Just the Ticket #221: Godzilla vs Biollante

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. The Ticketmaster.

Something you probably don't know about me is that I'm afraid of carnivorous plants. I can't watch Little Shop Of Horrors (especially on a touchscreen), or play most video games that have carnivorous plant enemies (so Mario, Crash Bandicoot, Pokémon, Resident Evil, Metal Slug, and the DKC Returns games are way off the table), Power Rangers' "Spit Flower" episode and the "Pretty Poison" episode of Batman: The Animated Series (despite my 2D crush on Poison Ivy herself)

scared me as a kid, and the mere concept of things like the Corpse Flower and Pitcher Plant are too existentially terrifying for me to even consider visiting their countries of origin. Just the thought of a dandelion or sunflower (I know they're not carnivorous, but phobias aren't rational) growing to my height or taller makes my imagination go apeshit, like, "nope! Not going near that today!" 

At one point, I decided that zombie and slasher horror weren't doing it for me anymore, and began seeking out horror movies that tickled the aforementioned phobia (because people and large crowds were my other triggers, and zombies and slashers didn't hit like they used to). The Happening was too stupid,

and The Ruins was too slow and disappointing (because trailers lie and "reality" is more horrifying than fiction). But then I really gravitated toward the monster designs in A Quiet Place and Stranger Things, restoring my faith in dendrophobic horror...until Goosebumps: The Vanishing came along and ruined it again.

Which partly informs my viewing experience with this week's entry in the Goj-Year-ra project.

If there's any one quote that has stuck with me from Godzilla vs Biollante, it's that "if we continue doing the same thing, we can't call it a new era."

Grown from a contest-winning story treatment by Shinichirō Kobayashi (who was a dentist at the time, but would later write the treatment that became Godzilla vs SpaceGodzilla, and work as a producer and production planner on anime like Samurai Champloo and S-CRY-ed) and directed by Kazuki Ōmori (Godzilla vs King Ghidorah), Godzilla vs Biollante is a 1989 direct sequel to Return Of Godzilla. Like past versus films, its Japanese title uses "tai" in the Romanized spelling, but as we would see in many future Heisei entries, the English "vs" is used despite the rest of the title being in kanji, as you can see in the banner above and the poster to the right.

If the Super-X in the previous film didn't clue you in on how much faster the Heisei Era is getting insane compared to Shōwa, we're only two movies in this time (not counting Godzilla '54), and the series has already gone international twice with the human plot (here, it's a messy, corporate espionage assassination narrative between a Japanese agribusiness, American ecoterrorists, and an oil company from the fictional Middle-Eastern country of Saradia as they fight over gojirasaur DNA and radiotrophic bacteria, because even though he legalized female drivers, Mohammed bin Salman is still a vicious dictator who seeks to own all video game things and write them off as money-laundering slop factories, so fuck Saudi Arabia with an unlubricated dromedary), the JSDF has the 80s equivalent of an unmanned strike drone with an artificial diamond mirror that reflects nuclear laser breath until it doesn't (as well as a training academy for child psychics, because World War II taught Japan to turn America into a profitable but destructive, radiation-breathing dinosaur mascot, and absolutely nothing else, right‽), and a grieving scientist (Kōji Takahashi, Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis) gives into his grief and creates an immortal plant-kinda-saurus kaiju from the combination of gojirasaur cells, the anti-nuclear bacteria, and a rose that he crossbred with his dead daughter's (Yasuko Sawaguchi, Return Of Godzilla) genes and soul...without alien assistance! If you're asking yourselves why that sounds so much like Terror Of Mechagodzilla, and realizing why I mentioned that quote at the beginning of the review, here's a cookie and hold my beer, because that's not the only Shōwa film this movie repeats the mistakes of, and Godzilla vs Biollante even repeats Return Of Godzilla!

While the rich are fretting about the stolen bacteria and gojirasaur cells that they weren't able to steal first (so they can solve a hunger crisis by growing Colour Out Of Space weeds in the desert because Son Of Godzilla didn't happen in this continuity to serve as a cautionary tale against the perils of kaiju-sized GMO produce), the spies and ecoterrorists (who speak English with thick stereotype accents that are almost impossible to understand) are chasing and killing each other (the coolest of whom is a Saradian assassin, played by Manjot Beoi, who is the source and recipient of many important and entertaining WTF moments in the plot) and blowing up laboratories and volcanoes (so the terrorists are basically responsible for both of the titular monsters being in this movie because they killed Erika Kirishima and freed Godzilla five years apart), and the JSDF are building space-age weaponry, using psychic child soldiers (including a young woman named Miki—played by Megumi Odaka—who is probably the only character in the franchise to appear in more than three films and not be recast) as a kaiju warning system and radar (because no one thinks psychic contact with kaiju is bullshit in this continuity, thank Godzilla), being as impractical and bad at science as ever (they attempt to infect a kaiju lizard—a cold-blooded animal —with bacteria—which only thrive in warm bodies—then cloud-seed a microwave storm to heat him up—again, because Son Of Godzilla didn't happen in this continuity to show them that artificial radiation storms make much bad and attacking Godzilla's nuclear metabolism worked so well in the last movie, and all they manage to do is evolve Biollante into a stronger form, the morons),....

I forgot what point I was getting to with this insane run-on of a rant, but the human plots are needlessly convoluted and derivative, the military (aside from the badass Colonel Gondo, played by Takahashi's Last Megalopolis co-star, Tōru Minegishi) is almost incompetent beyond enjoyment, and the scientist characters are too far up their own asses (deep enough to gaze at their navels from the inside, you might say) to contribute anything but speculation and philosophical platitudes (and the odd genetic nightmare creature) until the movie is almost over. As for the kaiju component, Biollante is probably my new favorite monster design in both her elegant, giant rose form and her final carnivorous plant form, because she ticks my phobia boxes while also being an ambitious practical effect and having a bizarre but tragic backstory. But because Biollante is a plant, there also isn't much to the fight choreography, leaving the dramatic, wet atmosphere and spoon-fed bioscience subtext to do the heavy lifting. Godzilla struggles against her vines for a bit before incinerating her rose form in one shot (literally one take, because there was no backup model), then we're just waiting around for entirely too long while an expensive waste of time and resources on both sides of the screen not only fails to kill Godzilla (and the JSDF are just so surprised it didn't work), but revives and evolves Biollante in a stronger form, at which point the choreography is the same except that Biollante learned Stun Spore, Bite, and Solar Beam when it evolved. Again, the scale of the practical effects and the cinematography really sold the...fight?...and made it feel epic.

But Godzilla vs Biollante didn't consistently engage me until the end when the humans either learned their lesson about playing God or were killed hilariously for being greedy, homicidal terrorists. And the simple subtitles on my version end with two of the main characters (I honestly couldn't tell you their roles in the movie besides "other scientist, who gets an action scene because Kirishima got fridged by the Saradian assassin" and "least important third girl character") offering each other to sleep together as they drive off.

There's so much else I could pick apart, like the JSDF getting this knockoff John Williams Superman theme in between Ifukube's Godzilla intro and military march needle drops, or how Godzilla and Biollante just stop fighting because the movie's almost over (granted, their body language and the tragic, human-focused stinger that follows really add to the finale, but anticlimaxes will anticlimax anyway), or the Looney Tunes sound effects that compromise the tone a few times, or Kirishima's line about Biollante being named for a plant goddess in Norse mythology (so she should have been named Ygdorah or Mameidrah or Vattirah or Huldrah or something, because Biollante was made up for the film).

But I've done enough long-winded rambling and I'm still drafting this up the afternoon of publication, so I'll just say that Godzilla vs Biollante could have been shorter, it could have been tighter, and it could have been more sensible, but it could not have been more frightening, epic, or thought-provoking.

B

Next week, more Grimm Universe, and Godzilla faces King Ghidorah...again! So Stay Tuned for that 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 to give money to me instead of greedy dictators, and follow me on BlueSky, Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my content.

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Ticketmaster,

Out.