aka Sora no Daikaijuu Radon

• Directed by Ishiro Honda
• Written by Takeshi Imura and Takeo Murata
• Starring
  • Kenji Sahara
  • Yumi Shirakawa
  • Akihiko Hirata
  • Akio Kobori
  • Fuyuki Murakami

So. 1954’s Gojira (aka Godzilla) becomes a surprise international sensation, getting an unxpected boost by an American release (with Raymond Burr spliced in all over the place, just in case Euro-Americans can’t relate to a movie with all-Asian protagonists). If there’s one thing that Japanese culture has always been good at, it’s “more of the same,” and so, decades before sequels would become the norm in the U.S., Toho Studios followed up with two movies, each taking the premise of the original Gojira in a different direction. One was a straightforward sequel, Gojira no Gyakushu, known over here as Gigantis the Fire Monster (on those rare occasions on which it was known — thanks to being released in America by a different entity than the original, the name “Godzilla” couldn’t be used in any of the publicity, which meant that nobody on this side of the Pacific realized it was a sequel. It made very little impression, compared to its predecessor.) Director Motoyoshi Ota didn’t manage to make the impression that Ishiro Honda had made in the original, and was out of the movie industry by the end of the decade.

The other movie, though, brought back director Ishiro Honda to play with a similar though unrelated situation. That movie, of course, was Rodan.

“I’m sure we’ll be happy — you, me, and the poofy thing that lives on my head.”

The prologue takes whatever might have been seen as “too subtle” in Gojira’s cautionary-tale treatment of atomic power, and makes it clubbed-over-the-head obvious, as footage of two separate nuclear tests, one on a Pacific island, the other under the ocean’s surface. What, the narrator asks, might Mother Nature do in recompense for such violations of her sanctity? What might be the aftermath?

Well. For the answer (or, at least, for “the story of such an aftermath”), we go to the mining town of Kitamatsu, where we get a new narrator — Shigeru (Kenji Sahara), an employee of the mine. Shigeru’s the first sign that nuclear energy is running amuck in the world, as his giant poofy hair looks sorta like a mushroom cloud itself. Among the men, tempers are running high, as they’re all very sensitive to plot foreshadowing; it even comes to fisticuffs between Yoshi and Goro, the latter being the brother of Shigeru’s intended, Kyo (Yumi Shirakawa). Yes, we’ve got the full setup for plenty of soap opera, provided you like your soaps full of flying monsters.

So. #8 Shaft has gone deeper than any of the other shafts in the mine, and the men going down there are just waiting for something to happen, and as usual, something does. Water breaks in from somewhere, and two men are stranded down there in the mass escape: Yoshi and Goro. Shigeru and some others head down into the flooded shaft and recover a body — Yoshi, who looks like he’s been savagely ripped apart. Naturally, suspicion rests on the still-missing Goro, because what other answers are there? Giant prehistoric caterpillars with pointy mandibles?

“Boogah! Boogah-boogah!”

Unfortunately, other men investigating Goro’s whereabouts get themselves munched by something mysterious under the surface of the water. It isn’t until Shigeru goes to Kyo’s house and comforts her (“I’m sure your brother is alive, and what’s more, that he isn’t a crazed homicidal maniac”) that the true culprit is revealed. Hey, whaddaya know? It’s a giant prehistoric caterpillar with mandibles! Awfully accomodating of it to crawl out of the mineshaft, through the workers’ houses, and right in the front door of the home of the sister of the accused. Say what you will about these bugs, they’ve got a rock-solid sense of honor.

Several of the local police expire as they run the caterpillar to ground, then they gladly defer to the army to search the caverns for any more of the critters. Shigeru accompanies them, mainly to keep the soap opera plot and the giant monster plot in the same movie. Once the caterpillars prove inpervious to gunfire, Shigeru manages to squash one with a coal cart, but then they find that there are more caterpillars than coal carts. And to make matters worse — there’s a cave-in. Not just a garden-variety one, either — the kind that causes huge sections of the fertile landscape to collapse inward on a minature model. Everyone makes it out but Shigeru, alas.

After an earthquake causes a second cave-in (as well as starting the nearby volcano to rumbling), seismologists and other scientists (you know, kaiju movies are always crawling with scientists of one stripe or another) find Shigeru wandering through the collapsed area without his memory. This leads to one of the most memorable visuals of the movie: Shigeru’s still-poofy hair, sticking up on odd places from the bandages which wrap his head. He doesn’t remember his name, he doesn’t remember Kyo, he doesn’t remember the caterpillar, and he certainly doesn’t remember the big scary thing he encountered after the cave-in.

Great. First Rodan, then the Borg.

Now, Honda and his screenwriters have put an awful lot of effort into tying the human story with the monster story up to this point, but from here it’s going to unravel awfully fast. Japanese Air Force planes start reporting strange bogeys which execute impossible maneuvers, and whose sonic blasts can actually knock aircraft from the sky. Then the mysterious flying somethings start picking off people on the ground and levelling buildings with their passing, all over the Pacific Rim; unfortunately, the only people who get a good look at the airborne whatevers end up as lunch immediately thereafter.

But then, Shigeru catches sight of a couple of eggs in a bird’s nest, and suddenly remembers a) who he is, b) that he hasn’t had breakfast yet, and c) that while trapped in the mine, he found two gargantuan eggs which hatched in front of him, revealing huge leathery-winged creatures, which immediately started snacking on the caterpillars. He leads an expedition back to that cavern (through mineshafts that are miraculously still passable) and finds them a fragment of five-inch-thick eggshell. The scientists immediately figure out that these are prehistoric pterosaurs called “Rodans”, whose hibernating eggs were awakened when nuclear testing in the Pacific (you knew it had to figure in here somewhere) caused cracks in the underground and allowed water in to their sealed cavern. No one, though, ventures a theory as to why pterosaurs would leave jet trails when executing their aerial stunts.

Now that the scientists have done their job, the military can step in and do theirs: Piss the Rodans off. The Air Force fires a bunch of missiles at the Rodans’ lair; in return, the Rodans descend on Sasebu City, knocking most of it over with the wind of their passing. (Thrill to five minutes of pterosaurs and jetfighters flying back and forth past each other!)

“Impossible! There’s no way we can put a man in a suit and have him look like this!”

Then the Rodans disappear for more than a week. Aha! say the scientists. They’re obviously hibernating — that’s what reptiles do! And moreover, they’re obviously doing so in the once-extinct volcano that’s conveniently rumbling again! Why, all we have to do is get the volcano to erupt while the pterosaurs are still in the crater!

So they do. The end.

No, really, that’s it. Granted, it takes a lot longer than that — there are a gazillion explosions from various missiles, and the Rodans try to fly out but are overcome by the fumes and catch fire. (I was watching this with my kids, and right here nine-year-old Alex said, “Anybody want some fried chicken?” I’m raising that boy right.) And Shigeru, narrating for us even though his usefulness in the plot evaporated long ago, pontificates at length over slo-mo shots of char-broiled pterosaur about how sad it is to see such creatures die. Will we, the world, ever take responsibility for what we’re doing to nature? Will a similar crisis ever come up again, and if so, how will we deal with it differently? “The answer,” he muses, “lies in the future.” Well, that interests me greatly, because the future is where we’re all going to spend the rest of our lives.

As you can see, the entire movie was an attempt to capitalize on the successful elements of Gojira. However, the human element is severely lacking, and it shows. In Gojira, the soap opera elements played a part in the story of fighting the monster right up to the climax. Here, though, as with so many “serious” kaiju films to follow, the lives and loves of the puny humans really fade into the background as soon as a creature with the ability to decimate whole cities rears its head. There’s a Shigeru/Kyo “I love you/I love you too” scene late in the flick that has no point except as a tacit admission by the filmmakers that, dammit, there’s absolutely nothing for these characters to do in the story anymore. This kind of problem goes a long way toward explaining the siller late-period “friend to children” Godzilla and Gamera movies; without something that ties the monsters and the Kennies together, there’s no real need for human characters at all after the movie’s halfway mark. (Or later. For a kaiju movie, there’s a glaring absence of the titular monster for an awful long time.)

“And just look at what it did on the statue of our city’s founder!”

The other weakness is the same one that kept coming up whenever Mothra would make a movie appearance: Monsters whose main ability is flight just don’t really have the juice, not compared to one who can breathe radioactive fire or shoot laserbeams from his eyes. Winged creatures can beat their mighty wings at you and let the wind knock you over, and that’s about it.

(At least Rodan didn’t also look like a fuzzy plush toy. An attack by Mothra was like an attack by a festive handknit sweater.)

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 14, plus the off-screen collateral damage
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 68
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0 (according to the IMDb, George Takei was an uncredited voiceover artist, but that’s a little too vague for me)