Godzilla vs. Gigan

#11 in my ranking of the Showa Era Godzilla films.

Tomoyuki Tanaka brought back Jun Fukuda to the Godzilla franchise after the…interesting results from Yoshimitsu Banno on Godzilla vs. Hedorah, choosing to go a more traditional monster-mash route from the man who had made Ebirah and Son of Godzilla. There’s also a move away from more direct proselytizing about an issue-du-jour and inelegantly inserting messages about how everyone needs to be nice to each other. It’s more generically monster-movie stuff with the humans having some small effect on the plot as we wait for monsters to smashy-smash.

Gengo (Hiroshi Ishikawa) is a cartoonist looking for work, selling his incomplete comic book about a homework monster to appeal to kids. He’s having no luck even with the help of his friend and business manager Tomoko (Yuriko Hishimi). He gets a meeting with the director (Toshiaki Nishizawa) of Children’s Land, a new theme park for children with a monster and peace them and a central tower of Godzilla. The organization is run by a young man named Sudo (Zan Fujita) who can do advanced math while having a conversation. As Gengo leaves the office, having been hired to design a pair of monsters (it never comes to anything, which is a disappointment), the young woman Michiko (Tomoko Umeda) runs out of the building, dropping a reel of magnetic tape, chased by the director and some lackeys. Gengo picks up the tape and meets with her later, along with her friend Shosaku (Minoru Takashima), where he finds out that they have suspicions that the Children’s Land organization isn’t concerned with peace but subjugation.

It’s a fair amount of plot to deal with, but at least the film doesn’t completely forget about it once the monster action starts. Essentially, the director and the chairman are insects projecting images of human form over their bodies (there’s a small segment dedicated to investigating the people, finding out that they both died a year before), and they have a plan to bring space monsters to Earth to terraform it into a hellscape that they could thrive in. The young people mess up the plan by stealing the tape, the second in a series, and playing it which awakens Godzilla and Anguirus to the danger.

I think what holds me back from appreciating this entry of monster smashy-smash action is that the plotting on the human side while competent largely feels extraneous even within its own context. It mostly becomes about rescuing Michiko’s brother, Takashi (Kunio Murai), who is trapped at the Godzilla tower for reasons. The aliens supposedly need him for reasons, but they’re never explained and he never seems to do much work. I mean, the rescue attempt with a weather balloon and zipline is amusing, but it ends up feeling like a distraction to the monster action which is just wheeling up.

The aliens bring in King Ghidorah and the new monster, the eponymous Gigan, a metallic-looking creature with a buzzsaw vertically along his belly, but Godzilla and Anguirus have been called too early to put up a decent fight. The aliens control the two alien monsters and the fight goes against the two earthly monsters. This is where I begin to wax poetic about the monster action, but this is the first in a long while where I feel like the monsters are misused.

So, first of all, there’s this comic book approach to communication between our two hero monsters. They literally communicate with speech bubbles. Never mind that they are talking in a very human way (Anguirus says OK! A couple of times), but it diminishes them from monsters to something more human, an effect that I’ve resisted every time it comes up. The next thing is that the early parts of the monster madness are heavily lifted from previous films (to drive down production costs since these films were now being shot cheaply), namely Ghidorah’s debut in Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster. And then, when everything does come together for the big showdown, Ghidorah doesn’t have a lot to do and just kind of stands back while Godzilla and Anguirus take on Gigan themselves. It has this placid quality where it feels like things are just stopping when they should be fast, which is an interesting contrast to the previous extended fight in Godzilla vs. Hedorah which was just two monsters against each other, intentionally slow, and more compelling (even if a bit incoherent).

So, the monster stuff isn’t great, though it tries. The human stuff is okay but feels like as much a distraction as anything else. It’s not bad, but it has little to recommend it beyond some light entertainment that doesn’t quite come together as well as it should. It’s something of a return to the standard form for the Godzilla franchise, but you know what? The previous film, while not entirely successful, was at least interesting.

Rating: 2/4