Three Angry Monsters

You might think a film series would run out of gas by the fifth installment. But sometimes that’s when it becomes clear what makes the formula of the franchise work. So it is with the Godzilla movies.

Specifically, the main problem with kaiju films is that, for pacing and budget reasons, there has to be a certain amount of time the kaiju aren’t onscreen. This means the story has to deal with boring humans, while the audience is watching because they want to be entertained by giant monsters. But with Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster director Ishiro Honda and writer Shinichi Sekizawa worked out a solution.

If the audience has come looking for genre-film thrills, give them genre. You can’t have Godzilla onscreen all the time, but you can come up with a story in a nearby genre and then have the kaiju stomp all over that story. Thus Ghidorah: Honda and Sekizawa concocted a science-fiction story with some espionage elements, and then enriched it with giant monsters.

Put it all together and there’s something a manic five-year-old would come up with if fed a full meal’s worth of pixy sticks, chocolate, and Coca-Cola. The plot goes something like this:

There’re UFO fans watching a sky with a reporter lady and there are falling stars and also there’s a princess visiting Japan and also there are rebels and they put a bomb on their plane and there’s a cop who’s gonna be her bodyguard but she gets a telepathic warning to jump off the plane and she falls in the ocean and also there’s a meteor that fell in the mountains and it’s a big magnet and then also there’s something happening on Mount Aso and Mothra’s priestesses are on TV and the priestess turns up and she’s a prophet and she says Rodan’s gonna wake up at Mount Aso and he does and the princess’s kingdom sends more assassins and she says a ship shouldn’t go out to sea and it does anyways and it runs into Godzilla! And the assassins try to kill the princess and Godzilla fights Rodan who’s a big Pteranodon and the priestess says she’s the mind of an alien from Venus who took over the princess and Venus was all destroyed 5000 years ago and it was destroyed by a monster who’s in the magnet-meteor and the meteor cracks open and it’s King Ghidorah! Who’s like a three-headed dragon! And the humans can’t stop him but they ask Mothra for help and Mothra says she can’t stop him either but maybe with also Godzilla and also Rodan and then together they can stop Ghidorah!

There’s a lot going on here.

The acting’s effective enough, especially Akiko Wakabayashi (previously in King Kong vs. Godzilla, later to play Aki in You Only Live Twice) as the princess possessed by an ancient Venusian. But the bigger draws are Eiji Tsuburaya’s special effects, and Haruo Nakajima’s performance as Godzilla. Masanori Shinohara is in the suit of Rodan and Shoichi Hirose takes on the surprisingly effective suit of King Ghidorah.

There’s no explanation for the weird coincidences of the plot, in which at least three different kaiju all appear at the same time. Nor is there an explanation for the weirdness mentioned in passing in the introductory segments of the film; you can only assume the encephalitis outbreak referred to once and then never again is some sort of sign of the  impending arrival of King Ghidorah. Why not?

It works because you don’t really have time to think about what’s happening. You don’t even notice that the movie takes its time getting to the arrival of the kaiju, because there’s always something going on: a meteor landing, the prophetess orating, humans desperately trying to figure out what’s going on.

The movie’s not only the fifth Godzilla movie and the third Mothra movie, but the second Rodan movie (after 1956’s Rodan). It might be that it was always going to be a mess, and a mess it is, but a glorious mess. There’s a euphoric sense of fun, along with that plot always going hell-bent-for-leather off in all directions.

The build to the arrival of the kaiju is effective tonally if not logically, and, crucially, the staging of the fights is effective in showing us what the monsters do and how they stack up to each other. You do believe that the three earthly kaiju are all needed to win the final fight against Ghidorah. So along with the headlong momentum, a zest for storytelling, and an engaging enthusiasm, there’s some kind of internal coherence.

There’s a fair argument that the kaiju are too human at one point, when they debate helping humanity against Ghidorah. And yet Godzilla and Rodan reluctant to fight the bad guy because humans try to bully them is weirdly relatable. People do suck. But, despite it all, they end up helping; a recurring theme for the series, in which kaiju end up fighting to defend a world that hates and fears them even when all logic says they should just let the tiny monkeys burn or be squashed.

Kids’ movies can take many forms. Some of the best are made with no pandering. There’s no sense here of adults patronizing a youthful audience, just of talented creators sitting back and letting go with a stem-winder of a tale. It’s the sort of kids’ movie that can appeal to adults at a simple but undeniable level, like a good superhero comic or pulp novel. It’s hard to ask for more than that.