It was with a due sense of resignation and expectations bordering on the actually subterranean that I sat down to watch the third and (hopefully) final part of the Godzilla trilogy which has been loitering on a market-leading streaming site for the last year or so, Godzilla: The Planet Eater (directed as before by Kobun Shizuno and Hiroyuki Seshita). Honestly, just the thought of watching another of these things gave me one of my very infrequent moments of existential self-doubt – why do I put myself through this kind of experience? The first chapter, Planet of the Monsters, was terrible; it’s a close thing as to whether the middle instalment, City on the Edge of Battle, was actually worse or simply just as bad; despite the implication that there would be appearances by Mothra and Ghidorah in the concluding episode, was it really worth the investment of ninety precious and unique minutes from my finite store?
Oh well: I’d gone this far, after all, and it would truly be an exceptional feat to take characters as storied and iconic as Godzilla, Mothra, and Ghidorah and put them in a film together and still produce something as tedious and misconceived as the first two films in this series. It would also be a very cheering moment were the Toho Animation people to actually manage to turn things around and produce a worthy Godzilla movie. So it kind of felt like a win-win situation, although it almost certainly shouldn’t have done. Possibly I should just own up to my own innate masochism, I don’t know.
The film opens not long after the conclusion of the previous one, with Godzilla having battered Mechagodzilla City into submission and the human survivors having serious differences of opinion with both their sets of alien allies: the gruff militaristic ones are annoyed with our hero Haruo for interfering with their plan to use ‘nanometal’ to defeat Godzilla, even though this would involve people being absorbed and assimilated by the living metal. Meanwhile, the spiritual ones have concluded that Haruo, and in particular the purity of his hatred for Godzilla, is the perfect vessel to summon their god into existence. Said deity, Ghidorah, has the power to finally defeat Godzilla once and for all. He will also annihilate the planet, but you can’t have everything your own way.
As in the previous two Godzilla animes, the title character spends the first half of the movie standing around off in the background not actually doing anything, while the human-scale characters stand around and flap their mouths at each other. On this occasion, they spend the first half of the movie discussing – oh, something or other. It’s so dull and pretentious I appear to have blanked it from my memory. The film makes various eager swipes at big philosophical issues, contemplating whether it’s better to live in harmony with nature or as part of a technological society, and then contemplating the nature of God and religious belief. Fair play to the makers of Planet Eater for being willing to engage with these sort of themes, but on the other hand the debating seems to go on forever in the most abstract manner. Most of the plot of the first half of the film just consists of people having this kind of static philosophical discussion.
Things briefly perk up ever so slightly as Ghidorah finally manifests himself from a black hole which forms near the humans’ colony ship, still in orbit over the monsterfied Earth. This is almost certainly the best sequence in the whole trilogy, as the familiar dragon-head on a sinuous, seemingly endless neck snakes out and coils around the huge spacecraft. From here we move on to what is clearly intended as the main event – yet another battle between Godzilla and Ghidorah.
Well, wouldn’t you know it, the makers of this trilogy have hit upon a way to make kaiju battles nearly as dull as the theological debates going on around them. This new version of Ghidorah is almost all neck: three more black holes form in the upper atmosphere of Earth and each one produces a Ghidorah-head on a long, golden neck. There’s no sign of Ghidorah’s actual body, legs, tails or wings. I suppose Ghidorah should just be grateful he’s not been reconceived as a piece of urban planning in the same way Mechagodzilla was. How does Godzilla proceed to fight an enemy who is mostly neck? Well, he blasts his nuclear ray at him, but this new Ghidorah has gravity-warping powers and he just bends the ray so it doesn’t strike him (this, I suppose, is not actually a bad idea). Then the dragon-heads of Ghidorah clamp onto Godzilla and start leeching his energy. Which takes about fifteen minutes mostly consisting of the two monsters standing there almost stock-still, while the other characters stand around and watch, and discuss what’s happening.
All right: the animation and production designs on these movies is not awful, although it is a very mixed bag, and you can kind of see what they are trying to do by introducing such radically reimagined versions of many of the classic Toho monsters (their new version of Mothra is actually pretty traditional, compared to the others, but then everyone’s favourite giant mystic lepidoptera barely gets a cameo in this new trilogy). But it’s almost as if they don’t actually understand or don’t care what a Godzilla movie is usually about.
Writing about the other two films I have explained what I think a really good Godzilla film (or kaiju movie generally) should incorporate: excitement, fantasy, spectacle, hopefully a sense of grandeur. These are cheerful, upbeat films, not least because of their essential absurdity. The animated trilogy, on the other hand, quite apart from being slow and talky and pretentious and lacking in any sense of humour or fun, are notable for their essential nihilism: the implication is that modern technological civilisation inevitably spawns giant destructive monsters and (on a more metaphorical level) devours the souls of its citizens. These films end up advocating a rather simplistic back-to-the-land philosophy about living in harmony with nature. It feels glib and insincere.
Well, as luck would have it, we are going to get another outing for Godzilla, Ghidorah and Mothra this year (Rodan will be in it too), and if nothing else the new version of Godzilla: King of the Monsters can only look better compared to the animated trilogy. Someone has already described these films as by far the most boring interval in the entire 65 year history of the Godzilla franchise. I can only agree, and might even suggest they are being too generous in saying that.
No Chic. Just Geek. 