Tag: Godzilla

There’s been a LOT of Godzilla movies, so how is it that that the 37th chapter in this venerable franchise has ended up one of the best reviewed movies of the year?

It turns out Toho’s new Godzilla Minus One is an astonishingly good movie, let alone a Godzilla movie, the latest in a series of endless reinventions of the king of monsters since his debut in 1954. Set just after World War II, it tackles the weighty subjects of Japan’s post-war trauma and rebuilding and mashes it together with some of the most stunningly visceral kaiju rampages ever filmed. 

It’s the rare Godzilla movie where the human characters are fully realised. It’s the story of a disgraced kamikaze pilot attempting to recover from his war experience, with Godzilla cleverly interlaced as both potent metaphor and big-ass destructive force constantly upending one man’s little life. Godzilla is terrifying in this movie, in a way he’s only occasionally been in the last 70 years. It’s instantly rocketed into my top 3 Godzilla movies of all time.

But it’s also a very serious Godzilla movie – which is totally cool. The thing is, Godzilla has turned out to be very flexible for such a big fellow, so the very same day my son and I were floored by G-1 in the theatre, we also saw the trailer for next year’s American “Monsterverse” instalment Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire, which swerves 180 degrees back towards the silly side of Godzilla again. Godzilla and King Kong are set for a good ol’ fashioned monster team-up adventure, and I can’t wait.

Yes, the trailer is kind of wacky, but I loved 2021’s Godzilla Vs Kong for its same combination of bombastic old-school kaiju action with modern special effects, too. Look, any movie with a giant gorilla and reptile having a punching match on the deck of an aircraft carrier can’t be all bad.

That’s what’s great about Godzilla. He can be a horrifying embodiment of nuclear fears as in his very first movie, he can be a quasi-superhero, he can be a big galoot who wrestles other giant critters, he can be a hero or a villain or an implacable alien force of nature. In recent years, the American series of Godzilla films have gone for the popcorn craziness, while the Japanese ones have tried for a little more depth such as 2016’s fascinating Shin Godzilla which was a dense satire of the country’s bureaucracy mixed with a shapeshifting take on the titular creature. 

I watched Godzilla Minus One in the afternoon and then in the evening for a whiplash-inducing change of pace I watched 2004’s Godzilla: Final Wars again, which was made to mark the 50th anniversary of the big guy and a temporary “last” movie in a franchise that never truly ends.

It is an insane overstuffed piece of cinema that juggles alien invasions, mutants, martial arts, rap-metal, terrible early 2000s CGI and cameos from pretty much every kaiju from the vintage Showa era on up. It’s like someone decided to mix a 1970s Godzilla movie with a Matrix ripoff and it’s technically sometimes awful but also amazingly entertaining in its go-for-broke fashion. 

Final Wars is in tone and execution about as far away from the layered, emotional Minus One as you can get, but somehow Godzilla works in both of them. That’s the beauty of Godzilla. After 70 years, he’s still got plenty of new tricks up his scaly sleeve.

Like many folks, I’ve been a bit over-saturated by superhero movies the last few years. 

I’m not declaring the superhero boom “over” like a lot of pundits are, but it’s all started to feel a bit rote. The Marvel Cinematic Universe in particular has fallen into the quicksand of “what-next-itis,” where watching the movies feel like homework as bread crumb credit-scenes stack up endlessly teasing the next adventures. The movies are mostly “fine,” but I’m not getting the same epic kick I once did of watching Captain America, Iron Man and Thor share the screen for the first time or Black Panther leaping onto the screen. To be honest, it’s hard to imagine they’ll ever top the lead-up to Avengers: Endgame no matter how hard the studio execs sweat. 

But there’s far more out there than just one cinematic universe. So far, the best superhero-style times I’ve had at the movies this year have been Japanese tokusatsu films in the “Shin” heroes universe led by director Hideaki Anno. I’m very much a tourist in this world, but I like it. 

The Shin series has taken old Japanese favourites like Godzilla and Ultraman and reimagined them in bold big-budget films that combine Hollywood bombast with a distinctly tokusatsu* vision. (*Japanese “special effects” movies/TV shows) It’s included Shin Godzilla, Shin Ultraman and Shin Kamen Rider movies. 

The Shin universe – “Shin” roughly translates to “New,” “True” or “God” in the title  – is a wonderfully strange one where all the somewhat cheesy energy of ‘60s Godzilla flicks and Ultraman TV shows are done up with modern special effects and a true reverence for the material that makes it all feel epic and magical. Sure, a 40-metre tall silver humanoid hero like Ultraman is kinda silly, but his first appearance in Shin Ultraman evokes a real sense of awe. 

The Shin universe kicked off with 2016’s remarkable Shin Godzilla. From the start, it undermines your expectations, like having Godzilla first materialise as a kind of google-eyed reptilian slinky who evolves rapidly throughout the film. While at first it may seem off-putting to not get to the Big G right away, it actually makes Shin Godzilla’s dangerous kaiju all that more impressive when he takes centre stage. The movie actually won the Japanese equivalent of the Academy Award for Picture of the Year!

The Big G of Shin Godzilla is one of the venerable franchise’s finest and freakiest ‘Zillas, a truly sinister predator with no kindness in his eyes, no “helping” humanity against other monsters, and it boasts some of the most dazzling destruction sequences of the more than 30 Godzilla movies. It was a solid reminder that after more than 60 years Godzilla still has the capacity to blow us away, and Anno turned his live-action skills to two other famed Japanese franchises, with 2022’s Shin Ultraman and this year’s Shin Kamen Rider. 

I had a wide grin on my face the entire time I watched Shin Ultraman a few weeks back in the theatre. Ultraman is the Superman of tokusatsu heroes, an alien visitor fused with a human host who fights giant rubbery monsters and aliens galore. There’s been an insane amount of Ultraman series and movies over the years but, like Shin Godzilla, Shin Ultraman starts everything over from the beginning with a zippy tale of alien invasions, giant monster attacks and secret government agencies. It’s a giddy, unpredictable blast and unlike too many American superhero movies lately, you don’t feel they’re endlessly seeding the story with teases for a flurry of sequels. Instead, the Shin movies draw backwards on the franchises’ long history to create a world that feels deeply imagined yet new. 

I’ve been a Godzilla nut for years and a more casual fan of Ultraman, but when it came to watching Shin Kamen Rider, the decades of source material is something I was utterly unfamiliar with. It’s the intricate tale of insect-human hybrid “augs” battling for supremacy in a world full of zippy motorbike chases, cool helmets and bizarre villains. 

Unfortunately Kamen Rider (or Masked Rider in English) was probably the least successful of the three Shin films for me, thanks to some dodgy CGI and a sense they’re REALLY trying to jam all 50 years of fan lore into one two-hour movie. While Shin Ultraman also packs a lot of legacy story in, it feels slightly less rushed. But while it’s a bit of a chaotic jumble and overwhelming at times, there’s still more energy and originality in Shin Kamen Rider than I ever felt watching recent US hero snoozefests like The Eternals. 

The Shin movies have been full of surprises, instead of following the rather predictable path of recent superhero movies with that mandatory everybody-running-around-things-falling-from-sky-in-a-hail-of-CGI climax. They’re deeply Japanese – Shin Godzilla has a dizzily rapid-fire satirical take on Japanese bureaucracy, for instance – and don’t feel like they’re catering to a Hollywood audience. 

I grew up reading Marvel and DC Comics and so all the inside references and teases and foreshadowings make sense to me and I know my Dr. Strange from my Dr. Fate, but it also kind of means that after 30-something MCU movies, it all starts to feel like something you’ve seen before. The fun part of the Shin universe is how it’s a doorway to another pop-culture world entirely, one I freely admit to only having the barest knowledge of. 

It’s a big old multiverse out there, and I kind of love feeling like an utter newcomer to some of it.  

In a way, I’ve been waiting for this rematch most of my life. I grew up watching and rewatching 1962’s King Kong Vs. Godzilla on a battered Christmas gift VHS tape, my first exposure to classic kaiju movies. 

I won’t claim that ‘60s clash of the titans is an objectively good movie, but man I loved it back in the day, watching rubbery Godzilla and Kong stomp on model houses all over Japan. The Kong in that movie is awful looking, like a hairy Danny DeVito who was hit by a truck, but that didn’t really matter. It was all about the spectacle.

I’ve been a fan of Godzilla movies ever since, as I’ve written about before, and so decades after that VHS tape went to pieces, I went into an advance screening of the long-awaited Godzilla Vs. Kong this week with a kid’s eager anticipation. I was seeing it on the IMAX screen, really the only way to watch such a movie, and I left with my ears ringing and a mild headache after nearly two hours of chaos and carnage. It was loud, ridiculous and utterly fantastic. 

Look, you know going into a kaiju movie what to expect – lots of city-crushing action, some human melodrama, and a willing suspension of disbelief. By all those standards, Godzilla Vs. Kong succeeds admirably. They’ve been building up to this “Monsterverse” clash since 2014’s Godzilla reboot. Without spoilers, they create a good reason for the monsters to battle, throw in a few welcome surprises, and director Adam Wingard nicely straddles the line between kitsch and combat in a very fast-paced ride. Godzilla is the meaner, far more alien monster, and Kong is the more relatable human surrogate, but in the end they’re both just giant creatures smashing up everything in sight. 

Spoiler alert: The monsters do fight in two epic battle scenes, and it’s quite a sight. (The movie’s first clash, a battle at sea, is an all-time kaiju clash highlight.) Although I’ll always have a sentimental attachment to the 1962 flick, the action in this remake blows it out of the water. While these more recent Monsterverse movies can have an annoying tendency to have battles happen at night/in the rain, Godzilla Vs. Kong mostly stages them cleanly and coherently. The special effects work to bring Kong to life is particularly good, giving the big lug a real sense of personality. You could argue that maybe Godzilla isn’t in the movie enough, but actually, he usually racks up less screen time than you’d think if you look at charts like this uber-geeky fan study. The point is the impact he makes when he’s on screen. 

Godzilla Vs Kong actually reminds me a lot of the movies in Japan’s utterly bonkers Millennium series circa the year 2000, which married the zaniness of the original ‘60s Showa era movies with a slick, modern vibe and special effects, and a madcap “anything can happen” feeling. You can do a gritty realism version of Godzilla but you’ll never really better the dark Cold War paranoia of the original 1954 classic.

The key really is to not take these movies too seriously – a flaw that the sluggish Godzilla 2014 was particularly guilty of, while the underrated Godzilla: King of the Monsters managed to be a bit more interested in smashing over hushed awe. GvK takes on a Jules Verne-esque vibe that embraces the mysteries of lost worlds, a theme which we also saw in the great 2017 Kong: Skull Island (still the best of these “Monsterverse” movies, I think). 

The humans are mostly there to fill the gaps between battles, and medium-famous names like Alexander Skarsgård, Millie Bobby Brown and NZ’s own Julian Dennison get the job done. Those “family drama” issues that hobbled King of the Monsters are barely sketched in with each human just getting one or two character traits (scientist has a dead brother; woman adopts troubled orphan; guy loves conspiracy theories). The humans in GvK are almost shorthand approximations of human beings, but who goes to these movies for the humans? You have to just accept that in any realistic kaiju movie the human characters would be dead in the first five minutes and move on, rolling over the implausibilities and basking in the spectacle. 

And boy, there’s a lot of spectacles in Godzilla Vs. Kong. It’s the cinematic equivalent of three energy drinks and a bucket full of M&Ms, and it might leave you with a bit of a sensory overload hangover, but in 2021, there’s no blockbuster I’d rather see than a giant monkey punching a giant lizard right in the face. 

Brothers and sisters, let’s rap about Godzilla’s strangest trip of all time, the crazy, freaked-out madness that is 1971’s Godzilla Vs Hedorah (also known as Godzilla vs the Smog Monster in the US). 

I love me some Godzilla, but the psychedelic 11th Godzilla movie is, um, divisive among Godzilla fans, and even landed a spot in The Fifty Worst Films of All Time. 

Yet there’s something nervy and loose about Godzilla Vs Hedorah that the mostly formulaic 30-something other movies in the franchise lack. It’s a Godzilla movie, so there’s smashing and screeching. But it’s also without a doubt one of the strangest Godzilla movies ever made, a dogged attempt to be topical and hip as Godzilla fights the evils of … pollution. 

The “smog monster” Hedorah is, to put it mildly, disgusting. He’s a shapeshifting blob of goop and tendrils whose most imposing form has a strong Cthulhu vibe, with one single sideways staring eye that never fails to creep me out. At one point Hedroah gets blissfully stoned sucking on factory smokestacks. He’s constantly leaking and spurting out his bodily fluids, raw toxins and disease. Unlike say, Rodan or Mothra, he isn’t cuddly at all. A scientist at one point says he comes from “a negative world of death.” He looms over the movie far more than Godzilla does. 

A trippy movie that’s soaked in 1971 vibes, from the go-go hippie music sequences to the inexplicable brief animated cartoons that pop up between scenes, Hedorah is firmly planted in its time. It boasts many of the familiar Godzilla cliches – an evil monster to fight, buildings toppling, an incredibly annoying little kid who keeps screaming “Godzillaaaaa!” – but there’s something spartan and weird about Hedorah. Godzilla himself seems half drunk, introduced with a bizarre woozy horn fanfare in each scene. (One of the most infamous scenes in Hedorah has Godzilla flying, backwards, using his nuclear breath to propel him. It’s mental as anything, and yet it’s another one of the weird touches that give this flick the feeling of a strange fever dream.) 

Unlike pretty much every other kaiju monster in the Godzilla series, Hedorah doesn’t flinch in showing the body count. At one point his toxic goo invades a boardroom of Japanese businessmen, who are then shown in a rapid cutaway all dead, soaking in ooze and oddly evocative of some of the horrors of Hiroshima. In several scenes, Hedorah swamps civilians and leaves them nothing but smoking bones. In most Godzilla movies, carnage is abstract, smashed buildings. Hedorah dissolves you.

Godzilla movies mostly stick to the basics, but some of the other films have tried to be topical – the 1954 original is all about nuclear fears, while 2016’s innovative Shin Godzilla, made in the shadows of the Fukushima disaster, is one of the boldest movies in the series since Hedorah. Hedorah is definitely preachy, but it’s hard to pretend its environmental message isn’t still in the right place nearly 50 years later. 

Director Yoshimitsu Banno was trying to shake up the Godzilla franchise from its kiddy-movie reputation. He didn’t really succeed in the long run – he was actually fired from the franchise! – but yet his goopy masterpiece still stands out from a line of assembly-line kaiju clashes. Most Godzilla movies are just popcorn fun, which is totally cool, but Godzilla Vs. Hedorah is the only one of them that really leaves you feeling a little creeped out over the horrors we can’t always see. 

I love Godzilla, because when I’m in the mood, you just want to watch a giant lizard smash the hell out of everything around you. Another big-budget Godzilla movie opened this weekend, and it’s gotten the usual mixed reviews from people who don’t really get the point of a Godzilla movie. 

I never heard the word ‘kaiju’ until I was in my early 30s and every hipster with a DVD collection was spouting it, but it does trip off the tongue better than “giant monster movies.” I love all kinds of monsters and aliens, but Godzilla kaiju movies are the pure biscuits and gravy of the casino buffet of cinema. For more than 60 years now, they’ve been stomping along to the same general formula – Godzilla returns, stomps around a lot, fights another monster or two, sometimes Godzilla’s the good guy and sometimes the bad, and there’s always an annoying human-focused side plot or three. 

My first Godzilla movie was a battered VHS tape of 1963’s “King Kong Vs. Godzilla”, and to this day it’s one of my desert island flicks. It’s absurd – this Kong looks more like a squashed and mangy grizzly bear than a gorilla, really – but so much damned fun as this duo wrestle and tumble around Japan.

Did you know there’s been an insane thirty-five Godzilla movies since 1954’s original? They range from the Saturday morning-matinee cheese of the “Showa” era to the steroid-infused bombast of the “Heisei” films in the 1980s and 1990s to the flashy, crazed “Millennium” period of the early 2000s. Some of the movies are worse than others, but usually they’re at least worth a watch (except for 1998’s misbegotten “igunazilla” Hollywood bomb, of which we won’t speak again). 

For those who think the current Godzilla: King of the Monsters is wacky, check out 1991’s utterly unhinged “Godzilla Vs. King Ghidorah,” which features time-travel, a ridiculous “Terminator” riff and the spectacle of Mecha-Ghidorah. For those who want something a little deeper, 2016’s “Shin Godzilla” is a strange satire of Japanese bureaucracy mixed up with some of the most awe-inspiring Godzilla scenes ever. For those who just remember Godzilla wrestling other rubber-suited goofballs on sound stages, 1972’s “Godzilla Vs Gigan” is the kaiju-fest you’ve been hunting for, and Gigan, with his chicken beak, massive talons and inexplicable buzzsaw blade sticking out of the middle of his chest, is peak kaiju craziness. Meanwhile, 1971’s eco-thriller “Godzilla Vs Hedorah” (aka “Godzilla Vs The Smog Monster”) features hippies and the goopiest Godzilla nemesis of all. It also features this anecdote courtesy of Wikipedia that’s too crazy not to mention: Kenpachiro Satsuma, the actor who played Hedorah, was struck with appendicitis during the production. Doctors were forced to perform the appendectomy while he was still wearing the Hedorah suit, due to the length of time it took to take off. Let me repeat that: A man dressed as a kaiju had his appendix taken out. 

“Godzilla: King of the Monsters,” aka Godzilla II, has all the horsepower of a million CGI-producing gigabytes behind it to produce images the original Toho team could’ve only dreamt of, but at its core it’s just as silly and funky as the guy in a rubber suit movies of the ‘60s despite its Hollywood cast. Thankfully, it takes itself much less seriously than 2014’s too-ponderous Godzilla reboot, and delivers images of almost painterly beauty amongst the mayhem. You get a four-way monster-mash throw down reducing downtown Boston to shreds at one point, and honestly, that’s all I want out of a Godzilla movie. If you disregard the fact that every single human character in Godzilla II should’ve died 17 times over, it’s a lot of fun. 

Godzilla movies are an acquired taste. They’ll never achieve the crossover success of, say, Marvel movies or Star Wars, but like I said, sometimes all you want out of a movie is watching one monster shove another one’s head through a skyscraper. And next year, they’re releasing a remake of Godzilla’s championship title bout with King Kong. I’ll be there opening day.