A Godzilla movie from the 1970s is easy to enjoy. Ominous foreshadowing leads to giant monsters, and probably to meddling aliens, and the monsters end up beating the hell out of each other before Japan and also the Earth are saved. But a simple story can interact with the culture and history from which it emerges in ways difficult for foreigners to entirely grasp.
Consider 1974’s Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla, the 14th Godzilla film (its American release was first called Godzilla vs. the Bionic Monster, then after the owners of the rights to The Bionic Man threatened a lawsuit, more lastingly known as Godzilla vs. the Cosmic Monster). It’s a simple tale in outline, though the plot foreshadowing doesn’t always pay off.
It opens with a priestess in Okinawa having a vision of destruction caused by rampaging kaiju. Then a photographer, Masahiko Shimizu (Kazuya Aoyama) finds a shard of extraterrestrial metal in a cave; his brother Keisuke (Masaaki Daimon) explores the cave with archaeologist Saeko Kanagusuku (Reiko Tajima) and they find a statuette and a riddling prophecy Saeko translates. The statue depicts King Caesar, legendary kaiju hero of Okinawa who once saved the island, and when the heroes take it to a professor for further exposition they’re spied on, followed, and see a mysterious black cloud that may indicate the prophecy’s coming true.
Then Godzilla appears, gratuitously attacking Japan for the first time in many years. He defeats his buddy Anguirus (Kin'ichi Kusumi), but another Godzilla enters the fray. The first Godzilla turns out to be a robot, a Mechagodzilla (Kazunari Mori) made of Space Titanium and equipped with an array of deadly weapons. The human protagonists are captured by the baddies, leading one of the humans to exclaim: “Space aliens, just like I thought!” Can Godzilla (Isao Zushi), with the help of King Caesar (Kusumi again), save the world?
Probably, though there’ll be a lot of special effects and monster slugfests before it’s done. The director is veteran Godzilla whisperer Jun Fukuda, who does his usual workmanlike job with the human-scale runninging-around, and special effects come from Teruyoshi Nakano. The script’s by Fukuda and Hiroyasu Yamaura, from a story by Masami Fukushima and long-time kaiju scribe Shin’ichi Sekizawa.
It holds together well enough. Early on there are some nice mystery-thriller moments, occasionally verging on horror with mysterious watchers and assailants popping up at unexpected moments. You don’t really know who’s who for a while, and there’s a nice twist with an undercover Interpol agent.
But there are problems. There’s no particular logical reason for things to happen at the precise moment they do. That’s not too surprising for a Godzilla movie, but the attempt at using the prophecy early in the movie to foreshadow events at the end doesn’t work because what’s prophesied has no direct connection to the structure of the plot. It’s not even clear, at least to me, what one of the final riddles is supposed to refer to.
The movie’s also exceptionally formulaic: a first half with humans scrambling to defeat agents of an extraterrestrial power leads to Godzilla appearing for no particular reason, setting up a second half dominated by kaiju fights. Still, that’s a formula that does tend to work, and the build-up of the aliens is well-handled in this case.
The human characters get a little bit more acting to do than usual. Tajima and Aoyama work well together, and the ever-reliable Akihiko Hirata, veteran of many Godzilla movies, does his usual effective turn as the brainy guy who establishes plot points. There’s not a lot of emotional subtext, but you don’t really want that getting in the way of the kaiju.
In fact, the monsters have a subtext of their own. King Caesar, who turns up to help save the day at the end, is specifically identified with Okinawa. I don’t have the grasp of the history of the Okinawa and Ryukyu Islands to know how to read this, beyond being aware that there’s a vexed history between those islands and the rest of Japan. That seems to play into the story of the movie; you can, if you want to, see King Caesar and Godzilla teaming up against the alien-driven Mechagodzilla as Okinawa and the rest of Japan teaming up against foreign powers.
If that seems like a bit of a stretch, consider the name of King Caesar. The kaiju’s not named for a Roman emperor; “Caesar” is a close English sound-alike to “Shisa,” the creature’s Japanese name. A shisa, in turn, is a mythical dog-lion creature from the folklore of Okinawa. (Toho first tried to Romanize the name as “Seeser, which somehow resulted in various early American reviews referring to the creature as “King Seesaw.”)
However much the Okinawan setting and cultural references resonate with Japanese audiences, they’re easy to overlook for North Americans with no particular knowledge of Japan. The movie works as a kaiju fight. It hits its marks and does what it needs to. If there’s no great glory in that, it still produces the pleasurable glow this kind of entertainment aims at. And so we get monsters and aliens and prophecies, brawling it out with a giant robot into the bargain. There’s real value in a movie that knows what it is, and sets out to be just that.