1992 saw the release of the 19th Godzilla movie, Godzilla vs. Mothra. The franchise had been through ups and downs and lacunae by that time, 38 years after Ishiro Honda first unleashed the King of Monsters on the world. What’s interesting about Godzilla Number 19 is how well it fits into the series.
There’d been 15 Godzilla movies released up through the mid-1970s, then a nine-year gap, a reboot of the franchise, another four-year gap, a sequel to the reboot that didn’t make much money, and another sequel that revived a fan-favorite villain. Then Godzilla vs. Mothra. And, watching it, it’s as though the previous 15-plus years of ups and downs hadn’t happened.
The strengths and weaknesses of this movie are very close to the strengths and weaknesses of, if not the Godzilla movies of the 1960s, then certainly the Godzilla movies of the 1970s. Kaiju battles are leavened with broad comedy, the film starts as another genre of movie before the giant monsters show up, and the special effects are cheap and fun to look at it. Scenes with humans are earnest and lacking in subtext, but also not the point. Monster fights carry the picture, with a distinctive visual appeal not quite like anything else.
It’s not that the movie’s sticking to a formula, though you can see familiar narrative moves. Instead it’s as though the series has become again what it used to be. If there’d been no long gaps, no reboot, if they’d kept cranking out Godzilla movies every year through the 1980s, then the Godzilla movie of 1992 would’ve looked a lot like this.
The plot opens with a meteor crashing to earth and revealing a giant egg; cut to a daring Japanese archaeologist, Takuya Fujita (Tetsuya Bessho), trying to steal a relic from a foreign country and getting arrested. But his ex-wife Masako Tezuka (Satomi Kobayashi) turns up with a way out of jail: investigate the mysterious Infant Island with her on behalf of the Marutomo Company. They discover tiny twin priestesses of an ancient alien civilization who worship a creature called Mothra. 12,000 years ago attempts to alter the Earth’s climate led to the creation of a Black Mothra, or Battra; Mothra defeated Battra, but their battle destroyed civilization. Now a Mothra egg has appeared. Will Battra reappear as well?
As it turns out, the meteor that unearthed the egg also reawakened a certain giant lizard. A series of monster battles ensue between Godzilla, Battra, and Mothra. Will the environmental depredations of the Marutomo Company be stopped? Will Fukita and Tezuka reconcile?
Some things you see coming and don’t really mind. This is one of those movies. It’s nominally about plot, and not about character, but the plot’s less important than the monster scenes.
The script, from Kazuki Omori (who directed the previous two Godzilla movies) moves along sharply but does nothing surprising, down to the parallel between the divorced couple and the battling Mothras. Sample dialogue: “People should learn from Mothra,” reflects Fujita; “Exactly. Including us,” responds Tezuka. The directing, by Takao Okawara, is uninspired. The movie was apparently rushed, which might account for the TV-show feeling.
At least the special effects look nice. Effects director Koichi Kawakita creates some lovely (if implausible) underwater battles, and the beam weapons are fun to watch. There’s a common opinion that the kaiju fights in this movie are too reliant on beam powers instead of physical combat; I’d argue the bright electric-ray visuals are one of the movie’s pleasures. An underwater volcano erupting during a battle is a mess of light and color, exciting to the eye no matter how you slice it. The Mothras are too mechanical, but this isn’t a film striving for realism.
If one of the charms of the early Godzillas are moments when we see what the 1960s and 70s thought high technology looked like, in control rooms and secret bases and the like, so it is here. We’re far enough away from the early-1990s that the 90s technology in the film has charm: CRT flatscreen TVs showing simple computer graphics; mainframes with banks of lights. Once, when you had to evoke high technology on a budget, this was what you ended up with, and there’s now nostalgia in seeing what the future used to be.
But the movie most resembles past Godzilla epics in the way it cribs from other films to hold the viewer’s interest until giant monsters show up. This time there’s a cut-rate Indiana Jones who, amusingly, is immediately jailed for trying to steal a historic artifact from a foreign country. His swashbuckling effectively carries the early part of the movie, until Mothra’s priestesses show up, and then is forgotten about.
The weirdness of the best of the 1970s movies never appears, and it doesn’t have the energy of the best 1960s sixties films. It’s a movie that successfully evokes earlier Godzilla movies, and reassures you that the series is now what it was before. You can’t really object, even if it’s not the most exciting result.
Some franchises have a gravitational pull, are subject to some narrative logic that pushes them into certain shapes. Godzilla may be one of them. Caught between budget limitations and fan expectations, there was a certain narrative space for the big guy’s movies. It’d be churlish to object to the Godzilla movies doing what they were supposed to do, and this movie, like many before it, does just that.