After an obviously tacked-on bit of pre-credit narration, explaining the movie’s plot, D-War launches us onto the most audaciously stupid journey I’ve seen in a long time, beginning with the most audaciously stupid directorial decision of (most likely) all time: a triple flashback…explaining the movie’s plot. Again.
Ordinarily, I’d assume a poor test-screening panicked D-War‘s producers into this last minute front-loading, a glut of action scene-driven exposition hot off the Lord of the Rings press. But the vagaries of D-War offer a much simpler, and much dumber, explanation for this film’s hit-the-audience-in-the-face-with-bricks approach. Someone, somewhere, must’ve honestly thought that starting off with a triple flashback worked. Somehow, it made the film better. Marvel with me, for a moment, at such rampant idiocy, and never again ask yourself why movies often suck. {More}
What do you do when you’re fired from a crappy movie? If you’re Larry Cohen, circa 1982, you get right back on the horse, call up Samuel Arkoff, raise a cool million, and go make another one. Why waste a good hotel stay in New York? I can think of few things I’d rather do to that damn town than terrorize it with a giant monster, a proclivity Cohen seems to share. He apparently looked up at the Chrysler Building one day and said, “You know…that’d be a great place to build a nest”…a comment eerily evocative of Charles Joseph Whitman‘s first reaction to the University of Texas clock tower.
Thus, Q, which opens high above the canyons of Manhattan. A window washer outside the fortieth floor of the Empire State Building looses his head to unseen forces. Detective Shepherd (David “Kwai Chang Caine” Carradine) is on the case. His Token Black Partner, Powell (Richard “Shaft” Roundtree) discovers a skinned corpse in a hotel room. And, in the Obligatory Tit Shot, a topless Park Avenue sunbather gets snatched off her own roof by a shrieking, winged shape that dives out of the sun. Blood rains down on Central Park as shoppers and old ladies look the sky, aghast, no doubt wondering, if the Apocalypse is imminent, why they haven’t been Raptured up to Heaven yet? (God must know about that time you masturbated to Johnny Carson’s opening monologue, sweetheart.) {More}
In the far flung future of…for all intents and purposes, 1967…the Fuji Astronautical Flight Center, Japan’s answer to Cape Canaveral, prepares a sixth manned mission to Mars. The previous five met mysterious ends at the hands of equally-mysterious UFOs supposedly camped out in interplanetary space. “Your job,” a FAFC flunky tells the doomed sixth crew of gullible space monkeys, “is to determine what’s stopping us from reaching Mars.”
In the great tradition of Japanese sci-fi films from the sixties, the crew of the “nuclear powered ship” AB Gamma will fail miserably in this. However, by the time you reach the end of the film, you’ll have forgotten all about the UFO and the five crews of astronauts it allegedly obliterated. Rest assured the movie itself will have long since left such considerations dead in its wake. The X From Outer Space is a film obviously desperate to cash in on the daikaiju genre’s Silver Age, well underway at the time of its production. As the evil android, Ash, from Alien, said to his crew: “All other priorities are rescinded.” {More}
I feel remiss letting the one big budget, theatrically released daikaiju movie of 2008 pass by without comment. I have no illusions about the utility of these comments, however. Every fan on the Internet has already seen the film and come down fo’ it or again’ it. Instead, I plan to cut a path straight through the ambivalent center. My hope is this vantage point with throw Cloverfield‘s good and bad sides into stark relief allowing us to have fun. This is, after all, supposed to be entertainment. Not the Second Coming of Godzilla. Not the Third Coming of the Blair Witch (God help us if it is). Cloverfield is neither of those things, in spite (or perhaps because) of the fact that it was probably sold as such.
“Probably,” hell. This is one of those movies where you can almost hear the producer making his pitch over the first reel, no commentary track required: “Okay…it’s Godzilla meets The Blair Witch Project…with creepy bugs thrown in for good measure. And I’ll do it all for under twenty-five million. I’m telling you, we can’t lose.” Unlike the film’s characters. {More}
In 1966 chaos and upheaval swept the world. A year after the Gulf of Tonkin “incident”, the United States of America was already well on its way to dropping its first million tons of bombs on Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, despite a recession at home. The Soviet Union found itself smack in the middle of what’s now called the Brezhnev Stagnation, with social and political reform firmly placed back on the shelf marked “Bourgeoisie Pipe Dreams.” Between the two powers, Japan soldiered on, dreaming of its monsters.
In spite of the impression these movies give us here in the twenty-first century (more on this later) Japan’s scars were, at the time, still visible in hospitals across the country…nowhere more so than in the city of Hiroshima. {More}
Too much rich food is bad for the diet. Too much speed is bad for the mind. Too many modern, high-fructose, Hollywood movies are bad for the movie reviewer. They encourage him to think, to wonder, just what the hell am I doing this for? That line of thought rolls right down a slippery slope, and we all know what else rolls downhill beside it.
So every once in awhile it’s good to reach back–way back for me; within living memory for most of you who walked the earth in 1975, that year of Jaws and Gerry Ford. The year director Bill Rebane (the man who brought you Monster A Go-Go) scrimped, slaved, and eventually made The Giant Spider Invasion…for $250,000. {More}
Where others formed their love of movies in the dank bowls of old theaters with important sounding names, I, your humble narrator, was a mite deprived in this regard. My obsession with this movie formed at an early age in the dank bowls of a crackerjack video rental store in a small Missouri town with a decided lack of apostrophes in its name, typical of the local dialect.
What a place it was to my five-year-old self. For him (me) a trip to Movies N More was a consistent birthday gift, a Christmas morning and a church visit all rolled into one. The stacks towered over my vertically-challenged self, but I could always ask my parents, or the nice man behind the counter, to stretch out and nab that copy of the Transformers movie for me. {More}
Forget for a moment that the original Kong was a blatantly racist polemic masquerading as a pulp fantasy-adventure yarn. Forget that no one is willing to even countenance this contention, much less discuss it in a calm, rational manner (perhaps during a double feature: Kong and 1915’s Birth of a Nation). Forget that no one, anywhere, appears willing to question this movie’s informed superiority. Why criticize when you can parrot over seventy years of generalized praise? Hell, its a classic, right? Must be: it came out before 1970.
“The classic film will always be the classic film,” said director Peter Jackson in a recent magazine interview (citation lost thanks to sleep deprivation). He might’ve added, “After all, it’s a classic!” just to drive the stake right through the heart of his point. The slavish worship Kong inspires in its fans honestly sickens me sometimes. (I’m sure this is how Star Wars and Trek partisans feel about each other.) Because what is Kong, really? Its story, constructed of reliable pulp staples, is hardly revolutionary. Hell, it’s the kind of tale chain smoking writers of the age turned out in their sleep…or their alcohol induced comas. The down-on-her-luck damsel gets a one-in-a-life-time chance to go to an uncharted island and become a monkey’s plaything…or a dinosaur’s bite-sized snack. The damsel, once distressed, needs the quick thinking of a square jawed man to save her bloomer-wearing ass. He does, the movie ends. {More}
Gamera vs. Barugon is the high point of the original Gamera franchise. After the (relative) success of Daikaiju Gamera, the far-sighted and responsible men of Daiei Studios could have carried on, as their fellows at Toho have for years, mining the tried and true formulas of the giant monster genre to wildly varied, but none-the-less consistent, success.
But the times were, sadly, a’ changing. Those who pine that American cinema is slave to every idiotic trend that comes down the pike obviously haven’t watched enough Japanese monster movies. They provide quite the handy cultural history of Japan, and can be enjoyable on that level even if one has no interest in giant monsters (narrow minded philistine that you are). {More}
Godzilla X Mechagodzilla, following the current vogue, takes place in yet another freakish alternate reality, as distant from all previous Godzilla films as they are to us. In this wacky parallel dimension, Godzilla first appeared in 1954, “raided” Tokyo, and fell to Dr. Serazawa’s Oxygen Destroyer the very next day. The year 1999 marks his second appearance in this history, and the film’s opening sequence.
Akane Yashiro (Yumiko Shaku) is just another groundpounder in the JDSF. Oh sure, she fights monsters with a laser tank for a living, but what’s that to an intelligent, independent, young Japanese woman on the make? Besides, she’s a member of the Anti-Megalosaurus Force, an elite unit created specifically to counter the continuing threat Giant Monster pose to Japan. As such, the AMF rushes to counter Godzilla’s latest insurgency. Three guesses who the winner is. In the confusion of battle, Akane accidentally gets herself and a truck load of her superiors into a road accident. Akane survives. Her colleagues go over a cliff and under Godzilla’s foot. Akane even gets to watch because God himself knows we can’t have a strong female protagonist in a Japanese film who isn’t suffering from some kind of trauma or another (unless she’s looking for a Just the Right Man to turn her into a giggling, pre-adolescent puddle, torn screaming from the depraved psyche of a deranged, Asian-obsessed pedophile…the type of guy who keeps Oriental Women magazine in business).
As the political establishment wets itself over Godzilla’s re-appearance, Akane is re-assigned in the wake of her little…incident. We leave her in the Data Room (the JDSF equivalent of Agent Mulder’s basement office) and quickly switch to our other (male) protagonists: Tokumitsu Yuhara (Shin Takuma), who will be our Scientist for the remainder of the film, by virtue of the fact he’s designated one of “Japan’s greatest scientific minds.” So says Science Minister Hayato Igarashi (Akira Nakao). And he should know because our Science Minister has an absolutely brilliant idea: use the assembled brain power of Japan to build a “bio-robot” in the image of Godzilla…using the bones of the first Godzilla (picked clean by the Oxygen Destroyer) as a base…and a support structure. “It’ll be a powerful weapon against Godzilla,” he says. Like a politician’s never uttered those words before…
If history teaches us anything, it should teach us this: Given half the chance, leaders will always use National Crises as an excuse for massive build-ups of arms. Japan’s leaders are no different. Once again, violent solutions are the only solutions considered. After all, this is a movie, film is a visual medium, and you try to think of something as visually striking as the sight of a giant robot fighting a giant monster in the heart of a major metropolis. If you’re anything like me, you’ll have to think on that a bit. So don’t get me wrong. I understand the need for a Mechagodzilla. He (or it) is one of my favorite re-occurring Godzilla antagonists. But I have some problems with his (or its) choice of films.
For one thing, they’re exceedingly narrow-minded…almost myopic. Certainly their sense of scope is small…ironically so, considering the film nominally centers around a three hundred foot lizard. I mean, let’s pretend for a moment. You’re the President of China. You turn on CNN one day and find out Japan is building a giant frickin’ robot right next door. To “defend” themselves, they say. Yeah, right. What exactly do you do? That could be a movie in itself…and it’ll have to be, because this movie sure as hell isn’t going to address the question (or even mention it). How do you think Kim Jong Il would take the news of a Mechagodzilla next door? Or our own Glorious Leader, over here in the United States?
I mention this only because Godzilla X Mecha-Godzilla takes care to add a political element to it’s story, apart from (but interacting with…occasionally and only tangentially) all the sordid, giant-monster-soap-opera turmoil our two protagonists go through. Yet the political peanut gallery never admits anyone outside the Japanese government to their (exceptionally polite, even by parliamentary standards) shouting matches. Budget consciousness and time play a majority part in this, I know…but there’s no denying the nationalistic nearsightedness. In fact, now that I think about it, nearly every giant monster picture suffers from some form of this malady. As if the appearance of a 300-foot, fire breathing, nuclear powered dinosaur didn’t have world wide implications. Past Toho pictures at least paid lip-service to this by casting a Token Anglo or three, almost all of whom generated unintended comedy gold thanks to their unprofessional acting and dead (not “deadpan,” just “dead”) line-reading abilities.
But anyway…three years pass and the “new” Mechagodzilla (named Kiryu…for no other apparent reason than to distinguish him from his predecessors) stands ready. Following bad movie law, Akane is inexplicably drafted to join the team set to pilot Kiryu. Why else would we have invested so much time (a full five minutes at this, the twenty minute mark) in her story? Even the casual movie goer knows Akane is destined to pilot Kiryu, in the same way domestic pets know when an earthquake is about to strike. The same way I (the jaded, cynical movie reviewing snit that I am) know her relationship with Yahara (and Yahara’s perky daughter, Sara, who will be our Kenny for the remainder of the picture) will teach her some lesson or another….probably have something to do with being isolated and letting the past haunt you or some damn thing.
Sure enough, Akane and Yahara cross paths before the first major action set piece. Seems one of Akane’s team mates–a little weasel name Hayama–just happened to have a brother in that truck that wound up under Godzilla’s foot. He interrupts Yahara’s comically inept attempt to pick Akane up by playing Iceman to Akane’s Maverick. She, being all stoic and bad-ass, sets him right…and then winds up in a heart-to-heart with Yahara and Sara about…how isolated she is…zzzzzz…
Thus the fundamental flaw of modern Godzilla movies is once again slapped, broadside, across my face. No matter how remarkable (or unremarkable) their special effects, or how broad their story-scope, they remain depressingly predictable. They move from A to B to C with all the energy of a single thirty-something’s morning routine. I’m moved to feel almost cheated by this kind of rampant story-telling laziness. And once again pitch a bitch about those damned studio suits with their insistence on churning these films out, every year, as if they’re stamping parts for a Toyota factory. Even the smallest moral, ethical, social, or political implications of building a giant robot from the bones of a nuclear monster (like, say, the potential collateral damage) are left unconsidered, which is sadly ironic in the face of what develops…
Because the God of the Godzilla-verse has a wonderful sense of timing, Godzilla interrupts Kiryu’s first manned flight-test. The Big G comes ashore, trounces an unfortunate water park, roars at the descending Mechagodzilla…and then leaves his mechanical doppleganger to go mad, Evangellion-style, and ravage the cityscape. I guess the G-man’s roar meant, “Sorry, bud. Didn’t know this bit was already taken. Tell you what: go on ahead with…whatever you were doing…I’ll try the next town down the coast. Sure they’ve got some scenic landmark or another I can smash.”
At last, I think. Something new…or, at the very least, different. Tales of man constructing his own demise in moments of psychotic hubris were ancient when Mary Shelley was still a virgin. But what do you do when your Frankenstein is three hundred feet tall and armed with all manner of missiles, laser beams, and a freeze ray (or “Absolute-Zero Gun”) so large it would send Captain Cold into orgasmic paroxysms?
The humans of this particular story decide to do nothing, evacuating the populous in Kiryu’s path (typhoon style) and wait until the robot literally runs out of juice…what the hell, everybody knows the construction industry is to Japan what Big Oil is to the United States, right? What’s a few independent contracts to pass around between friends…
Pop quiz: Will our director Masaaki Tezuka (director of 2000’s Godzilla vs. Megaguirus)and screenwriter Wataru Mimura (writer of the above, along with Godzilla: 2000, Yamato Takeru and 1993’s Godzilla vs. Mecha-Godzilla) exploit the dramatic potential implicit in the above “What do you do when your Frankenstein…” query? Or will they instead chose a quick fix solution that destroys all the tension and build-up they’ve established up to this point, in favor of staging an epic, climactic daikaiju big battle in Tokyo…at night?
What are the chances of that happening, right? It’s only the common denominator of the whole fucking franchise. And nobody knows common denominators like Tezuka and Mimura. These two dingbats may be near blind to the possibility of a giant monster tale (must’ve boycotted Gamera out of patron loyalty), but by God they know how to hit all the high notes and stick to the All-Mighty Release Schedule. Godzilla, and we, his fans, are that much worse off for it, since no one at Toho seems to have courage enough to dream up an original or creative thought.
And that’s the way it is. Human acting is serviceable all around…but in the final summation, I really could care less. I know the Love of a Good Man is going to draw Akane out of her Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder-induced shell and coax her toward heteronormativity the same way I know Godzilla’s going to sink back into the sea just before the credits roll…and, like any good comic book villain, they’ll be no body to discover, no postmortem to write up, and plenty of room left for the inevitable sequel…a direct one this time. Starring Mothra. God help us all.
I’ll get to that eventually, but in the meantime I wonder if Toho’s setting up some sort of Crisis on Infinite Earth‘s senario with all these wacky, parallel dimensions appearing and disappearing at will? Will the battle-hardened, Kenny-laden heroes of the Godzilla Multiverse be joining forces against some giant, rubber suited version of the Anti-Monitor at some time in the Not Too Distant Future? Have I finally succumb to sleep deprivation? Or am I merely deprived of honest-to-God good Godzilla films?
After an obviously tacked-on bit of pre-credit narration, explaining the movie’s plot, D-War launches us onto the most audaciously stupid journey I’ve seen in a long time, beginning with the most audaciously stupid directorial decision of (most likely) all time: a triple flashback…explaining the movie’s plot. Again.
In the far flung future of…for all intents and purposes, 1967…the Fuji Astronautical Flight Center, Japan’s answer to Cape Canaveral, prepares a sixth manned mission to Mars. The previous five met mysterious ends at the hands of equally-mysterious UFOs supposedly camped out in interplanetary space. “Your job,” a FAFC flunky tells the doomed sixth crew of gullible space monkeys, “is to determine what’s stopping us from reaching Mars.”
I feel remiss letting the one big budget, theatrically released daikaiju movie of 2008 pass by without comment. I have no illusions about the utility of these comments, however. Every fan on the Internet has already seen the film and come down fo’ it or again’ it. Instead, I plan to cut a path straight through the ambivalent center. My hope is this vantage point with throw Cloverfield‘s good and bad sides into stark relief allowing us to have fun. This is, after all, supposed to be entertainment. Not the Second Coming of Godzilla. Not the Third Coming of the Blair Witch (God help us if it is). Cloverfield is neither of those things, in spite (or perhaps because) of the fact that it was probably sold as such.
In 1966 chaos and upheaval swept the world. A year after the Gulf of Tonkin “incident”, the United States of America was already well on its way to dropping its first million tons of bombs on Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, despite a recession at home. The Soviet Union found itself smack in the middle of what’s now called the Brezhnev Stagnation, with social and political reform firmly placed back on the shelf marked “Bourgeoisie Pipe Dreams.” Between the two powers, Japan soldiered on, dreaming of its monsters.
Too much rich food is bad for the diet. Too much speed is bad for the mind. Too many modern, high-fructose, Hollywood movies are bad for the movie reviewer. They encourage him to think, to wonder, just what the hell am I doing this for? That line of thought rolls right down a slippery slope, and we all know what else rolls downhill beside it.
Where others formed their love of movies in the dank bowls of old theaters with important sounding names, I, your humble narrator, was a mite deprived in this regard. My obsession with this movie formed at an early age in the dank bowls of a crackerjack video rental store in a small Missouri town with a decided lack of apostrophes in its name, typical of the local dialect.
I have issues with 
Gamera vs. Barugon is the high point of the original Gamera franchise. After the (relative) success of 
Let’s dispense with the introductions, shall we?
I’ll get to that eventually, but in the meantime I wonder if Toho’s setting up some sort of Crisis on Infinite Earth‘s senario with all these wacky, parallel dimensions appearing and disappearing at will? Will the battle-hardened, Kenny-laden heroes of the Godzilla Multiverse be joining forces against some giant, rubber suited version of the Anti-Monitor at some time in the Not Too Distant Future? Have I finally succumb to sleep deprivation? Or am I merely deprived of honest-to-God good Godzilla films?
