Go-Go-Godzilla #19: Godzilla vs King Ghidorah

Director: Kazuki Ohmori
Year: 1991
Length: 102 minutes

The Story:
...is batshit insane.

In the year 2204 a deep sea vessel encounters the corpse of King Ghidorah with the middle of its three heads severed. In "the present day future" of 1992 Tokyo, everyone sees a UFO flying overhead. Kenichiro is a science fiction author wanting to go legit into reporting and true-life writing is working on a book about kaiju. He learns of a "crazy man" who was arrested at a dinosaur museum for talking about how he encountered a dinosaur on Lagos Island during the war. In further investigating Kenichiro corroborates the story with a respectable industrialist (not just that, but "the man who rebuilt the Japanese economy"), that Japanese soldiers were indeed saved from American forces by a dinosaur. Kenichiro hypothesizes that the dinosaur became Godzilla after American H-bomb testing in 1954.

The Japanese military, meanwhile, encounter the UFO from earlier. Turns out they're not aliens, but "Futurians", people from the future. They note that, in the future, Japan's wealth and industriousness wind up taking over the world, but that nuclear pollution once again revives Godzilla and he destroys the county. The Futurians want to prevent such a future by getting rid of Godzilla. And they know just how, because they have Kenichiro's book on Kaiju in the future, the book he hasn't actually written yet.

So the Futurians want to go back to 1944 Lagos Island and teleport the dinosaur Kenichiro believes becomes Godzilla to a different location.  Kenichiro, Miki the psychic girl (who now works for the government as a Godzilla consultant it would seem), and a professor join one of the Futurians, Emmy (the Japanese national) and the android M-11 in the mission to 1944. (The question not being asked is why do the Futurians need to go to 1992 in order to go to 1954, and why do they need Kenichiro, Miki and the professor to go along with them? There's no logic to this movie. It has a "first draft/no bad ideas" feel to it.  

Aboard the time travel vessel (which is a smaller ship than the UFO the Futurians traveled from 2204 in), they encounter some "pets from the future" called Dorats. Adorable little demons that have...something familiar about them. They are caged and the time travel ship goes back in time. We take a pause to spend time with two incredibly awful American actors in 1940s style naval uniform aboard a ship off Lagos island, as they witness the Futurians' ship cross the sky and disappear onto the island. Why, to nod to the fact that one of those seamen is Steven Spielberg's father!

The Japanase soldiers encounter, and are overwhelmed by American forces on the island until Godzillasaurus appears and wipes out the American soldiers, but not before taking a great many blows from the naval ship that leave it teetering on the brink of death. The Japanese soldiers salute the creature that saved them before leaving the island. M-11 teleports Godzillasaurus to the bottom of the sea, safely away from nuclear testing, while Emmy releases the Dorats onto the island before they return to 1992...

where they learn that the Dorat have mutated into King Ghidorah, and the great three-headed golden beast now is rampaging across Tokyo. It was the Futurians plans all along. Jealous white people angry about Japan's position of power in the future have set Ghidorah up to be Japan's downfall at the end of the 20th century.  They had trained the Dorat to react to sound and now can control Ghidorah. They wish to blackmail the government into following their orders, or the big golden kaiju keeps up its attack.

But Emmy, apparently, had no awareness of the nefarious plot to destroy her homeland, which she thought she was protecting instead. She takes off in a jetpack and tells Kenichiro because she loves him (not like that, later turns out she's his great-great-grandmother).

The Japanese government, not backing down to the threat, try to enlist private help in acquiring a nuke so they can make Godzillasaurus into Godzilla again, but, it turns out, Godzilla is already Godzilla (what?) and attacks the nuclear sub, absorbing its radiation and becoming an even bigger, meaner Godzilla than before.

But as Kenichiro and Emmy try to figure out their own plan to stop the Futurians, they've set M-11 out to bring Emmy back, and this low-rent terminator succeeds at his mission. When they're not looking though, Emmy reprograms M-11 to be her sidekick. Along with Kenichiro, they destroy the Futurians' ship, which releases their control over King Ghidorah.  Godzilla and Ghidorah meet in a clearing and the two creatures battle. It really doesn't feel much different than the 60's fight between these two except Godzilla blasts one of King G's heads off and tossing him into the sea (fulfilling the visual from the beginning of the film).  M-11 teleports the Futurians and their UFO to the middle of the fight and Godzilla destroys the ship, killing the Futurians.

But now Godzilla's headed for Sapporo, and the military tries to stave him off, but it seems Japan's destruction is inevitable. Unless...

Of course, Emmy and M-11 need to go back to the future and turn that corpse of Ghidora into a cyborg that they can control to defeat Godzilla. Because of course.

Godzilla makes his way to Tokyo when Mechaghidora arrives, piloted by Emmy. The creatures tussle side profile fighting game-style. In the end, they have the "Godzilla grip" which ensnares the king of the monsters, which allows them to fly off with him. But Godzilla's atomic breath destroys the cybernetics and sends them both crashing into the ocean. But, yay(?) Emmy escapes in her time machine. Only Godzilla's not dead, and seems pretty pissed about being at the bottom of the ocean. The End?

Godzilla, Friend or Foe:
Foe.

The Sounds:
Akira Ifukube returns to Godzilla once again, but delivers a pretty lazy rehashing of old themes. The old master doesn't seem to have a desire for anything too original.

The Message:
History has no room for sentiment.

Rating (out of 5 Zs): Zz

And I thought G vs. Biollante was convoluted...

Close Encounters, Star Trek, Back to the Future, Terminator, Six Million Dollar Man, Top Gun... this film is just a smorgasbord of American pop-culture reinterpreted into a low-budget monster movie. It's a return to the convoluted 60's style Godzilla story, where a foreign invader tricks the Japanese government into letting them do something with Godzilla only for it to be a total sham and instead there be some form of nefarious, world-dominating plan for the humans to stop, with a little help from big G's interference. They were my least favourite plots of the Showa era and it proves consistent here. 

It's a bugnuts bananas movie, and in the recap it seems like I *should* like it, but the production quality is so low as to be borderline unbearable. The special effects are pretty terrible (laughably Tim & Eric style), and the monster fights are uninspired. The white and English-speaking "actors" were universally godawful. Mix the bad special effects with terrible white people acting and M-11 was an ungodly thing to behold. I wasn't bored but I wasn't really entertained either. 

Where the prior Godzilla films, from the very first one, featured a certain level of humility and acknowledgement of at least some complicity, as if Godzilla or the creatures he fought were a specific punishment, for them, this one has an arrogance about it, a level of Japanese pride, a boastfulness that sticks out from the rest of the series so far. But Japan's prosperity starts to wane in the 90's so I doubt it will persist.

But with all these films where the government is tricked by aliens or future people, are the filmmakers criticizing Japanese politicos as being to easily swayed by foreigners?

This is Kazuki Ohmori's second take on Godzilla after Biollante, and I'm really dreading what he's going to do to Mothra.