Just the Ticket #208: Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster
a.k.a. The Ticketmaster.
When I tasked myself with watching every Godzilla film ever (Minus One) for Goj-Year-ra, I was not prepared for the franchise to get this weird this fast, but here we are, five movies in with Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster, and it's thanks in large part to screenwriter Shinichi Sekizawa (King Kong vs Godzilla and Mothra vs Godzilla) being bored with nuclear dinosaurs and tribal stereotypes.
Unlike previous entries in the franchise, Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster begins rather peacefully, with the first of our repeat tropes (Passionate Female Reporter, played again by Yuriko Hoshi) researching Unsolved Mysteries-style sci-fi and occult stories for her employer's upcoming new show, starting with an unusually prolific meteor shower, a global climate change trend, and a supposed intergalactic broadcast signal from a Venusian UFO, all of which are being researched by another recurring Godzilla trope (Young Theoretical Scientist, played by Hiroshi Koizumi, who reprises his role as Professor Miura from Mothra vs Godzilla and played a scientist with a different name in Mothra).
Meanwhile, her police detective brother (Yojimbo's Yosuke Natsuki) is tasked with protecting the visiting princess of a fictional nation (Bond Girl Akiko Wakabayashi, who was in You Only Live Twice and King Kong vs Godzilla with Mie Hama) from assassins...until her plane explodes en route to Japan and she's possessed by the soul of a Venusian precognitive who has come to Earth to warn everyone of an interplanetary kaiju named King Ghidorah (suit acted by Hirose and brought to life with a glorious practical puppet in its flight scenes) who was responsible for turning her home planet into a poisonous wasteland and wiping out her people. Modern moviegoers will no doubt recognize the "survivor of genocidal aliens warns Earth that it will be next" plot from Independence Day: Resurgence and Moonfall (though the 1950s had films like The Day the Earth Stood Still, so it wasn't exactly new when this movie did it), but it's handled much better here because simple warnings make more narrative sense than the two latest Emmerich disasters' (by both genre and quality definitions) "dead failure shows the living how to succeed" approach.
The Venusian prophet's warnings include the return of Rodan (another nuclear kinda-saurus kaiju based on the pteranodon that got his eponymous debut in 1956, here with a new suit and a retcon to his death at the end of that film) from the depths of Mount Aso and Godzilla's sinking of a passenger ship upon returning from his defeat at the end of Mothra vs Godzilla. It's still the bone-brow suit from that entry, but has been fitted with more expressive, articulated eyes in the short time between films, and it fits the sentient take on the three giant anti-heroes here perfectly.
Adding to the series' tenuous continuity so far, the ItÅ twins make their third appearance as Mothra's singing fairy priestesses, who have embraced a modest celebrity status since they acknowledged the potential for good in humanity in the previous film and no one is trying to capture them for a sideshow attraction this time. There's some gender confusion regarding Mothra in the subtitles, as the fairies say early on that one of the two larvae died between films and the surviving larva is male, but later they refer to it as "Mothra" and "her." So I don't know if the subtitles are wrong, if the Japanese language handles gendered pronouns differently from English, if there was an error in the script, or if a blooper got left in, but that happened. Also, it's the same puppet from the previous film with different eyes, and the fairies have a new Mothra song that's less chanty and more hype than the old one.
While the Shindo siblings (the reporter and detective) search for the possessed princess to protect her from a quartet of imposing but incompetent assassins and Godzilla and Rodan play a savage round of GigaBash across the countryside, Professor Miura and his team investigate a magnetically charged, size-shifting meteor because they've never read The Colour Out Of Space before, which hatches to reveal Ghidorah with haunting optical effects and music. So now, it's up to Mothra (the voice of reason with a sealing power of sorts and a dead sibling) to convince the hot-headed protagonist and his rival who wasn't introduced until the sequel to help her defeat the recently revived, multi-headed genocidal space dragon. If this sounds vaguely like the overarching plot of the first four King Of Fighters games, you are vaguely right because Sekizawa drew inspiration from the classic Yamata no Orochi folk tale when writing the script, with the obvious twist that the Three Sacred Treasures are kaiju and Orochi is from space.
Ghidorah is a practical effects marvel that mostly still holds up today, and the fight choreography and practical ingenuity is the best I've seen in the ShÅwa Era so far (maybe too much of Godzilla throwing and kicking boulders instead of using his atomic breath, but the Mothra larva riding Rodan because it doesn't have wings yet was a super-creative choice). But then Ghidorah just...flies away...and they let him! An intergalactic, planet-level alien dragon who caused the extinction and desolation of the physical Venusian population...and they let him escape so the human plot can be resolved and he can come back for sequels. This is what happens when you only leave fifteen minutes at the end of an hour-and-a-half movie to devote to its main draw and you have to work in an insane human plot and contrive reintroductions for three popular kaiju to now exist in the same universe and you have to work in the introduction of a fourth kaiju for them to fight. It's too much and there isn't enough time to stick the landing.
As for the human plot, it's kind of a motley crew spy action/political thriller/sci-fi disaster/psychological mystery/religious drama thing with a muted romantic resolution and extras so stupid that, in a world where kaiju exist and attack with extreme regularity, they repeatedly ignore the advice of a celebrity prophet of some documented accuracy simply because she is a woman who claims to be from Venus. To be fair, that particular book would not be published for roughly another thirty years, but still, giant prehistoric monsters and psychic fairies exist, and no one believes in aliens‽ The disbelief even gets so bad that there's a second scientist (played by original Godzilla and Raids Again scientist trope Takashi Shimura, of Seven Samurai) who wants to fix her "delusion" with drugs, hypnosis, torture, and near-fatal shock therapy.
Godzilla and Rodan were right; humans suck sometimes.
B-
That doesn't include my loyal Ticketholders, who have helped the Month Of Love surpass January's viewership numbers because you're awesome. Next week, Godzilla and Rodan will have to face Ghidorah without Mothra's help, so please continue to share the love by Staying Tuned for that and remembering to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, leaving a comment at the bottom of this post and any others you have feelings about, helping out my ad revenue as you read so I can stay safe from the alien delusions of our seventy-plus-year-old monster king, and following me on BlueSky, Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my randomly magnetic content.
94
Ticketmaster,
Out.
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