BONUS BLOG -- 1974: GODZILLA VS. MECHAGODZILLA

What’s it about?

Hoo boy, let’s see. As near as I can make out, an archaeologist discovers a cave on Okinawa which contains ancient artifacts, including prophetic murals and a small statuette of a dog-like monster. While transporting the statuette back to mainland Japan, the prophecies begin to come true (purportedly signaling the arrival of a terrible monster) and mysterious agents try to steal the statuette.

Meanwhile, earthquakes with “moving epicenters” rumble across the country, and it’s really no surprise when Godzilla emerges from one of them. But wait! This Godzilla doesn’t move or look quite right, and soon a second Godzilla has appeared to fight it. The first one is soon revealed to be a giant robot that defeats the real Godzilla, and the only hope now is to use the statuette to awaken the traditional defender of Okinawa, King Caesar.




Is it any good?

I haven’t seen that many Godzilla movies, or even really that many Japanese giant monster movies of any type. Obviously I watched the original GOJIRA (1954), which I liked a lot. And I did check in with MOTHRA VS. GODZILLA (1964), but I saw it too late to write about it in the blog. That’s a shame, since that movie is also quite good. GODZILLA VS. MECHAGODZILLA, on the other hand, is slipshod and disappointing.

With all the Godzilla movies to choose from, why did I pick this particular one? I had wanted to watch MOTHRA (1961) and DESTROY ALL MONSTERS (1968) -- both of which are pretty highly regarded by fans -- but couldn’t find a convenient copy of either. So looking down the list of other possibilities, I was mostly confronted by match-ups with other monsters I knew nothing about: Ghidorah, Hedora, Gigan, Megalon, and so on. I remembered seeing a bit of GODZILLA VS. MECHAGODZILLA as a kid, and I’ve always liked the idea of characters confronting different versions of themselves. So that was about all there was to it.

One problem, of course, is that Godzilla is not really much of a character. He’s a force of nature -- a destructive event to be endured, like a hurricane or earthquake, until he passes away again. From the three movies I’ve seen so far, Godzilla has hardly any personality or even awareness at all, so a robot version of him is really just exactly the same thing (with different weapons).




In GOJIRA, the human characters have clear precedence over the monster. The conflict is about whether a scientist is willing to share knowledge of a new destructive weapon to stop the attacks. In MOTHRA VS. GODZILLA, the focus is largely on Mothra. And despite being a giant moth puppet, Mothra has considerably more personality than Godzilla -- partly because she can communicate through a pair of pixie twins who live in a box, but also because she actually has objectives and makes decisions.

In GODZILLA VS. MECHAGODZILLA, there isn’t really any worthwhile human conflict. The aliens who control Mechagodzilla are cartoonish villains who seem to be invading the Earth for no particular reason. At one point, one of the human characters is forced to help repair Mechagodzilla, which is intended to create some kind of moral crisis. But even that is executed stupidly and perfunctorily, like so much else in the movie.

In fact, the biggest problem of GODZILLA VS. MECHAGODZILLA is that the script-writers just don’t seem to have been trying very hard. The beginning of the movie is both incredibly complicated and incredibly linear. Besides the events I outlined in the synopsis, there’s also a young girl who has a vision of destruction and a reporter who discovers a radioactive metallic scale from Mechagodzilla. There’s so much going on that’s it hard to keep the characters and events straight, but it all just points towards the same thing: the arrival of Mechagodzilla, which the ancient Okinawans apparently predicted. Nothing is introduced that doesn’t relate directly to the main story, and its almost always immediately obvious how each piece fits into the big, dumb puzzle.




I will admit that King Caesar is a pretty neat monster. There’s a nice bit where a young girl must go and sing to him to awaken him -- it’s both eerie and suspenseful, since other monsters are fast approaching. His appearance is apparently based on a mythical animal called the shisa, which is a cross between a dog and a lion. There’s no doubt that he looks pretty goofy fighting, but while sleeping and waking up, he’s one of the cooler Japanese movie monsters I’ve seen.

Mechagodzilla, on the other hand, is always ridiculous. I’m not sure who exactly thought that Godzilla would be more awesome if he was made out of grey plastic and shot missiles out of his fingers and toes, but that’s more or less what Mechagodzilla is. He looks silly no matter what he’s doing -- flying, fighting, standing around. Another disappointment is that almost none of the monster scenes feature any miniature buildings or military units. To the extent that I find Godzilla’s rampages interesting at all, it’s almost all due to the nifty miniatures he destroys. So the fights in this movie are (as far as I’m concerned) pretty dull. There’s one scene early in the movie where Mechagodzilla does some rampaging through miniature city. But the scene is nothing special, and after that the monster action is restricted to guys in suits shooting colored beams at each other or grappling impotently.

I can’t talk about the Godzilla series in general, so I don’t know if this particular movie is a dud or if it’s indicative of the direction the series has followed in the decades since GOJIRA. I can imagine that the movies would have been pretty exciting for fans at the time, since they are essentially title-card fights between some well-known creatures. (Though I’m not sure exactly how many had an existence before taking on Godzilla or other monsters -- besides King Kong, Mothra, and Rodan.) The series seems similar to Universal’s “monster rally” movies where Frankenstein’s monster, Dracula, and the Wolf Man met each other again and again. No doubt a person better acquainted with the history of Japanese movie monsters would get a lot more enjoyment out of watching them fight and defeat each other. For the most part, I’m not even sure who to root for, so a lot of that is completely lost on me.