• Directed by Takaoa Okawara
• Written by Wataru Mimura
• Starring
  • Megumi Odaka
  • Masahiro Takashima
  • Ryoko Sano
  • Kenpachiro Satsuma

My apologies. I had meant to review the remainder of the ’90s Godzilla films before the opening of Godzilla 2000, but the Blockbuster special order took weeks longer than it should have. (And before anyone starts slamming me for deals with the devil, back off! I used a $50 Blockbuster gift card that I got for switching long distance to MCI — and since I don’t make enough long distance calls for them ever to make back their investment, I file this one under “sticking it to the man.”)

The “2″ in the videobox title was added, supposedly, to prevent incautious browsers from mistaking this movie for the original, made in 1974 (and released stateside in 1977). Hah! Like that could happen! I mean, the ’70s version was a goofy-ass movie with ridiculous monsters bouncing each other around the landscape and a plot with more holes than cheesecloth, while the remake…

Hmm…

I’m actually starting to believe that there’s a relationship between the number of kaiju in a given film, and said film’s plot’s coherence. Consider: Godzilla vs. King Ghidora? Two monsters. Coherent plot (played hell with internal continuity, but still made a tweaked kind of sense). Godzilla and Mothra: The Battle for Earth? Three monsters. Kinda slack; too New-Agey, and the Big G seems shoehorned into his own movie.

Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla 2? Well, we’ve got Godzilla, Baby Godzilla, Rodan, and Mechagodzilla (plus another mechanized G-fighter, code-named Garuda, which effectively becomes Mechagodzilla’s overburner). And a storyline to make the angels weep.

First up, we’ve got Kasuma Aoki, slightly nerdy scientist who will, by cultural tradition, be the closest thing to a heroic lead. Formerly a worker on the completed Garuda project, he gets dumped unceremoniously as the new Mechagodzilla (based on technology reverse-engineered from the severed Mecha-King Ghidora head from the finale of Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah) renders it obsolete. He is instead transferred to “G Force,” a label which caused me no end of giggles throughout the running time.

Apparently, G Force models its training on that in Spies Like Us, because Aoki manages to screw up at every endeavor — hand-to-hand combat, booklearning, simulations, gyroscopic thingies — and presto! he’s selected as one of the four-man pilot team for Mechagodzilla. Or rather, four-person team. One of them’s a woman. And a white woman, at that — since G Force is apparently run with the cooperation of the UN, a token international presence is called for. Aside from another couple of white girls in Aoki’s martial arts class, the only other gaijin is a silver-bearded scientist who pontificates so poorly that one supposes his two acting qualifications were a) his ethnicity and b) the fact that his beard came pre-trimmed. (Though his name is never mentioned, the credits list him as “Dr. Asimov”; I wonder if the real Dr. Asimov would have considered that a compliment.)

Wait! We forgot one thing that came up in Aoki’s initial interview with his G Force superior — the fact that he’s a pterosaur enthusiast.

Gee, you don’t suppose that will come up later, do you?

Meanwhile, on yet another of the little islands that dot the ocean around Japan, a paleantological team is exitedly showing their find to Professor Omae (hee hee hee — you have to speak Japanese to think it’s funny) and his assistant Azusa. (Side note here: While the dubbing is generally good, a little bit of coaching would have helped immensely. Sometimes her name was said “Azusa,” sometimes “Asuza” (a name I never did hear in Japan), and sometimes the difference was split with “Azuza,” which is just plain comical. More on mispronounced names in a moment.)

The find is a couple of huge eggs, buried until the team dug them up. Or at least, it used to be two eggs — in the time it took them to bring in the Professor’s expert opinion, one of the eggs has mysteriously cracked open, and there’s nothing inside. Hmm.

It isn’t until that night that the former occupant of said egg shows up, though you couldn’t convince me it had until recently fit inside: It’s a giant pterosaur, with the lamentable disability of being unable to draw its wings back; it also has a head so puppet-like in the closeups that you expect it to look jauntily into the camera and announce, “Heigh-ho, this is Kermit the Pterosaur here…” But no! It’s none other than — Rah-don!

That’s right, Rah-don. Not Rodan. At least, no one ever pronounces it Rodan. It’s always Rah-don. “Look, Rah-don’s coming!” “Watch out for Rah-don!” Given how annoying I find it when others consistently mispronounce my name, is it any wonder that Rodan’s in a pissy mood?

Naturally, if there’s one kaiju on the scene, there must be another, and thus our star enters stage left; Godzilla waddles out of the ocean and pitches a fit against Rodan, while the paleantological team tries to stay out of the way and speculates about the pterosaur’s unusual size. (Oh, that’s explained away easily enough — it’s the radiation. This whole island was a dumping ground for nuclear waste, you know. Oh, you didn’t, Professor? Gee, sorry — I guess you would have wanted to take precautions or something. Hope you’re done having kids and all that.)

Godzilla wins, thanks to a rare demonstration of his opposable thumb, and, you know, wanders off. The scientists trundle the remaining egg off to the lab, leaving the pterosaur “carcass” where it lies. (No one says, “Hmm — maybe we’d best cart this old hulk of to the lab too, maybe to study it.” I guess anachronistic reptiles are a dime a dozen in Japan.) The egg soon develops an affinity for Azusa, glowing red in agitation whenever she leaves it. That’s right, it’s the amazing Mood Egg!^TM

Kazuma of course catches all of this in a news item, and gives himself a couple of days of vacation to travel to Kyoto and see it himself. He wanders into the unprotected lab, takes some pictures, makes a couple of geeky passes at Azusa, and filches one of the plant samples that Azusa had been working on; the plants had been fossilized to the exterior of the shell.

Okay, now hang on. I’ve tried and tried to understand this next bit, and it still eludes me, so I’d appreciate any light anyone can shed on the subject:

Aoki goes back to G Force headquarters, where who should sit next to him in the cafeteria but jug-eared Miki the psychic girl, recurring character in the revisionist Godzilla series. (The other two Stooges are nowhere in evidence, and to be frank, I didn’t miss them.) When he shows her the plant sample, she senses something from it. To find out more, she takes him over to the kindergarten of the ESP Institute, where psychic children enjoy sitting around in pyramids. (No, really, try it sometime.) The Psychic Kids Network forms a ring around the little ziplocked plant sample, and apparently sense some kind of music coming from the plant; the input it into a computer and output it to cassette. Aoki takes the cassette back down to the lab in Kyoto, and plays it for the Professor; a couple of floors below, under Azusa’s watchful eye, the egg becomes increasingly agitated, until finally, it hatches — revealing, not another pterosaur, but a baby Godzillasaur, about the size of, say, a man in a suit!

(Look back over that last paragraph and tell me if it doesn’t have a higher hunh?-per-minute ratio than anything since the success of Mr. Belvedere.)

Now, I’ve heard a lot of screaming lately about how Godzilla 2000 plays havoc with Godzilla continuity. But brother, it’s not as if the seemingly contiguous series didn’t have massive problems. One of them is right here: The Baby Godzillasaurus a) exhibits many physical characteristics of our modern Godzilla, features which were not nearly so pronounced on the original, pre-irradiated Godzillasaur in Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah (the spinal plates are the most obvious), and b) is immediately declared an herbivore — presumably because nothing so cutesy could be a nasty meateater, despite being so obviously a morphological carnivore. Now, one might posit that the post-radiation features on the baby Godzillasaur are a consequence of the radiation it was exposed to while in the egg on the island — but if that same radiation is what turned another otherwise peaceful Godzillasaur into the ferocious Godzilla, then I’d be a little more careful with my fingers as I’m feeding lettuce leaves to the little critter, podnah.

So. Enough of the slow stuff, it’s time for Godzilla to hit Kyoto. As per standard operating procedure, he finds some real estate along the shoreline occupied by a refinery, so that he can produce large explosions from his first step.

It’s launch time for Mechagodzilla (minus Aoki, since he’s still AWOL at the lab), and, to make a long story short, Godzilla kicks his ass, and continues on his quest. What could he be looking for? In all this city, what could Godzilla be seeking?

Duh.

Azusa and friends drag the Baby Godzilla into the concrete-lined basement of the lab so that Godzilla can’t hear him, and eventually Godzilla goes away.

Afterward, scientists actually manage to find an exploitable weakness in Godzilla. It seems that, like many dinosaurs, Godzilla has a second “brain” or nerve node at hip level. If, the generals deduce, we can sever the connection between the two brains, Godzilla will be helpless.

Yeah, and if we could blind him with a slingshot we could make him run around in circles, and if we sliced him really thin we could put him on our sandwiches, and if we could teach him to dance we could charge admission. Sheesh. (This is aside from the overly-pedantic objection that such secondary brains are only found in quadrupedal dinosaurs with walnut-sized brains, such as the stegosaur.)

Meanwhile, Miki brings her Little Psychic Friends to visit Baby Godzilla. (Get ready for another high hunh?-ratio.) Being cutesy little girls, they’ve prepared a song for Baby G, which just happens to be that same plant-generated tune. Baby G gets agitated again — and at that moment, waaaay over on the island, Rodan opens its eyes.

Huh? I’m sorry, but — excuse me? I get the idea of the connection between both Godzilla and Baby G (same species) and Baby G and Rodan (buried next to each other for epochs, they developed some kind of psychic bond) — but how in the hell did a singing plant get into things here? Couldn’t they come up with something even a little bit more rational? The whole idea is so far-fetched that I’m wondering if the English translator was playing a What’s Up, Tiger Lily? on us.

Anyway. Baby G is to be used as bait (over Azusa’s objections) to get Godzilla to yet another remote island, on which Mechagodzilla (now reinforced with Garuda and eleven othe essential vitamins and minerals) would be able to take aim at Godzilla’s spine — in military parlance, Operation G-Crusher. But as a helicopter is hauling the transport crate with Baby G and Azusa aboard, Rodan comes swooping out of the sky and snatches it, taking it back to Kyoto for no discernable reason. Godzilla, Garuda and Mechagodzilla converge there, and the fight gets going.

Not to ruin it all for you, I’ll just point out that you already know that Godzilla and Baby G show up in the next movie. After asserting reptilian supremacy, the G’s are sent away by Miki’s psychic power, as she somehow conveys to Godzilla the idea that he should take Baby G with him instead of leaving it here. (Because that’s just what Japan needs, right? Another generation of giant lizards stomping its urban areas flat. Come on, Miki, as long as you’re giving directions, why not something like, “I hear North Korea’s beautiful this time of year”?)

The end.

I think I’ve managed to cover all of my gripes interlinearly, but it still flabbergasts me. I mean, you can’t just luck into a plot devices as lame as “psychically-singing fossil plants” — you’ve got to put mucho brainpower behind digging so deep.

In this movie’s favor, though, I must remark on Akira Ifukube’s remarkable score. He takes his original theme music from almost forty years before and teases us with slight echoes of it all through to the point that I wanted to call it “Variations on a Theme by Ifukube”. By the time the original theme is finally belted out in the final confrontation, its the culmination of a remarkable build in musical anticipation.

Hey, it’s not much, but it’s something.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 0 (I mean, there probably were — there were fighter jets and tanks blown up just like normal, plus Kyoto is a city without a well-practiced Godzilla evacuation tradition — but we didn’t see any of it)
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 89
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0