early 70s is marred by an uneven effects job in bringing him to life. The major redesign of his heads makes them look less Chinese Dragon like, and more boring. Thankfully the odd pubic hair has been removed from the back of each head, but the cool curved horns he sported have been replaced with generic spikes protruding out of the back of each head. Scandalously, his cool, eerie sort of whistle has been replaced with a boring, standard monster roar. While on the ground, the KG suit is decent enough, if unspectacular. However, in the air, the puppet used looks terrible and stiff. In both incarnations, the wings are awfull, being almost completely flat, and not looking at all like they belong to a flesh and blood creature.
Thankfully, when upgraded to Mecha status, the monster looks a lot cooler. The metal parts actually succeed in looking metallic, and the steel wings are a whole lot cooler than the rubbish ones used on the original suit. My only real complaint with the monster in this respect is that the eyes on it's robotic head are a bit too large and goggley.
The biggest shock though, is that Kawakita won an award for a film that contains one of the most painful effects sequences ever, yes, I'm looking at you Godzillasaurus. Not only does this dinosaur look nothing like Godzilla, but it's one of the stiffest monster suits ever. The scenes where it stands on American soldiers are cringe inducing. Then, to add insult to injury, Godzillasaurus, for no explained reason, uses Gamera's roar!
This aside, the M-11 effects are god awfull. When he runs at super speed, his legs don't move, creating an absolutely hilarious effect, and the less said about the scenes where the city passes behind him at super-speed, which are like really badly done versions of the effect used for The Flash TV series.
After the last movie, where series producer dredged up some of legendary composer Akira Ifukube's old scores to liven up a drab score, he went one better this time, and talked Ifukube into coming back to score the film. This naturally means that, in general, the music has a classy feel to it, even if all the good bits are just reworkings of his classic themes. Ifukube's themes sound great, and re-recorded it's a nice inclusion, especially the return of his Ghidorah theme.
On the downside, some of the music just plain stinks. The generic keyboard-horror music, as well as the 'futuristic' tracks used for the already painful M-11 scenes pile on the suffering, and some scenes are scored with the wrong music. One, potentially great, scene, where Godzilla battles some Mazer tanks in Tokyo, is marred by the inclusion of an ill-fitting musical piece. The scene called for a dramatic and pulse-pounding score, the film delivered a piece of almost ponderous music!
To be honest, I don't see where so many people's love of this incredibly flawed movie stems from. Many call it the best of the Heisei series, personally I would say it's a closer contender for the title of the worst. The plot has more holes in it than Tokyo after Destroy All Monsters, and while many people would say that applies to all monster films, I've never seen it so repugnantly obvious than in this film. With this said, the film isn't actually a complete bomb. As I mentioned, some of the effects work is very good, and the film does feature some nice action sequences, hence it scoring 2 instead of 1, but the fact is that the film really just isn't very good, and can't touch the two movies that book-end it.
I will still recommend the film, if only to Godzilla fans, who've probably already seen it anyway, because it does feature Godzilla looking pretty awesome and doing some great damage to both the Japanese skyline and his enemies, as well as a decent cast of actors, including two attractive ladies in the form of Odaka and Nakagawa, and is still very watchable, if incredibly stupid.
Year: 1991
Titles: Gojira tai Kingu Gidora
Godzilla Vs. King Ghidorah
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