Planet Zillywood

Like many people of my generation from the UK, my first exposure to the Godzilla franchise came from the Hanna-Barbera cartoon series that first aired in the late 70s and early 80s. It was diverting enough at the time, I suppose, but watching an episode a few years ago was a somewhat disconcerting experience: the animation was rather primitive, and, most jarring of all, Hanna-Barbera inexplicably chose not to license the sound of Godzilla’s roar, with the result that the King of the Monsters spent most of the time sounding like a gargling dog. The series took a few liberties with peripheral matters – Godzilla was an almost wholly benevolent figure, with laser-beam vision, accompanied by a comic-relief mini-me named Godzooky – but at least managed to hang on to the core experience of the franchise, which was a regular succession of monster smackdowns. It was a decent gateway to the full Godzilla experience, in other words.

Having been somewhat spoilt by some really good live-action Godzilla movies over the years, the news that Toho’s animation division was hard at work on an animated addition to the franchise was interesting, rather than a source of unconditional delight. Now the project in question has appeared, most likely, on a market-leading streaming site near you – originally entitled Monster Planet, it’s ended up being called Planet of the Monsters, which if nothing else gives you a decent sense of what to expect. It is directed by Kobun Shizuno and Hiroyuki Seshita.

This is another total reboot of the series, which appears to have become Toho’s preferred option for Godzilla movies these days. The backstory goes as follows: in the last months of the 20th century (yup, you read that right), the human race found itself bedevilled by attacks by a series of giant monsters, culminating in the appearance of an invincible behemoth known as Godzilla. All attempts to defeat this menace having failed, the human race took advantage of an offer of help from two passing groups of alien refugees, the religious Exif and the technologically-advanced Bilusaludo, to abandon Earth and look for a new home on another planet.

Well, the story proper kicks off twenty years later, sort of: things look grim for the refugees, who are leading a gruelling existence of scarce resources and existential misery, with their continued survival doubtful and little prospect of their discovering a new home planet. Main character Haruo Sakaki is in really a permanent strop about all of this, convinced that humanity gave up Earth too easily. He even publishes an anonymous paper arguing that Godzilla could be killed using recent technological advances.

Somehow this persuades the ruling committee to take everyone back to Earth, either to resupply or – the best case scenario – resettle the planet. Due to time dilation, or whatever (this is basically a plot device, obviously), twenty thousand years have gone by on Earth while the refugees have been in deep space and the planet has reverted to a primeval state. But probes indicate that Godzilla is still present and still as implacably hostile, and so Sakaki joins the mission to take back the planet…

I don’t necessarily have a problem with Godzilla movies that allow themselves to be somewhat influenced by other bits and pieces of pop culture from around them – there’s an element of James Bond to some of the later films from the original series, Godzilla vs King Ghidorah owes a lot to The Terminator, there’s a large chunk of The Matrix in Final Wars‘ curious mixture of influences, and so on. But there’s definitely something odd about the way that you could watch Planet of the Monsters and in effect catch up on much of what’s been going on SF and fantasy movies and TV over the last decade so. In other words, there’s a bit of Interstellar here, a bit of Battlestar Galactica, a lot of After Earth, even a smidgeon of Skull Island. Which would all be fine, but the problem is that they seem to have left Godzilla completely out of the mix.

There are two basic ways of doing a story about Godzilla: either he’s the living-engine-of-destruction walking-metaphor-for-something-or-other bad guy, or he’s the possibly-misunderstood defender-anti-hero. This film tends towards the first position, but never completely adopts it. It’s not quite the case that this is one of those films that isn’t really interested in or even actually about Godzilla – he is the central driver of the plot throughout – but at all times it seems more about idea of Godzilla than a living, active monster. Godzilla is always just looming over the horizon somewhere, or being discussed, but other than occasionally nuking something with his atomic breath he is oddly passive, never doing much (well, there are no buildings around for him to crush), a cypher rather than a character or a metaphor.

The movie’s two innovations both have definite potential – there’s the idea of Godzilla taking on an army of sci-fi jet bikes, walking tanks and soldiers in power armour, and also the notion that over the course of twenty millennia, a whole new Godzillafied ecosystem has developed to cover Earth (in other words, everything’s a little bit Godzillaish). But not much is done with the latter, and former is just superficial, contributing only visual spectacle. You never really care about the action or feel invested in it.

This is, of course, largely the fault of the script, which features some laborious and rather baffling plotting. Why do they include not one but two distinct races of friendly aliens? Neither of them contributes much to the story. Much of the movie seems precision-tooled to generate maximum confusion, not to mention gloom. I sense some of this may have originated from quite high up in the production. Here is co-director Seshita discussing the ‘new’ version of Godzilla (heavily influenced by the Gareth Edwards version if you ask me, but whatever): ‘With his masses of muscle fibres and unique body tissue to support his enormous bulk, this is an extraordinarily rugged-looking physique. It was an overwhelming presence that reverberated through the whole project, like a fearsome deity that even we who created it must prostrate ourselves before.’ Hmmm, yeah. This sort of thing seems to have filtered through into dialogue like ‘When those fleeting lives destined to die, become arrogant and sing praises of their own narcissistic glory, such will shake the very heavens and split the earth.’ Well, quite (and this is relatively easy to follow, compared to some of the lines). It’s hard to tell whether this was written by a teenage poet, or Google Translate, or some odd combination of both.

The one thing mitigating in favour of Planet of the Monsters’ casserole of pretentious cobblers and joyless, confusing gloom is the look of the thing, which is certainly distinctive, although not completely consistent. The film goes from near-photorealism to scenes which look rotoscoped and then on to more traditional anime action and carnage. The look of the film isn’t actually bad and is certainly atmospheric, even if the atmosphere created is the one of dour oppressiveness which is arguably one of the film’s problems.

In a great (or even good) Godzilla film, you want the following things – a clear sense of who or what Godzilla is supposed to be, interesting and sympathetic human characters, masses of property damage, a worthy opponent for Godzilla to take on, a proper theme tune for the big guy, and at least a little bit of positivity, one way or another. Some good new ideas never hurt. Planet of Monsters falls down so badly because it seems to have viewed this venture into the unknown for the franchise as a chance to dispense with all the accumulated wisdom about how to make these movies work, and includes none of the above. All its innovation is visual, with the story a barely-functional stack of contrivances populated by anonymous characters. Still, it seems to have been successful enough to earn a sequel (current title something like Godzilla: Living Robot City Final Battle, which hardly bodes well even if it is supposed to have Mechagodzilla in it), and we can only hope that some lessons will have been learned. As it is, the less than stellar lineage of animated Godzilla projects continues, alas.