Go-Go-Godzilla #18: Godzilla vs. Biollante

Director: Kazuki Ohmori
Year: 1989
Length: 104 minutes

The Story:
In the wake of the last battle with Godzilla, agents from different nations are all clamouring for a pound of Godzilla's flesh. Whatever biomatter remains is potentially the trigger for changing the fortunes of a nation. Dr. Shiragami is working for one such nation but, when terrorist detonate a bomb in his lab, it kills his daughter. Shiragami believes that her soul was transferred into a rose. Five years later he enlists the help of psychic student Miki who tries to "read" the now blossoming rose bush for a sign of his daughter. 

Meanwhile, Godzilla has awaken, while Shiragami returns to his studies on Godzilla matter for the first time since his daughter's death and begins splicing the genes of his daughter's rose and Godzilla. It mutates, kills some spies, and becomes Biollante, an appropriately monstrous creature that makes its way out into the harbour.  

Godzilla is freed from his volcanic prison from the last movie by (American?) terrorists making a play for the Godzilla biomatter in a deal-gone-wrong. The new and improved Super X-2 tries to stave off Godzilla's encroaching on Japan, but after some delay it succumbs to the creature's might. Godzilla confronts Biollante, and the two tussle in the harbour...well, Biollante creates all manner of plant tendrils and tries to restrain Godzilla, as well as spitting an acidic compound on him, but once he revs up his atomic blast, it torches the plant-creature which then turns into pollen and floats away.

Now Godzilla heads towards Osaka: cue the evacuation montage. He starts decimating the city, and a wounded Super X-2 takes on Godzilla again, and loses, again. Godzilla is shot all up with some anti-nuclear bacteria, which affects the creature but doesn't take him down. It's up to Biollante, who Miki now reads as Dr. Shiragami's daughter, to reform out of its pollen state, to send Godzilla packing back into the deep. Biollante, meanwhile reverts to pollen form, flies out into space, and becomes a gigantic space rose, like the baby at the end of 2001, except, you know, stupid. 

Godzilla, Friend or Foe:
Foe

The Message:
All this genetic tampering is probably bad, so maybe let's not? Also, "wherever you go, people are the same. There's good and bad in every country."

Rating (out of 5 Zs): ZZz
It's a needlessly convoluted mess of a movie. The writer-director didn't trust himself enough to just develop a more simplified dramatic scenario of a father grieving the loss of his daughter and creating a monster in the process. Instead he muddies the mess with too many players, multiple espionage agents (in a total farce of a spy story), and extended sequences of miniature ships fighting guys in rubber suits with rockets and laser beams. The psychic angle was some useless b.s.  There's no center to this film. It's all reactionary. 

The miniaturized Osaka is a massive and impressive set-up, but it's shot very poorly and it looks very much like a set, and when it's destroyed it looks like a flimsy set. There's a lot of craft in the suits and the miniatures, but when they're not shot well, they look sooo cheap. 

Biollante is an intriguing, and different Kaiju design, and it proves an interesting challenge for the big guy, but there's also a lot of assumed metaphysical elements to it that aren't explained or even set up properly.

Thanks to the Internet Archive for providing video while the film is unavailable to stream or rent anywhere.