aka Gojira tai Megagirasu: Jii Shoumetsu Sakusen

• Directed by Masaaki Tezuka
• Written by Hiroshi Kashiwabara and Wataru Mimura
• Starring
  • Misato Tanaka
  • Shosuke Tanihara
  • Masato Ibu
  • Yuriko Hoshi
  • Toshiyuki Nagashima

If you’re looking for theories explaining Godzilla’s longevity, here’s one to add to the list: He’s got the whole Hollywood “Reinvent yourself” thing down pat. John Travolta? Madonna? They’ve got nothing on the Big G, especially under the current Toho philosophy which reboots continuity as often as possible. Every movie now is a direct sequel to the 1954 original, which means that the characters are justified in making the same mistakes every time that the radioactive lizard decides to stomp on Japan — they literally have no history to learn from. The filmmakers themselves, alas, have no such excuse.

This time out, at least, they deal with the most consistent problem with Godzilla continuity, to wit: How does Japan (and Tokyo in particular) manage to rebuild itself completely in the year or two it takes for another movie to be cranked out? This time, the incredible devastation Tokyo suffered under the foot of Godzilla in his first rampage is dealt with; so completely was the city decimated that the Japanese capitol was moved to Osaka. (Further revisionism: Godzilla left alive, instead of being dissolved by the oxygen destroyer.) In this alternate timeline, Godzilla next attacked in 1966, attracted by Japan’s development of nuclear power. Putting two and two together, Japan called off the nukes, and instead concentrated on alternate energy sources.

“I wonder what these would go for on eBay.”

Until 1996. That’s the year Japan decides to push forward with the new plasma energy system. And sure enough, Godzilla comes a-calling. Bereft of the experience of the earlier movies, the Japanese military doesn’t even know to send out those little laser tanks that never did any good; instead, they send out a dozen soldiers with shoulder-mounted artillery. Yeah. That’ll work. Predictably, most of the team gets crunched; a notable exception is Tsujimori (Misato Tanaka), lone female of the team, who manages to salvage her commanding officer’s dogtags from the rubble and vows revenge.

Fast-forward to the year 2000 (last jump, I promise); Tsujimoto is now a member of the special anti-Godzilla task force: the 9G-Graspers. (A hundred billion yen on experimental weapons, and not enough to buy a competent Japanese-English dictionary.) She recruits Kudo (Shosuke Tanihara), a brilliant but unmotivated young engineer, to help with their plans. We first meet him as he performs magic curry rice tricks (it’s complicated) using some super-miniaturized robots he tinkered together, which is exactly why they need him: Because they’re going after Godzilla with an artificially-created black hole.

How’s that, again? Well, see, they’re going to create a black hole using plasma energy. (I’m sure that there are phase inverters and Heisenberg compensators involved in there somewhere, but they don’t get too technical.) They’ve got a big gun, and they’re going to launch it at Godzilla and suck him up. And they want Kudo to help them make the black hole small enough to use conveniently, since constructing miniature robots is practically the same skill as shrinking a space-time anomaly.

“I wonder how much this would go for on eBay.” (If it’s funny once, it’s funny ten thousand times!)

Well. Congratulations, we’ve just encountered science so bad it contradicts all of the praise heaped upon the Japanese educational system. I mean, you’ve got to go well out of your way to find a goofier notion — and that’s taking into account all of the previous schemes to get rid of Godzilla, which we know about and these characters don’t. First up, how exactly are they going to “construct” a black hole? Are they planning on finding the mass equivalent of 100 of our suns and pounding on it until it gets really really dense? Given the strength of such a gravitational pull, how are they planning on getting it close enough to Godzilla without sucking in the entire Earth, the moon, and perhaps a few of our nearest neighbors? (Yes, they do say they plan to do it all “without damaging the planet.” Oh, good. I thought they might have overlooked that.) And for heaven’s sake, why would they need help miniaturizing it? I mean, that’s the whole concept of a black hole: A body of mass so dense, thanks to its own gravity, that it folds in on itself. Couldn’t they try something a little more rational — like, you know, gluing a rocket to Godzilla’s back and firing him off toward the sun? Or giving him salmonella poisoning? Or matching him up with Abbott and Costello?

[Deep breath.] Okay, I’m better now. I realize, we are taking about a franchise that revolves around a huge, vaguely anthropomorphic radioactive iguana, but still…

So. It takes them three months (okay, this is REALLY the last time we’re jumping forward), but they do manage it. Gee, folks, sorry I doubted you. They arrange a test in a nice remote area, within walking distance of an apartment complex. Hey, why use a remote Pacific island when you can save on all that airfare? Sure, they set up a roadblock to secure the area, but their best (cough) efforts are no good against… a Kenny! All right, his name is actually Jun, and his shorts are of a respectable length, but he still manages to enter the restricted area by cleverly walking through the unguarded, unfenced woods. He witnesses the launch of the miniature black hole against a large abandoned building, and would you look at that! It sucks up the entire building, collapses in on itself, and conveniently disappears. Doesn’t even leave behind a gravitational sinkhole that threatens to suck in the planet. All it leaves behind is a persistent heat-shimmer in the air which the combined experts promptly identify as a wormhole. Don’t worry, though, it’s apparently harmless. I guess.

Jun gets himself discovered, but Tsujimoto lets him off without even really exacting a promise that he won’t tell his friends and family about the super-secret project he wandered into. And everyone packs up and leaves.

Dude. Seriously. The breath is bad enough, even without the radioactivity.

Leaving the wormhole behind, mind you. It’s still there when Jun, awakened in the night by something whizzing around in the air outside his bedroom window, goes for another stroll through the woods, and finds a weird silvery egg the size of a medicine ball. He does what any boy would do on finding such an object in a pool of slime near the site of an anti-Godzilla experiment: He packs it in a cardboard box for his impending move to Tokyo.

‘Course, once in Tokyo, he decides that having a slime-dripping souvenir of the country isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, so he tries to find a place to dump it; and since it isn’t garbage day, he ends up dropping it down a loose sewer grate. (If this story had taken place in New York, see, that would have been the end of it, because the alligators would have eaten the egg.) Once there, it starts to germinate and bubble off little polyps…

And next thing you know, innocent bystanders are being eaten by strange insects crawling out of the sewers. Big insects, the size of a Harley. Having chewed a few people, they start metamorphosizing into huge dragonflies, which Jun (observant kid that he is) sees cruising through the night sky. Being a bug enthusiast as well, he immediately recognizes it as a prehistoric insect called a Meganula. He reports this to Tsujimoto, who thinks that maybe leaving a bizarre wormhole in the middle of nowhere might have caused some mutations or something.

But that’s not all. As you recall, Godzilla’s name was in the title of this movie, and the G-Graspers get a line on Godzilla in an underwater trench. They tag him with a tracking bullet (because a huge, radioactive mutant is otherwise surprisingly easy to misplace) and devise a plan to herd him toward an uninhabited island toward which they can shoot a miniature black hole — from space! That’s right, Project Dimension Tide (hey, it’s still better than “G-Graspers”) ultimately involves mounting the black hole cannon on an orbital satellite. What’s better than fighting Godzilla with nonsensical, mostly unproven technology? Why, placing that technology in a location from which it will have to be remotely controlled, and where it can’t possibly be repaired should there be a malfunction.

“I am NEVER picnicking here again!!”

Meanwhile, for some reason I didn’t quite catch, the Shibuya district of Tokyo has flooded. Maybe it was the work of the Meganulas playing in the sewers. In any case, thanks to the moist environment, hordes of Meganula reach adulthood and take flight.

Well, by shooting missiles at Godzilla, the G-Graspers herd Godzilla onto the island, and are ready to fire a black hole at him, when suddenly the Meganulas show up in a swarm, attracted by Godzilla’s energy. The Dimension Tide can’t lock on target through the haze of insects, and Godzilla himself gets pretty ticked off as the Meganula all latch on to him and start sucking energy out of him like mosquitos at a Fourth of July picnic. Eventually he fries enough of them that the G-Graspers can lock on target, the black hole is fired…

…And they miss. No, seriously. Somehow, amidst all of the devastation the black hole causes, they only manage to get him seriously torqued, and he heads off.. you knew it… toward Tokyo.

I think you can imagine the main gist of what happens now: Much city-levelling and such. What you can’t foresee is the final opponent Godzilla must face. See, the Meganula were all sucking energy from Godzilla to feed to Megaguirus, the plus-sized member of their species still beneath the water covering Shibuya. (G-Grasper has an erudite entomologist around to fill them in on the prehistoric killer dragonflies, but it’s only after the kaiju-sized Megaguirus rises from the water and starts destroying buildings on his own that the scientist bothers to say, “Oh yeah, there’s also a big-assed dragonfly who’s going to show up sooner or later and be fiercely territorial.”) So get ready for some giant monster clobbering, and probably the most visible set of wires holding up a flying monster in any Godzilla flick. Seriously, they could have told us that the Megaguirus spins webbing and it would have been believable.

“Who needs a bugzapper NOW, bitch?”

Now in contrast to some other Godzilla movies, there’s a valiant effort to keep the human cast involved in the last half hour of the movie, instead of just standing around staring at all the wreckage. (Well, Jun, disappears from the story as soon as Tokyo is evacuated.) The G-Graspers have to get the satellite ready to fire a second time, and the task is made more difficult because the high frequency of the Megaguirus’ wings somehow plays havoc with the satellite’s systems (huh? It’s in space, for crying out loud!), and there’s a system crash which forces Kudo to use his spanking-new system repair utility that he just happened to show off earlier, and the satellite immediately starts falling from orbit (whaddaya mean, “out of fuel”?) and is in danger of burning up before they can fire another black hole at Godzilla. How, oh how, will it all play out?

I suppose, as Godzilla flicks go, it’s not too terribly bad. (Even if you ignore the whole “Godzilla, mankind’s friend” period in which the productions were too impoverished even to afford cities for him to destroy.) It’s goofy and derivative, sure, but at least the Big G himself looks good. And for once, the plan to destroy Godzilla doesn’t have to end in obvious failure, setting up a sequel. After all, if each movie is a reboot to the original, then they could destroy him every time and still have him come back for more. Godzilla reinventing himself to the tune of South Park? You be the judge.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 16 (plus all the off-screen collateral damage)
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 95
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0