Just the Ticket #216: Godzilla vs Gigan
a.k.a. The Ticketmaster.
I was not alive yet, but the 70s were a strange time, if these last two Goj-Year-ra selections (and A Clockwork Orange) are anything to go by.
The architecture (before it's kicked over, smashed, cut through, and/or exploded), the hair and fashion that looks androgynous (feathered bangs! Dracula collars! Even the pant-legs are dresses!) and either over-patterned with intense primary colors or monochromatic with pastels (fittingly for the latter this month) like the designers were trying to blind you with Easter, and the...enhanced thinking it takes to come up with a plot where alien cockroaches try to conquer Earth with a cyborg buzzsaw chicken while two monsters talk to each other with see-through speech bubbles and rewinding tape noises.
Directed by former franchise black sheep (before Yoshimitsu Banno "ruined" it with last week's entry) Jun Fukuda (Ebirah and Son Of Godzilla), Godzilla vs Gigan (prefaced with Earth Destruction Directive in Japan and screened in the US as Godzilla On Monster Island—which he is for maybe five minutes of the actual runtime—and in the UK as War Of the Monsters) was settled on after Banno's sequel was squashed and two replacement treatments (one with Godzilla and Anguirus teaming up with a living Incan statue to fight a giant alien brain—which sounds both awesome and weird—and one where Godzilla teams up with Rodan and Varan against Ghidorah and Gigan) were proposed. It has a very familiar premise to fans of Sekizawa's sci-fi scripts (Astro-Monster, specifically): that of aliens brainwashing kaiju (particularly the tri-headed dead horse that is King Ghidorah, though the aforementioned cyber-chicken Gigan is a new factor) to demolish Japan, while the humans do espionage to thwart the aliens so the Earth monsters will have an easier time with their battle.
Godzilla vs Gigan feels like a weak entry in the franchise after the Hedorah film ticked so many boxes for me, despite having a favorable fan consensus. But it's still a special film because it marks Haruo Nakajima's final appearance as Godzilla (and final suit-acting role, in general) before retiring at the age of 44, and is the first time a kaiju has made Godzilla bleed. Also, the villains (Japanese Spider-Man and Space Sheriff actor Toshiaki Nishizawa, and Outlaw: Gangster VIP actor Zan Fujita) and humans are the superior component to the plot, perhaps being the best characters since Saeko from Son Of Godzilla and Dr. Serizawa from the original, if not the best human characters in the Shōwa Era thus far.
Minor actor Hiroshi Ishikawa (not to be confused with the director of the same name) shines as Gengo Okada, a freelance mangaka who bumbles his way into a "fool winds up with mysterious MacGuffin and proves to be a competent hero" story when he's hired to provide concept sketches for attractions at the villains' theme park headquarters. His girlfriend and manager, Tomoko Tomoe (the Ultra franchise's Yuriko Hishimi) is a good straight-woman to pair him with, bringing sex appeal and a progressive amount of personality and fighting competence to the film. The woman whom Gengo bumps into (Tomoko Umeda) and her hippie sidekick (Minoru Takashima) bring drama and further levity to the proceedings, respectively, but to a lesser degree than the main couple, and their role in the narrative "benefits" from some flawed editing (how did they escape capture, anyway?). I should also give props to Kunio Murai (the Japanese dub voice of Harrison Ford; yes, I'm serious) as the woman's captive electrical engineer brother, and Gen Shimizu (Yojimbo) as the JSDF commander, for the impact of their brief appearances here.
But as much as Godzilla vs Gigan attempted to capture the pacing and atmosphere of the Hedorah film from a kaiju standpoint (starting the action early, having Godzilla fail and get injured several times for dramatic stakes, having a dark and smoky battlefield and an abundance of practical destruction, etc.), it mostly felt like carnage for its own sake while Godzilla and Anguirus (Koetsu Omiya, the kaiju not getting to do much outside of Destroy All Monsters stock footage—where the suit was worn by Hiroshi Sekita—and his big team-up moment near the very end of the fight) spent half the movie swimming to Japan and making rewind noises at each other. Ghidorah looks cool with his new(?) neck frills, but has lost much gravitas since his eponymous debut (because Godzilla can almost solo him by now), and as...edgy?...as Gigan looks, he's mostly impractical in combat considering he has no dexterity and doesn't do everything he should be capable of so that Godzilla can eventually win a prolonged handicap brawl with no lasting stakes or coherent narrative flow because of plot armor. Like, just when you think Godzilla has been definitively knocked out, or blasted multiple times by an alien death ray specifically designed to kill him, or Gigan stabs him repeatedly between the eyes and saws into his shoulder deep enough to sever an artery, the big guy just gets back up like Hulk Hogan no-selling a new wrestler he's jealous of, and wails on the two space kaiju while they and Anguirus just stand there with dumb looks literally baked onto their faces. I did enjoy the "again! Again! Again!" sequence at the end where Anguirus helps Godzilla defeat Ghidorah, but everything else not involving the human subplot (or obviously spliced in from a better movie—get ready for more of that next week, by the way) bored me to sleep, and the final, "be good to the environment and don't blow each other up over stupid shit or the roaches will inherit the Earth and make condos out of our corpses" message felt like an inferior, tacked-on rehash of what the previous film communicated with such bluntly disturbing effectiveness and narrative competence.
The jury's out on green living and world peace (just watch the news in 2026 for journalistic evidence), but humanity at least saved this movie from subjective failure.
D+
Stay Tuned for my thoughts on another isekai anime, Zenescope comics about a sexy, Greek angel, and the "Godzilla" film, Fake Ultraman vs Big Static Beetleborg, coming next week.
Until then, it looks like we could pass ten thousand views this month, so please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, comment something at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read so I can afford a giant death ray shaped like Godzilla, and follow me on BlueSky, Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and LinkedIn to like what you see, receive the latest news on my kaiju-sized content, and get me closer to that goal.
68
Robot Chicken,
Out.
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