Just the Ticket #217: Godzilla vs Megalon
a.k.a. The Ticketmaster.
It was my intent to kick off May last week with today's review of the next movie I watched for the Goj-Year-ra project, but time and energy were not permitting.
I didn't expect to enjoy it as much as I did despite its imperfections and the vehemently mixed reception it received for its tonally inappropriate mouth-harp score, not having enough Godzilla, using too much stock footage (is All Monsters Attack a joke to you? Because it is to me!), and meme-ifying everything that's "wrong" with the Shōwa Era.
Making me think of Mega Man for the first time since Invasion Of Astro-Monster because a scientist creates a sentient robot (designed with the help of a fan art contest) to save humanity from a monster that looks like the lovechild of Tunnel Rhino and Gravity Beetle and has a name that starts with Mega, 1973's Godzilla vs Megalon is perhaps the gem of writer/director Jun Fukuda's kaiju career so far in my viewing experience.
Before I continue, I'd like to talk a bit about my review process. Generally, if I can, I like to avoid the critical opinions of others before seeing a film that I intend to review because it affects my viewing experience (in many cases, it has turned me off to the idea of watching or reviewing something at all) and limits the number of "new" things I have to say about it. Once I watch a film and have written my own review, I will then see what others had to say about it. But there are times (when I wonder about my opinion, like with Godzilla Raids Again, or I have to delay the review as the case is here, and feel like my talking points are solid enough) that the process can benefit from a bit of tweaking.
That said, I have encountered several opinions that say Godzilla vs Megalon is boring and padded until the kaiju show up, and I honestly don't know what movie they were watching.
According to the opening stock footage, the explosion of the Red Bamboo island caused an earthquake on Monster Island and disrupted the peaceful lives of the Seatopians (the survivors of two previous Atlantis-like civilizations that were almost wiped out by the bomb tests that created SpongeBob, but they're pretty much just three white guys—the leader played by Mothra police chief Robert Dunham and dubbed by Astro-Monster's Gorō Naya even though Dunham spoke fluent Japanese—and their slave-harem of Japanese dancing girls in impotently phallic Klan hats, who have zero personality, depth, or reason to be in the movie, and so disappear from the plot halfway through with barely a notice before returning just long enough to blow themselves up in the third act). Now, with the villains being an underwater civilization and the kaiju villain being called Megalon, you'd probably expect Megalon (Thunder Mask's Hideto Date) to be a giant shark, but no. For some reason, the Seatopians' kaiju god is instead a drill-handed beetle-lizard who spits grenades and fires Ghidorah's Gravity Beam from its horn for stock footage purposes. And speaking of stock footage purposes, the Seatopians can just...call the Hunter Nebula to have the skinsuit cockroaches (great name for a punk band?) send Gigan as backup so Godzilla (Shinji Takagi) has to fight two power tools for the price of one.
But Godzilla isn't fighting alone because of that fan-designed robot hero I mentioned earlier. Jet Jaguar (or Jetto Jagga, as the characters call him, and he's played by Tsugutoshi Komada in his only known role) is more Ultraman than Mega Man, and he's at once a source of goofy fun and a fighting badass who's more than worthy of standing back-to-back with the King Of the Monsters when shit gets real (and when he's not being used as a laser pointer made of shiny, jangly keys to lead kaiju around and drag the pacing through the mud).
But wasn't I supposed to be talking about how the human stuff isn't boring? Yes.
With characters like Inventor (voice actor Katsuhiko Sasaki, son of Minoru Chiaki—a.k.a. "Weed Pants"), Friend (Yutaka Hayashi, The Bullet Train), and Boy (Godzilla vs Hedorah's Hiroyuki Kawase, who bears a resemblance to the kid from All Monsters Attack, and I'll talk about that later), and nothing villains like the Seatopians, it's easy to say the story is bad (and be right), but I wouldn't say it's boring. Divorced from the kaiju stuff (that's also really, really good), the human plot features some of the only legit hand-to-hand fight choreography in the Shōwa Era not done in a rubber suit, and a prolonged car chase that would have felt right at home in a Japanese Italian Job remake (the original film with Michael Caine came out in 1969, four years before Godzilla vs Megalon). Yes, there's too much exposition about villains who barely matter, and the editing of establishing shots could be tighter, but I was otherwise genuinely impressed and entertained. The espionage angle surrounding Jet Jaguar (someone broke into Inventor's lab and made a mess but didn't take anything! Maybe they left something instead?) was even kind of smart for its time and feeds naturally into a typical mashup of the "villains direct kaiju to destruction montage with radio frequency brainwashing" trope and the "ancient civilization worships kaiju as a god/defensive weapon" trope (so if you think about it, Godzilla as a franchise never really left its nuclear allegory roots because all kaiju are pretty much "the nuclear option" in a metaphorical, perpetual Cold War scenario: send your kaiju to threaten us, and we will respond in kind...even if we have to wait half of the movie for our nuke-monster to swim across the ocean...again!).
Bridging the gap from human action to kaiju action, Jet Jaguar does quite the baffling number of "somehow"s. Somehow, he breaks free of his control system. Somehow, he gains a sentient personality. Somehow, he learns martial arts, wrestling moves, and combat strategy. Somehow, he discovers an Ultraman pose that lets him grow to kaiju size when it looks like Godzilla won't make it to land in time. According to the subtitles, Inventor explains it away with a nebulous "survival program" he installed in Jet Jaguar (so, just a sophisticated AI program with the ability to manifest playground hax like magic; no big deal in 1973, right? Though I suppose this could be set in the relatively distant future because Monster Island exists and it was 1999 in-Universe when Destroy All Monsters took place, so magic AI isn't totally out of the question here).
I've heard that good film criticism is about the quality of the film that was made, not the absence of what the critic thinks should have been made, and I agree. But I also think that if Toho wanted to have a more child-friendly Godzilla (and given the established connection children have had with Godzilla through dreams, willpower, and psychic radiation in previous entries), it would have made more "sense" for Boy, a.k.a. Roku-chan, to have been the cause of Jet Jaguar's glow-up here, if not making this a direct sequel to All Monsters Attack (as bad as that was, I think the connection would have worked, and the character archetypes would have been easy to continue over with Roku being a more adventurous, grown up Ichiro and the toy maker evolving to fill the Inventor slot).
But with those gripes out of the way, we get into the kaiju action itself. Gigan (once again played by Hedorah and Heisei Godzilla actor Kenpachiro Satsuma) is more of a presence here than he was in his debut, showing a sadistic personality and working with Megalon really well. Despite not making thematic sense, Megalon has a cool, terrifying design (especially his mouth-within-a-mouth that shoots grenades) and unique mobility that introduces uncertainty into the battle. Jet Jaguar is a force unlike anything the franchise had seen before because of his less cumbersome design, and when Godzilla shows up, their chemistry gives big Ryu/Cyclops, "you son of a bitch" handshake energy, and the fight choreography gets insane. 
Godzilla is a new suit here (I haven't talked much about suit changes in awhile, but I wanted to now) that calls back to his expressive, kind of duck-faced look from the sixties and seems more mobile, allowing for more pugilism, grappling, and attitude from the character, but we also get stuff like Jaguar tossing Megalon out of a torture rack pose so Godzilla can volley him with his atomic breath, and a redo of the previous film's "Again! Again! Again!" finale with Godzilla doing his notorious tail-grind dropkick. Some see the dropkick as a franchise-killing moment, but I love every bit of the big fight, that included.
Sometimes, it's okay for fun of any size to just be as stupid as it possibly can.
B+
Stay Tuned for my thoughts on a superhero anime spin-off's second season, a Zenescope story arc about a psychologically unstable sun god, and the Goj-Year-ra debut of Mechagodzilla, coming next week.
Until then, I will keep trying to pass ten thousand views a 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, 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.
63
Ticketmaster,
Out.
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