Quick Take: Godzilla vs. Megalon

Godzilla vs. Megalon (Jun Fukuda, 1973), along with several others of the Godzilla Showa era, scared the heck out of me as a kid. The monsters were huge and scary looking, the sound effects loud and weird, and I freaked out whenever Megalon melted and burned Japanese tanks. Sure, you couldn't see the crews burning, but I knew they were there, and I was horrified.

But even though I was scared, I had a great time. What kid doesn't love a giant robot fighting alongside Godzilla? That was the very definition of a good day for a child in the 1970s.

Rewatching the film last week - my chosen debut for the launch of The Criterion Channel - I finally saw Godzilla vs. Megalon for what it is: a fairly lazy and slipshod entry in a series that was well past its prime by this point. But that doesn't mean I don't still love it, even though I don't rate it very highly. If nothing else, it's sincere kid's entertainment.

In the Shadow of Godzilla

The human characters in Gareth Edwards' masterful interpretation of Godzilla are small, frightened creatures who barely make a difference in the film's outcome - and that's as it should be. When faced with a natural catastrophe of this nature, we are as ants before a brushfire; this movie is all about the monsters, who show more personality than the people. 

Some might see this as a weakness, but I wonder if Edwards' made an intentional choice here - and even if he didn't, it works in the context of this film. 

It turns out that our experiments with nuclear energy have awakened Goliaths millions of years old, alpha predators of immense power. Two such awakened creatures will soon mate and doom the world. Another, Godzilla, is a counter-acting force of nature, a thing of balance. 

The humans in this film behave realistically and with intelligence and valour. Their efforts simply don't matter - except, perhaps, at one juncture. That single act raises the possibility that people can have an impact if they make the right choice at the right time. But for the most part, all the guns and planes and boats and science in the world are as useless as stone knives would be against threats of this magnitude.

Edwards uses the by now ho-hum fear of nuclear apocalypse as a lens through which to grapple with today's existential horrors. The giant beasts cause tsunamis that wreak utter havoc, just as the rising oceans are likely to do in decades hence. They also threaten the end of technology, taking away the tools we've used to dominate and perhaps cripple the planet. 

Godzilla and the two other titans he faces represent the two ways in which we fear the world might react to our stewardship: with obliterating wrath or harsh but compassionate correction. 

The film makes it clear that had humans done nothing at all, the outcome of the film would have been the same as with our hapless intervention. (With perhaps - and only perhaps - the one exception I mention above.) It is a film that reflects our current anxieties. We're not worried about nuclear apocalypse so much any more (although we should be), but we do worry about being diminished, losing control. As the world has grown smaller, so, it seems, have we. Compared to the forces around us - economics, governments, nature, a growing understanding of cosmology and evolution - we struggle to find meaning in our lives. And we realize that all our hopes and dreams and aspirations could be swept away at random, as though we mean nothing, the billions of years leading up to and extending beyond our flickering existence so gigantic, so heavy, that we are as singularities, crushed to a point smaller than we can comprehend. 

And yet Godzilla itself, at two moments in the film, regards humans with just enough respect (unless we are merely imagining it) that we wonder if we do matter, just a little, to a universe so vast and cold. 

Kaiju Dreaming

I work for an electric utility and I've been watching a lot of Godzilla movies lately, so perhaps it's only natural that I dreamed last night of Godzilla's rampage through Alberta and his wanton destruction of our electricity transmission lines. It was a pretty short dream; there were just a few vivid images of Godzilla tearing through southeastern Alberta, bringing down towers and power lines, followed by a cut to me in my office, lamenting the destruction but thinking "At least this'll make a great story for the company newsletter."

The Little Boy and the Metaphor Monster

Yesterday I watched Ishiro Honda's offbeat 1969 Kaiju film All Monsters Attack, the tenth entry in the original Showa series of Godzilla movies and the one often derided as "either the worst or second-worst" of all Godzilla films, at least according to Richard Pusateri's audio commentary. And yet I was charmed by this simple yet genuine little film, which focusses not on monsters but on the plight of a little boy facing a reality often cruel.

Little Ichiro lives in the seemingly endless rust-hued industrial wasteland of postwar Kawasaki, Japan. He is a latchkey child, both parents often working late to make ends meet. Ichiro wishes his parents were home more often, but his loneliness is somewhat abated by a kindly, eccentric neighbour - an inventor of toys - and his own fertile imagination.

Ichiro's nemesis is Gabara, an older boy who bullies Ichiro on the way home from school. Ichiro is too small and scared to fight back, and either runs away from his tormentor or meekly submits to his wishes. It's humiliating, and like many bullied little boys, Ichiro escapes into fantasy.

Using the sort of psychedelic dream sequence transitions that have been out of style for decades, Honda transports Ichiro to Monster Island, where Ichiro admires the fighting prowess of the mighty Godzilla, King of the Monsters. He also makes friends with Minilla, Son of Godzilla, who can apparently shrink down to little-boy size and speak Japanese. Just as Ichirio is about to wrangle an introduction to Godzilla out of Minilla, he's rudely woken by the neighbour, who tells Ichirio that his mother can't come home tonight because she has to work late. The inventor consoles a stoic but clearly upset Ichirio by inviting him over for sukiyaki beef.

At this point the b-plot intrudes on our tale - the police enter to warn of a pair of dangerous "50 million yen thieves."

The rest of the film's running time dances adroitly from the framing sequence to the Monster Island scenes, with Godzilla teaching little Minilla to fight his own monster battles. In the real world, Ichiro finds himself kidnapped by the bank robbers, and must take inspiration from his own fantasy world to escape.

One can see why most Godzilla fans don't like this film much; the famed monster battles consist almost entirely of stock footage from other, better films, and the child's perspective is a little too juvenile for (supposedly) more sophisticated viewers.

But I think it's pretty amazing that after nine films Honda and the producers decided to break formula so thoroughly. Imagine if, say, one of the middle films in the Star Trek or James Bond or Star Wars series had been set in the real world, with Roger Moore or William Shatner or Harrison Ford playing "imaginary" characters (in the world of their respective universes). A lot of fans might claim that such a structure ruins their enjoyment of fictional worlds they've come to treat as internally consistent and "real" in that particular context.

Actually, nothing in the film explicitly states that Godzilla and the other monsters are imaginary. For all we know, the world of Ichiro's framing story is one in which Godzilla exists; no one is surprised by Ichiro's fantasies. To them, perhaps it's natural that little boys would imagine adventures with such fearsome creatures, as a way of coping with their very real menace. (On the other hand, no one in the film states that Godzilla is real, either.)

In any event, just as Minilla learns to breathe radioactive fire like his father and defeat the monster Gabara (a dinosaur-like creature given the same name as Ichiro's bully), Ichiro uses his wits to escape the robbers and even deliver them into the hands of the police - and in the film's coda, he confronts and defeats the real Gabara.

By no means is All Monsters Attack a great work of cinema. But it is genuine, well-made, honest and sincere. And I'll take that over virtually any of this summer's supposed blockbusters.

The Blob

A couple of weeks ago I was fooling around with one of those innumerable iPhone photography apps and accidentally shot this. I don't know what I was actually trying to photograph, but this result is sort of cool. The Blob is due for another remake, isn't it?

Come to think of it, the Blob should fight Godzilla. And the Three Stooges, but then the Three Stooges should fight everyone: Bruce Lee, Tarzan, Zorro, Hannibal Lecter, Dirty Harry, the Man with No Name, the Three Musketeers, the Mummy, etc. I'd go see each and every "Three Stooges vs." movie. In fact, I'd buy them all on Blu-Ray. Get with it, Hollywood!

Stompin' Sean

Reading memes is fun, but creating your own memes is even better. Here's an easy-to-use cutout of my brother Sean, ready for insertion into whatever funny situation you can imagine. I can think of a whole bunch of Godzilla-themed city-stompin' rampages already!

Here's an example of the fun you can have with the Stompin' Sean meme template.

Analyzing Godzilla

Well, Happy April Fool's; I just finished watching Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack. And I don't even feel like a fool for having done that.

Others have already written about what the Godzilla films mean to the Japanese; the line you hear trotted out most often is that the atomic-powered Godzilla represents the deep-seated terror of the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This observation no doubt has merit, but while watching GMKG:GMAOA (even the acronym is awkward!), I considered a new wrinkle: perhaps Godzilla represents guilt as much as fear.

Consider this: whenever Godzilla appears, he rises out of the ocean, a horror of the deeps. Slowly, inexorably, he makes his way to Tokyo, the very heart of Japan, where he destroys everything in his paths, killing scores of innocent people.

Ah...but are they indeed innocent? The first Godzilla film came out in 1954, less than a decade after the end of World War II and the atomic holocaust. Bombed into submission, the Japanese were forced to take responsibility for the war in the pacific. They were then occupied and forced to institute a democracy closely patterened after the American model. And since then, the Japanese have struggled to come to grips with the deaths caused by Imperial ambitions.

Godzilla's wrath, significantly, is atomic: his radioactive breath sears deep gashes into the Japanese cityscape, and the various films of the canon are littered with atomic imagery, specifically the white flash of immolation as victims are vaporized by Godzilla's atomic beams.

In All-Out Attack, this idea is made explicit when one of the characters reveals that "the souls of all the victims of the Pacific War" are somehow trapped within Godzilla. It's a throwaway line, and at first I thought it went nowhere.

But at the end of the film, when a heroic submarine commander puts an end to the threat and Godzilla sinks, defeated, to the bottom of the sea, we're treated to one final shot...a slow pan across the ocean floor that reveals a grotestque, pulsing, beating heart. The heart is Godzilla's, of course.

Many B-films feature one last "shock" shot, meant to show that The Menace Is Not Really Gone (TM). But in this case, whether or not the filmmakers intended it, I think this throwaway shot has a second meaning: guilt is not easily dispensed with. It can't be blown away with a rocket or a hail of bullets. Such brute force can suppress it, or drive it away, but the only way to really free yourself of guilt is to deal with what you've done and resolve to do better next time.

The question of Japanese guilt is a controversial one, with some Westerners still claiming that the Japanese have never reallly taken their full share of the responsibility for World War II atrocities. I'm not one of those Westerners, but I do find it interesting that some Japanese, if we are to take their films as evidence, do harbour some guilt to this day. Maybe one day, they'll make a Godzilla film in which the beast is accepted as an intrinsic facet of Japan, and the islanders and the monsters can coexist in some kind of harmony.

Wait, I guess they already did that with those goofy Godzilla films of the 70s, in which Godzilla is a defender instead of a destroyer.

Well, there's another brilliant theory shot to hell.

On a lighter note, I found it very amusing when a group of Japanese tourists spot Baragon, one of the giant monsters featured in the film (though not in the title), and after screaming a bit, stop to pose for photographs with the approaching horror in the background.

That is all.