Watched: 01/08/2024
Format: Hulu
Viewing: 4th? 5th?
Director: Takao Okawara
Selection: All me, baby
I had to check, but somehow I've not written this one up, but I know I watched it during that circa 2020-era where I was dealing with the COVID lockdown by just watching an endless stream of Godzilla films.
So, this movie is the key to my Godzillaissance.
As a kid, I was a Godzilla fan via a few channels. There was an American produced Godzilla cartoon that ran for a year or three. I have some flickers of memories of watching Godzilla movies on TV with Steanso during long summer days. We also had two key Godzilla toys. My toy was the Shogun Warriors Godzilla, which I absolutely adored. Steanso, however, had this amazing playset with Godzilla, a non-canon monster, a city backdrop and army vehicles, which I remember us setting up and having a good 'ol time playing with.
But this was also the era of Star Wars, Tron and other fun, shiny stuff, and so Godzilla fell by the wayside.
Also, Godzilla was weirdly hard to come by. Unless you were home to catch a movie on UHF, badly dubbed movies weren't something most channels wanted to run. And you weren't going to get much in the theater.
In fact, when Godzilla Returns/ Godzilla 1985 was released, I *wanted* to see it, but it came and went so fast, it wasn't until my 11th birthday party that I used my "I can rent whatever I want" pass to rent the movie. What I don't remember is Godzilla films from Toho on the shelf. I just have zero memory of Blockbuster carrying the movies, or the Mom & Pop places before Blockbuster. That may have been an artifact of sorting out US distribution or me being distracted by trying to unlock the mystery of what was happening in those Sybil Danning movies on the shelf. But given that I would rent stuff like Robot Jox without blinking, given the option, it seems like I would have picked up a Godzilla movie or two.
For most of my life, like a lot of things I like - comics, Star Trek, etc... Godzilla was mostly just a thing living in the zeitgeist that people referenced and giggled about, if it was acknowledged at all in mainstream culture. And in the 80's, 90's and 00's, you were more likely to see Godzilla show up spoofing himself in a commercial with Charles Barkley than you were to have access to a G movie in theaters.
But I want to be clear: the giggling is fine. I think Godzilla can be all things, and one of those things is a silly pitchman. I mean, Godzilla skiing is @#$%ing funny. And to take Godzilla super seriously in all his incarnations is... well, I don't agree with it. And you need to sit with yourself if you think Son of Godzilla is meant as deep art.
During college (mid-90's) I was friends with a guy who was a huge Godzilla fan, and he got me to reconsider what had become my sniffy attitude about Man-in-Suit movies. But, again, the movies were a bit hard to come by and *expensive* if you tried to buy them at Best Buy.
Then, of course, there was the notorious American produced 1998 Godzilla film, and we all kind of realized "maybe Japan knows what it's doing and we don't". To prove this, Toho produced Godzilla 2000 - Millennium (1999).
When we saw Godzilla 2000 in the theater, what I really remember was my sense of how this movie was delivering everything I wanted in a movie about a giant, atomic monster and my awe at how much Roland Emmerich didn't do this. I'll save commentary on the US movie for another time, but there was *applause* at the end of Godzilla 2000. Because how else do you respond to the third greatest ending of a movie in movie history? (the other two being Superman: The Movie and The Third Man).
Look, the plot is pretty good/ standard. There's a bootstrap science group who wants to observe Godzilla, learn to get him to back off, and there's an evil corporate guy in an overcoat who wants to KILL Godzilla (and, frankly, he has an argument). You have be bought into the philosophy of Godzilla to get what this is all about versus "there's a thing we don't know, murder it" which is evil in this movie and the solution of how to solve the monster crisis for many of our heroes in the US 1998 Godzilla.
Our plot: An alien thing is found under the sea, which is a very circa 1999 threat. It wants OUR DATA. And DNA, maybe. And, of course, turns into a big monster and fights Godzilla.
There's a cute, precocious kid, because 1990's. And a cute reporter who seems oblivious to danger, because Lois Lane.* I really like the villain in this - he's a fun bastard guy.
Anyway, all of that is groovy, good stuff with some really good practical FX, cool suits, models, etc... and some awful 90's-era CGI.
But what really shines is that ending.
Normally I'd break it down, but I'm not doing that. I'm asking you to find four or five minutes and just watch this yourself whether you've seen the movie or not.
BEHOLD
I rest my argument.
Anyway, that was what set me off to look into more Godzilla and really look into Toho's output. It's been a journey, man.
*in the US English dub, you can hear someone in her newspaper office yell "Great Ceasar's Ghost!" at one point.
By the way, I finally found evidence of the end as I saw it in the theater that I've never seen at home. They need to restore this.
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