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Have you even watched the films, General?
Let’s play the Heisei Godzilla Series tropes game! It’s as simple as counting all the clichés and over-used narrative devices in the films from 1989’s Godzilla vs. Biollante to 1995’s Godzilla vs. Destoroyah. 1984’s The Return of Godzilla is technically part of the Heisei era, but it was made by a different creative team five years before and lacks most of the tropes found in the others.
- One or more transforming kaiju who do battle with Godzilla in multiple phases of their lifecycle (organic kaiju) or after modifications and/or modular separation (robots). I count eight instances: Biollante (rose form + adult), King Ghidorah (+ Mecha King Ghidorah), Mothra and Battra (larva + imago), Mechagodzilla (+ Super Mechagodzilla), Rodan (+ Fire Rodan), MOGUERA (Land MOGUERA + Star Falcon + combined), and Destoroyah (crab form + flying form + adult).
- Monster suits built so bulky and stiff that hand-to-hand combat is physically impossible (Mechagodzilla, SpaceGodzilla, MOGUERA, Destoroyah).
- Godzilla grows fatter and his spines larger and more uniform in shape with every new suit. These characteristics evolve smoothly from Bio-Goji (1989) to the more muscular Ghido-Goji (technically the same suit)(1991), the thicker, generic-looking Batto-Goji (1992), the wide, bottom-heavy stance of Rado-Goji (1993), and finally the “thunder thighs” Mogue-Goji (1994-95).
- Godzilla is awoken off-screen and underwater by an external force prior to his entrance: Time travel and a nuclear submarine (Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah), meteors (Godzilla vs. Mothra and Godzilla vs. SpaceGodzilla), uranium deposits on an exploding island (Godzilla vs. Destoroyah).
- Expensive, highly-advanced weaponry is introduced late in the film and out of thin air with absolutely no build-up: Thunder Control System (Godzilla vs. Biollante), a privately owned, Japanese nuclear submarine (Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah), jets with laser cannons (Godzilla vs. Mothra), the Super-X3 (Godzilla vs. Destoroyah).
- Well-educated characters refuse to believe in the existence of a new monster despite Godzilla and others having been around for years.
- Those same characters draw far-fetched conclusions summing up a movie’s half-assed theme while observing a kaiju battle from a rooftop or a ubiquitous JSDF command center: “The meteorite was merely a detonator, setting off an (environmental) time bomb created by us humans.” Or, “We paid for it in the end. All that stupid use of nuclear energy.”
- One character arrives at an epiphany, states it out loud, and another character pointlessly rephrases that exact statement in the form of a question: “So the dinosaur was hit with radioactivity from the H-bomb test and it turned into Godzilla.” ––– “You mean the dinosaur turned into Godzilla?” Or, “Men of your time would call our ship a time machine.” ––– “Oh, so this thing is a time machine?”
- Psychic Miki Saegusa is sandwiched into a plot that has nothing for her to do, prompting the use of her telepathy in situations that would never otherwise call for it. Exceptions are when they actually do use Miki for a specific purpose in Godzilla vs. Biollante and Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla 2. She gets major screen time in the other four films, but you can literally remove her character from all of them and they will still play out unchanged.
I might eventually do an article just on the countless tropes throughout the whole Godzilla series. I could keep going if I didn’t have this little, um, film to talk about here…
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1995 was very different, yet also oddly similar time to today for Godzilla. Toho was about to hand off its prized character to Hollywood, which would use its bigger budgets and greater resources to take the baton and run with it to places Toho never could. In ’95 this was Tristar Pictures and the Roland Emmerich/Dean Devlin duo who were then hot off the success of Independence Day. Godzilla is in much the same place in 2014 with Legendary Pictures and director Gareth Edwards. The difference is that unlike 2014, in 1995 Toho still had its own ongoing Godzilla series to attend to first. Success of the upcoming American film probably felt like a given, so the only thing left to do with Japan’s Godzilla was to end it. Toho wasn’t just planning to stop making their monster’s movies, they were going to kill him for good. And make sure everyone knew about it.
Godzilla vs. Destoroyah (GvsD) creates a palpable sense of dread from the first scene. Godzilla is literally burning from the inside-out. Audiences didn’t even need his glowing, orange-hot skin or another ‘scientist with a too-easily-reached epiphany’ trope to realize what was coming. Godzilla’s death was heavily advertised. It was not a question of if it would happen, only how it would come.
In my Godzilla Countdown article I ranked GvsD as the second best Heisei film after Biollante. Choosing between either of those and Mechagodzilla 2 has become tougher after re-watching them all with a more critical eye. They are collectively better than their contemporaries, but GvsD has emotional weight to it unlike any other film in the series. Toho brought back Takao Okawara as director and Kazuki Omori to write the script and they try hard to respect the Godzilla mythos and pay homage to it. Deciding if they completely succeeded or not is difficult to answer.
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I didn’t even talk about Godzilla Junior in this post. He’s pretty cool now that he’s all grown up.
To start, they brought back the Yamane family in major roles for the first time since the original film. Momoko Kochi reprises her role as Emiko in an unfortunately bland cameo that at least includes a few nice nods to Gojira like her long-deceased father’s stegosaurus skeleton in his old office and a few photos. Her niece and nephew play more significant roles as a television reporter and wunderkind college student/scientist, respectively. The nephew Yamane, whose first name I forget, gets to be “that guy” who arrives at all the important conclusions pertaining to the monsters to keep the audience in the know. Somehow at nineteen or twenty-whatever years of age, he has already studied Godzilla “more than anyone presently alive,” in his own words. He always knows at the drop of a hat exactly what is going on with Godzilla’s meltdown condition, then gets to sit comfortably in a chair at G-Force with the other characters and watch events play out on a big screen exactly as he said they would.
Emiko’s niece, Yukari, functions as a liaison to Dr. Ijuin, a physicist who develops Micro-Oxygen, a formula that may or may not be the exact same thing as Dr. Serizawa’s Oxygen Destroyer from forty years ago. This where the version of the movie I watched gets a little vague. Has Ijuin recreated the Oxygen Destroyer or is it just something similar but less powerful? No idea. The international dub on Sony’s DVD release implies both and doesn’t have any answers. The subtitles are only a written version of the dub, so they’re of no help either. I have yet to see a proper subtitled copy with a direct translation of the Japanese dialogue, so it’s possible that Toho’s own domestic edition clarifies things. Also unknowable from the Sony release is whether Destoroyah is the byproduct of Ijuin’s work or a long-dormant result of Serizawa’s.
Either way, in Destoroyah Godzilla faces a kaiju created by at least some version of the same weapon used to kill him in 1954. It’s a terrific concept that Toho, as usual, does almost nothing at all with. Godzilla and Destoroyah just stand apart, firing their rays at each other for fifteen minutes, same as every other monster fight in the Heisei series. We immediately see the reason for this the one time Godzilla actually does close distance and engage Destoroyah hand-to-hand. The Destoroyah suit is a full two heads taller than the Godzilla costume and was apparently not designed with mobility as a concern. Destoroyah is so thick and blocky that actor Ryo Hariya (who had the same problem playing SpaceGodzilla) can’t even move in it, much less convey any sort of emotion.
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Kenpachiro Satsuma makes his final appearance as Godzilla and it may be his best. Despite the Mogue-Goji suit being more cumbersome than a few of the earlier ones, Satsuma still makes Godzilla feel like a living, breathing, thinking individual. You seem to know what’s on his mind at all times. Satsuma gives Godzilla sharper, more aggressive movements than before; a convincing escalation to his ultimate meltdown.
A few last thoughts on Godzilla in this film: This is again probably the dubbing company’s fault and not Toho’s, but as many times as I have seen GvsD, I’m still not entirely sure what the catalyst is for his meltdown. We know Birth Island has exploded and that has something to do with it. But what? College Guy makes an assertion about the “fission of pure uranium,” but it’s unclear if this was some natural disaster or if Godzilla himself was a factor. Other sources online even make reference to it all being somehow related to energy Godzilla absorbed during the destruction of SpaceGodzilla in the previous film. Sony’s DVD makes no mention of this, so I’m still in the dark here.
And finally, I will never understand the choice director Okawara made to have G-Force ultimately kill Destoroyah instead of letting Godzilla do the honors in his final moments. Just when the tide of battle swings Godzilla’s way and he has Destoroyah battered and bleeding, Destoroyah leaps into the air and is finished off by tank-like “Freezer Weapons.” The dub makes it even worse, when a character exclaims, “Destoroyah is falling to the ground… onto Godzilla!” (Which he doesn’t). Why not let Godzilla go out on his shield and vanquish what was supposedly his ultimate foe himself while in the midst of a nuclear meltdown? After all Godzilla has been through, doesn’t he deserve at least that much? I suppose someone, possibly Okawara or Koichi Kawakita (glimpsed at the end of the video below), felt Godzilla should be allowed to die on his own, away from Destoroyah, so the moment could be solely his, but it’s a choice that I feel does a disservice to a legendary screen icon. Fortunately, footage exists of an alternate ending where Destoroyah gets back up, Godzilla grabs his horn, and beats him to death while melting down. The special effects are unfinished, but at least we get to see how this movie and the entire Heisei Series, in my opinion, should have ended (starts at 0:20):
Fortunately for everyone reading this, events did not play out the way Toho – and certainly not Sony/Tristar – expected. The Emmerich/Devlin 1998 Godzilla became perhaps the most universally disliked, mega-budget tentpole of the last twenty years. By 1999 Toho’s Godzilla would be back in Japanese theaters. And as the closing shot of Godzilla vs. Destoroyah implies, Godzilla is eternal. The Heisei Series timeline was over, never to be revisited. But Godzilla himself was not.
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