Just the Ticket #201: Godzilla Raids Again

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a.i.j.u. The Ticketmaster.

This Goj-Year-ra project will be my first time watching the majority of the movies in this franchise. I have vague memories of watching one or both of the Raymond Burr cuts (King Of the Monsters and Godzilla 1985) as a child, and I made it no further than the first entry the last time I made an attempt at seeing every Godzilla movie ever.

Here's how that went, edited FROM Just the Ticket #154: Last Man Standing (List Lookback) (August 30, 2024): 

"...the time [in 2022] that I was going to watch every Godzilla film and gave up after the 1954 original (which was amazing, but I didn't want to watch a week's worth of subtitled runtime, and my obsessive scope creep made me think I was going to also have to watch all of the Mothra and Gamera movies [and Rodan, and...])"

It just shows what a little discipline and planning can do for motivation. But the point I was going with before I derailed it with self-promotion was that, outside of American localization efforts and adaptations (and toy commercials from the 90s), I was only ever aware of Godzilla as a legacy. I thought that because it continued to get over thirty adaptations and sequels and reboots for over seventy years such that it holds the world record for longest, biggest film franchise ever, every entry must be just that damned good.

Little did I know that the original was dismissed as "too weird" upon its release, and as I made my way through Godzilla Raids Again, I felt the need to stop and find out if my own, negative opinion of the sequel was in the wrong.

Directed by Motoyoshi Oda (Ishirō Honda was busy with another film at the time), 1955's Godzilla Raids Again (a.k.a. Gojira's Counterattack, later edited and dubbed as Gigantis: The Fire Monster by a different studio without Raymond Burr or any other American insert characters) was the beginning of Godzilla being paired off against another kinda-saurus kaiju monster.

After an opening scene where a downed pilot (and the other pilot sent to rescue him) find themselves on an island where Godzilla is battling a spiky, armored kaiju, we get an early exposition dump by the only returning (and otherwise unused) character from Gojira, Takashi Shimura as Dr. Yamane. Despite being low-center on the poster and the only face I recognized without having to look him up, Dr. Yamane is only here to show the audience "the good parts" of the previous year's film and tell us that this movie's Godzilla is a different one that was woken up by hydrogen bomb tests after two hundred million years (hence the dopey, snaggle-toothed design of the face this time, maybe) along with his ancient nemesis, Anguirus (a Japanese Hepburnization of "ankylosaurus"), whom he hates and fights because he hates fighting, which makes total sense and I understood with perfect accuracy because sarcasm doesn't exist, just like my sarcasm...I guess.

For some reason, the Japanese government and/or a shipping magnate with a batshit amount of resources go off of Yamane's mention that Godzilla has photosensitivity PTSD from the hydrogen explosions, and they decide to institute a city-wide blackout so they can test light bombs

as a lure to keep Godzilla from rampaging through major cities every week.

This is good from a lore standpoint because we know that in the year since the last attacks, Japan has built underground shelters and set up an early warning system to protect its citizens from kaiju attacks. And we know from how Osaka responds to the sheltering and government-issued blackout here that if Godzilla attacked the United States during Trump's first term, we would all be dead because "you can't tell me what to do in America!" and "I have a medical condition that I can't see in the dark" and "the woke Democrats are using blackouts to make everyone gay" and all the other MAGA bullshit we're still dealing with on the ass end of the pandemic era of American history. Seriously, as an American, fuck modern America. And fuck fictional 1950s Japan for being better than real modern America. And fuck Godzilla Raids Again for having such nothing human characters that it makes me miss Emiko's cheating ass. Seriously Raids Again, the only human characters we have to follow are some shipping millionaire and his yes-men, the dispatch crew who are networking all of the anti-kaiju efforts (so they're stuck at radios, not contributing much of anything directly to the plot), the two pilots from the intro, and some escaped convicts who ruin the light bomb operation by coincidentally Rube-Goldberging the shipping millionaire's business into a massive beacon of smoke and flames because there needs to be manufactured tension and wanton destruction (which sounds like a good name for a metal-AF Chinese food restaurant) in a kaiju movie.

Then suddenly, Anguirus is there because reasons and editing, and the next third of the movie is devoted to sped up footage of Haruo Nakajima (Godzilla) and Katsumi Tezuka (Anguirus) clumsily and monotonously grabassing in rubber monster suits while the scale model of Osaka crumbles and explodes around them, until Godzilla doing the same move he's tried roughly a dozen times finally works, and he puts down Anguirus for good by biting its jugular with his dumbass outgrown wad of teeth.

Shit-ass-fuck, there's still half an hour of this soulless, chopped-to-dick approximation of a "story" left! Which is what I thought before I saw the last third of the movie. Yes, we still have to follow the humans now (the millionaire is hosting a party so all of the important characters I can't name and don't care about can be in the same place to remind us of who they are and for almost no other reason) until another ship sinks (which can have no other explanation in this Universe besides Godzilla did it?) and the government/military/shipping millionaire/whoever has JASDF bombers follow Godzilla to a cold, mountainous island to bury him in an impractically huge avalanche that looks like someone is playing with a hand puppet in their ice-maker whenever things aren't exploding. I throw shade, and I once again sound like one of those "the best part of the movie was when it was over" people, but despite the cheap effects and the sequence maybe going on longer than it should, this was the best part of Godzilla Raids Again.

I'd also be remiss if I didn't mention the pilot Kobayashi (Minoru Chiaki, "Weed Pants" Heihachi in Seven Samurai). It takes most of the film to understand that he has a sweet but tragic arc—he's a slow burn as romantic subplot protags go—but he's really the only character in Godzilla Raids Again who could be classified as such, and it's a shame he wasn't written to amount to more, since the franchise at this early stage doesn't have its human heroes survive.

Godzilla Raids Again is a flat, cheap, directionless, editorial mess of a picture with barely anything to say or anyone of interest that only qualifies as a story by its mere existence and association with the far better film that preceded it. I am not happy to have so heartily disliked it, but I am glad to not be alone in my stance.

D-

I'll be taking the rest of the month off to catch up on the Twisted Childhood Universe films, so Stay Tuned and please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, leave a comment at the bottom of this post and any others you have opinions about, help out my ad revenue as you read so I can stay safe from the impulsive rampages of seventy-plus-year-old monsters, and follow me on BlueSky, Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my content, like what's coming up next week.

119

Ticketmaster,

Out Again.