Just the Ticket #222: Godzilla vs King Ghidorah
Article by Sean Wilkinson,
a.k.a. The Ticketmaster.
I said in my last Grimm Universe post that, as of Sunday, I had both read that issue and watched the movie for today's Goj-Year-ra review, and that's true. But it's also true that I've turned into a lazy, burnt-out procrastinator who couldn't think of a decent intro, so I'm once more cranking this post out on a Thursday afternoon.
In the less-distant-but-still-centuries-away future of 2204, a crew of explorers uncover the two-headed (but otherwise well-preserved) corpse of King Ghidorah at the bottom of the ocean, saying that Godzilla fought King Ghidorah at the end of the 20th century. Upon hearing this, my mind immediately went back to the curb-stomping that Shōwa Era Ghidorah received in Destroy All Monsters (which was set in 1999), and I assumed this film would use time travel to tie the two Era continuities together. But through poorly thought out time travel consequences, contrived conveniences, and nonsensical editing choices, we later learn that this is disappointingly not the case.
In the present-future of 1992, we are introduced to author Kenichiro Terasawa (Kōsuke Toyohara, who played the young Super-X II Operator in Godzilla vs Biollante and made me wonder why, aside from arcade and console gaming being primitive to nonexistent at the time, we never got a Godzilla shoot-'em-up where you play as the Super-X; that would have been awesome) and his editor/potential fiance (Kiwako Harada, who hasn't been in anything else I recognize because I'm not Japanese, but I bring her up because her character is basically only in the movie to establish her relationship to Kenichiro so we feel bad for her when she almost gets cucked for her great-great-granddaughter from the future).
For a basic idea of this movie's humor (aside from all the references to Back To the Future, Terminator 2, Alien, and the filmography of Major Steven Spielberg), its opening joke has our lead couple mentioning her tabloid's UFO expert Mr. Yaoi. Now, wikizilla credits actual UFO expert Junichi Yaoi as himself in the role, but as far as I could tell, he is only mentioned in the one line and never appears as a character in Godzilla vs King Ghidorah. You might be wondering why I thought this was so funny, so...manga readers out there might recognize "yaoi" as a genre tag for homosexual or homoerotic romantic content, also known as "boys' love" or "BL." But the term was originally attached to the genre in a derogatory context because it translates as something like "pointless," "meaningless," or "anticlimactic." So mentioning a character named Mr. Yaoi who ends up having no impact on the plot of the movie is brilliant and hilarious.
At the same time as a UFO (that is actually a time machine called MOTHER, because sci-fi technology called Mother can always be trusted, and TARDIS was already taken) makes its presence known in the skies over Japan, Kenichiro is thinking about pivoting away from sci-fi pulp and into writing a book about the history and biology of Godzilla, which leads him to interview WWII veteran Ikehata (Koichi Ueda, who has been in numerous Heisei and Millennium entries in the series), who claims to have been saved by a Godzillasaurus (Wataru Fukuda, Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla II) in 1944. We find out later that museum owner and businessman Yasuaki Shindo (Yoshio Tsuchiya in his last role in the franchise, following appearances in Destroy All Monsters, Son Of Godzilla, Godzilla Raids Again, and as the lead villain in Invasion Of Astro-Monster) was in Ikehata's unit, too, and his dinosaur-related path of "do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life" speaks to my inner child loud and clear, even as the movie turns the narrative irony of his later death into a "Tōru Iwatani in Pixels" moment.
Getting back to the Self-Identified Time-Traveling Object, it is the beginning of what many conservative bellyachers at the time (because unfortunately, the Trump era of America didn't invent the fear-grifting culture warrior mindset; it's just easier to spot now that public internet and social media exist) considered as signs of Godzilla vs King Ghidorah being nationalist propaganda: the villains are white people! Yeah, the Futurians (as they're called in the fandom and probably the English dub, which, I haven't watched a Japanese Godzilla movie dubbed, and I won't start now or later) are played by Chuck Wilson (Kaiju: Island Of Fire), Richard Berger, the Foncannon twins, and Robert Scott Field (the Ultra franchise and several Godzilla fan films), with Anna Nakagawa (Cure) playing the only Japanese member, who winds up as the main protagonist, gets hit on by a depressed Kenichiro (her great-great-grandfather), and outshines the only other Japanese heroine in this movie who's worth a damn (Megumi Odaka returning as psychic Godzilla expert Miki Saegusa).
Basically (or however time travel adverbs work), the story is a reboot of Ghidorah, Destroy All Monsters, and Invasion Of Astro-Monster, with the aliens not being aliens and the lie being that the not-aliens want to travel back to 1944 to teleport Godzillasaurus off of the fictional Lagos Island (not to be confused with the real cultural and commercial hub in Nigeria) so it doesn't get nuked into Godzilla and destroy Japan. But apparently their arrival in that time bootstraps them as the catalyst for the Japanese/American conflict on Lagos and inspires Spielberg to make E.T. (and possibly to adapt Jurassic Park, though my money's still on Tremors with the latter). This is another cited point of "evidence" for the "Japanese propaganda" controversy, as the Shindo's unit are saved from American troops by the 'zillasaur and later give it a full, onscreen military funeral. Personally, it hit me more like a reverence for the franchise itself, the same way "Gojira Love Theme" hit me at the end of Return Of Godzilla, and not as a strict statement of national pride. There's other stuff, like the movie framing the Economic Miracle and Japan's commercial might at the turn of the decade as negatives, that refutes the propaganda argument as well.
If you remember, Shōwa Era Ghidorah was a space kaiju that was possibly made or born on Planet X and sent to other worlds (like Venus and Earth) by the Controller to ravage them for their peroxide supplies, potentially resulting in the creation of Hedorah. Badass origin, right? Well, forget that because Heisei Era Ghidorah is a trio of cute, genetically engineered pets from the future whom the villains used their Japanese patsy to abandon on Lagos to be nuked together into one monster so they could use it to get revenge on Japan for conquering the world and colonize its wreckage without Godzilla there to oppose them. Except the other island the future Neo-Nazis sent Godzillasaurus to was also nuked because (according to what I heard about Godzilla: Singular Point in a Death Battle episode) Godzilla must always exist, and the humans' efforts to recreate him only make him more powerful and chungy, and he defeats King Ghidorah pretty easily after some uninteresting beam-struggle combat where they breathe at each other and Godzilla slams him around by the tail until he loses his middle head and I fall asleep.
Yeah, apparently, static beam struggles are going to be a thing going forward because boxing, boulder-tossing, and wrestling moves were too goofy. And another thing that will apparently be a boring annoyance going forward is the "Oh, no! We made a monster that we need Godzilla to stop for us, but now we can't stop Godzilla and Heisei Era movies need to be almost two hours long, so let's make the monster he defeated even stronger to stop him because circular logic makes sense" structure of the latter half of the movie.
Mecha Ghidorah looks pretty cool, and Nakagawa's character gets to be a badass piloting him against Godzilla at the end like he's a Power Loader, but its just more beam clashes until she breaks out the manacles and drops the big guy into the ocean to "die."
I was bored, I was disgusted, and I was confused and disappointed (if two of the same person can't exist in the same space-time at once, why not just send Godzilla to 1944 to make him and Godzillasaurus into a Timecop meme?). But I also appreciate when a movie can make me feel things besides aimless discomfort, and Godzilla vs King Ghidorah managed to make me laugh and cry in between the veiled incest, time travel nonsense, and uninteresting, torturously paced kaiju action.
If this trend continues next week, so will my trend of lowering my grades by the movie until I inevitably have to start inventing letters.
C-
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