The best thing about the so-called American Godzilla movie is that it spurred Toho, the Japanese owners of Godzilla, to reinvent Godzilla. Tossing traditional Godzilla mythology to the winds, director Shusuke Kaneko brews up a new Godzilla mythos and a movie that has what most fans want (giant monster battles!) with what the more reluctant watchers want (a real theme, a few laughs, and the plight of humans). The result is Godzilla, Mothra, and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack, one of the best giant monster movies to date.

Reporter Yuri Tachibana (Chiharu Niyama) works on pseudo-documentaries about ghosts and monsters. She's working on one about Godzilla when she spies a mysterious old man. When she discovers an earthquake with a moving epicenter, Yuri is on the cusp of the first real journalism of her career. When her co-worker Teruaki Takeda (Masahiro Kobayashi) shows her an old book about the three Guardian Monsters and the evil Godzilla, she knows she's got something...but can she get anyone to believe her before Godzilla destroys Japan either directly or as collateral damage in his battles with Baragon, Mothra, and Ghidorah?

Director Kaneko brought some much-needed depth to the daikaiju (giant monster) movie genre in the late nineties with the new Gamera movies. Gamera, the giant flying turtle generally known as a ludicrous Godzilla knockoff, enjoyed popularity mostly among Mystery Science Theater 3000 buffs. Kaneko took the stock human characters and gave them more unusual problems, such as that of Ayana (Ai Maeda), the lonely, Gamera-hating teenager who harbors an infant monster in Gamera 3: The Revenge of Iris because it reminds her of the cat that Gamera accidentally stepped on. That's the sort of thing that's just absurd enough to seem credible in the context of a monster movie, and it's very compelling. Kaneko also turned laughingstock Gamera into a butt-kicking powerhouse capable of destroying not just Tokyo, but Kyoto, in his quest to protect the citizens from yet-worse monsters.

When I found out Kaneko was taking a crack at Godzilla, I became very excited.

Kaneko recast Godzilla as a bad guy, the first time in decades this has happened. The new Godzilla looks meaner, with fangs, milky eyes, and pronounced eye ridges that evoke a frown. He also looks more powerful and more muscular, with a number of sinister features: longer, more nimble-looking fingers; a furtive, dogged way of keeping his head low; a sneakier, crouching gait (although you still wouldn't miss him, even on a cloudy day). This ain't your daddy's Godzilla.

Mothra looks about as one would expect. Baragon, the relatively unknown burrowing monster, is...well, kind of cute, really. His big-eyed, likable demeanor makes his fight with the immense Godzilla very tense. Godzilla maintains his nasty breath weapon, but Baragon has no distance attacks. In fact, most of the monster fights close to claw-to-claw very quickly.

Ghidorah makes his first good-guy debut in style. He appears more streamlined, more elegant, more like a traditional Eastern dragon than in his usual bad-guy roles. In fact, an early comment identifies his as having eight heads; this suggests that he may have inspired the orochi myth. Alas, the Ghidorah we see has only three heads.

The monster fights are pretty long, and very good. Humans join the fight, led by Yuri's father, a Defense Force admiral (Ryudo Uzaki, charismatic as all get-out).

The mythos takes a swerve from tradition in this movie. We're used to thinking of Godzilla as lizard suffering under a mutation caused by the atom bomb. The old man, when Yuri finds him, tells her that all the monsters are composed of souls. I had a little trouble following this, but if I got it right, Godzilla is composed of the souls of the atom-bomb dead in Japan, and the other three are composed of souls of those killed in Japan's name. So the souls from the Bataan Death March and the Rape of Nanking are essentially fighting the souls of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki victims--not for dominance, but for recognition? The problem is that the land is being debased by revisionist history? Yikes, that's heavy stuff.

Kaneko also understands that we need a few jokes in with our action and drama. Some are in-jokes, such as a subtle dig at the American Godzilla, and the appearance of a pair of unsurprised-looking female twins at Mothra's big debut. Many are just comments on how strangely people act in times of crisis.

It's that acknowledgement of the monster battles' effect on humans that makes Kaneko's work a cut above the usual monster flick. We're all used to the protagonists with their stock family problems and their issues of professional credibility, but we rarely get Kaneko's attention to minor, unnamed characters and the ironies of their lives. When Kaneko films a crowd scene, not everyone runs in the same direction screaming. Some look back; some lose their minds and cheerfully scream about impending doom. Someone may live through one attack and die in another.

Yes, that's what makes it like a better disaster movie. But for my money, what makes Giant Monsters All-Out Attack better than a disaster movie is the monsters themselves. There's no substitute for the awe of seeing a freshly hatched Mothra crawl out of its cocoon and flap its still-soft wings to stretch them. There's nothing quite like the slow benevolence of Baragon, moving like a dinosaur across the landscape. There's nothing in the real world as majestic as King Ghidorah, golden-scaled, crackling with electricity, aloft on enormous wings, his three heads glaring from snaky necks.

And I sincerely wish that all the terror and destruction in the real world were neatly encapsulated in one body, as it is in the frowning, ponderous form of Godzilla. But, as Kaneko points out in this monster movie, some monstrosities are due to human action, and it doesn't do to forget that.

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Good for Groups
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 9 - 12