Go-Go-Godzilla:#17 The Return of Godzilla (plus Godzilla 1985)

Director: Koji Hashimoto,
Studio: Toho 
Year: 1984
Length: 103 Minutes (Godzilla 1985 = 87 Minutes)

The Story:

Perhaps the first legasequel, The Return of Godzilla, ignores every prior film save the original. It opens with parallel to the original with a reference to the Lucky Dragon No. 5 (Daigo Fukuryū Maru) incident (where a fishing boat was bombarded by radiation as a result of being in waters originally deemed to be safe distance from the US Castle Bravo nuclear weapons test at the Bikini Atoll in March of 1954). In this case it's a result of a reawakened Godzilla.  Reporter Goro Maki is sailing and comes across it (it's unclear if he was looking for the ship). He finds the crewmen's bodies completely desiccated, save for one, Hiroshi, who is still alive but unresponsive. Goro is attacked by a gigantic sea louse by saved by the traumatized sailor.

Goro hears the sailor's story of Godzilla's return, but has his story stifled by the government, concerned about spreading panic. Goro is instead pushed to visit Professor Hayashida (it's not clear why exactly), where he learns the Professor's parents had died in the original Godzilla attack on Tokyo. He also discovers the Professor's student/assistant, Naoko, is Hiroshi's brother (now government issued quarantine) and he seeks to reunite them, in part because he likes her, in part because it's the right thing to do, and in part because he wants the story.

A Soviet submarine encounters Godzilla in the Pacific and is destroyed. In order to de-escalate tensions between the Russians and Americans, the Japanese government has to admit publicly Godzilla's return. After the monster attacks a nuclear power station (to "feed") with the Professor and company as witness, the Americans and Russians want to proactively nuke the creature before it decides to invade their soil. The government debates and resolves that the Cold War super powers are primarily looking for an excuse to test their weapons in a public space, regardless of the outcome, and denies their request.

The Professor and company realize that Godzilla, as a sort of dinosaur, is closer to bird than lizard (do we need a feathered Godzilla?) and he has a homing sense as a result of gravitational pull. The Professor works diligently to figure out how to exploit this, and maybe lure Godzilla to the volcanic Mt. Mihara where they can possibly trap or kill Godzilla in the fiery core.

But they aren't given much time before Godzilla heads towards Tokyo. The district is evacuated and when Godzilla reaches landfall, the JSDF has a surprise for him: the Super X! A flying tank, made of a titanium alloy that should be resistant to his atomic breath, and armed with cadmium missiles which should neutralize the creature's radioactive chemistry.  It works and the creature stumbles unconscious. The Professor, Maoko and  Maki are trapped in their building, but rescued by Hiroshi and a helicopter team. They head out to Mt. Mihara to prepare their backup plan, when a Russian nuke is accidentally launched. The Americans fire a counter missile which explodes it in the atmosphere but the resulting wave is absorbed by Godzilla which reawakens him. He destroys the Super X by pushing a building upon it, before he hears the summons the Professor concocted. 

Godzilla arrives at the mountain, the trap is sprung, and the creature wails as it's boiled alive in lava, wrenching the hearts of the very people he just terrorized.

Godzilla, Friend or Foe:
Definitely foe.  

The Sounds:
Godzilla's roar is given an overhaul, a little prolonged, more deeply resonant, with an added rumble. It's both familiar, but more intense.

Reijiro Koroku provides the score which is completely serviceable but, at times, feels like TV melodrama, at others conventional military marches. It never hits the highs that any of Akira Fukube's scores do, but it's nothing memorable. 

The Message:
Gone is the goofy, kid-friendly Godzilla that developed over the Showa Era series, and instead we have a decent analogy for Japan being stuck between two nuclear powers during late stage cold war and nuclear proliferation.  The traumas of the past have faded, but the fears of the present are crippling in their weight.

Rating (out of 5 Zs):
ZZZz
Now this is the Godzilla I've been waiting for. In the intervening decade (almost) between Terror of Mechagodzilla and The Return of Godzilla the technology for filming and effects took dramatic strides. No longer treated like a toss-away kiddie film, but instead an epic disaster movie, the scale of everything got bigger and better. The miniatures (operating at 1:40 scale, this time, with an 25-meter tall Godzilla, instead of the 1:25 scale, 15-meter tall Goji) are phenomenal despite being less detailed. At the increased scale, there's more density, and seeing Godzilla trod down whole city blocks with skyscrapers that tower over him. The smoke work, the pyrotechnics, the lighting, the special effects coordination all look much more gorgeous (it's got somewhere around 12 times the budget of the last Godzilla film, so makes sense it's better).

It's got a few goofy bits - the sea louse at the beginning particularly, and I found the introduction of the Super X really pulled me out of an otherwise engrossing feature. The Super X is just a little too sci-fi cartoon and old-school Godzlla for this new phase of movies.

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Godzilla 1985, from New World Pictures, adds R. J. Kizer as co-director since, like the original Gojira, in bringing the film to American audiences, additional scenes were added.  Once again they bring back Raymond Burr as Brazzos Steve Martin (Mr. Martin here) who consults with the Pentagon as the only American survivor of the original Godzilla attack.  He doesn't do much of any effect here, save provide a touching and thought provoking soliloquy at the films finale as Godzilla faces his doom.

The film is heavily reedited, not just to insert these new, terrible American scenes in the Pentagon, nor to add Dr. Pepper product placement, but also to eliminate any negative connotation about America's part in nuclear proliferation. 

In the original, the Russian nuke was accidentally launched when the Russian trying to stop it collapsed from the fallout of Godzilla's attack. In the American version it's made to look as if the Russians had maliciously fired the nuke against Japanese wishes. From the Japanese perspective, at least from the original, Russia and the US were equal threats to them, but the American version downplays any insinuation that America or its policy is doing anything wrong (much in the same way the 1950's American edit of Godzilla eliminates any sense of parallel between the creature and America's bombing of the country).

The American version is tighter, but also flimsier, with less characterization, less politics, and the acting in those Pentagon sequences gets pretty bad. The Japanese version is much more engrossing.

(Rating for Godzilla 1985: ZZz)

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Neither version is available on standard streaming, but Godzilla 1985 can be found here on Youtube, and The Return of Godzilla can be found here on the Internet Archive.