Destroy All Monsters (1968)

Rated G, despite being potentially the goriest of the Godzilla movies.  There's straight up blood all over this movie.  Some of it is weirdly gross, considering people die in droves in these movies.  It bothers me more that someone has their earrings ripped off or is cut open for surgical reasons than the mass death of Tokyo being leveled or something.  Also, the wrecking of King Ghidorah is pretty darned violent.  Still, a G-rating is a G-rating.

DIRECTORS:  Ishiro Honda and Jun Fukuda

Welp, this movie was hyped up for me.  I'll say this much.  It's better than its predecessors.  There was actually a long period of time where I was actively invested in the movie, both because of tonal shifts and because of some plot stuff.  But man, the second half of the movie --the part that people probably enjoyed because there was a bunch of monster fights --almost killed whatever goodwill the first half of the movie built up.  I don't want to dislike these movies, guys.  I have a million more Godzilla movies to go.  It would be better if I just said a bunch of nice stuff about them and how great they all were.  But I almost think, despite being a better movie than the ones before, that Destroy All Monsters is a larger betrayal to the franchise than other entries in the series.

Because this movie almost got a good review until the halfway point in the film, I want to talk about what works about this movie.  Despite being a successful film franchise that is part of the cultural zeitgeist,  I feel like Godzilla should have been a one-and-done. That's coming from a guy whose favorite movie of last year was Godzilla Minus One.  As part of an attempt to tell more stories in the Godzilla universe, these movies reached out into space with a handful of space threats. If you can acknowledge that it's a little bit silly, you can get behind these movies pretty quickly.  It's kind of like accepting that the Adam West Batman is Batman, but just a different kind of Batman.  In the vein of the spacey Godzilla movies, Destroy All Monsters has a decent premise.  There are aliens who are once again trying to take over Earth.  It's a short trip to a plot. In this case, the aliens are sick of sending their own monsters (which they will do anyway), so they decide to take advantage of the monsters on Earth to do their dirty work for them.  That's pretty cool.  Watching all the monsters completely wreck the planet holds the same appeal that a Roland Emmerich movie does (I realize that he had his own Godzilla movie.  I'm not there yet).  

Similarly, I kind of love that anyone could be a bad guy.  It's a used trope.  But we have to accept that this is 1968.  Even though I loathe the politics of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the reason that the movie still works is because there's something haunting about the notion that anyone could be the villain.  And say what you will about campy special effects, you don't really need much to pull off the zombie / body snatcher fear.  I kept trying to piece together whether the people under control of the aliens were themselves, clones, or robots and that's a fun place for me to watch.  So well done, Destroy All Monsters.  You got me on the wanton destruction and the concept that people can turn evil through mind-control manipulation.

But the movie falls apart with a couple of key problems in the film.  I'm going to be petty first and talk about one that bothers me every time I see this in a movie.  I hate when movies become "toyetic."  I forget which movie this term came from, but I always associate "toyetic" with The Lost World: Jurassic Park.  I really want to like The Lost World.  I remember seeing it at the Birmingham 8 when it came out and thought it was amazing.  But I had dumb little kid brains back then, so I kept defending a movie that is fundamentally inferior to the first film.  The concept of being toyetic comes from the notion that certain scenes in the movie are just in there to sell toys.  In The Lost World, there's a scene where all these nifty cars capture all of these dinosaurs.  Even as a kid, I was thinking about the toy commercial that I was watching in the film.  Now, I can't speak to the commercialism of 1960's Japan.  I can't say that SY-3 was sold as a toy.  I can't say that it had a removable lunar rover with laser beams on top.  I don't know.  I might be able to Google it, but I don't know how accurate the answer would be.  But man, there were so many scenes where they were highlighting Rocket SY-3.  Do you know why I know it's called SY-3?  Because they kept saying the name, as if they were marketing that object.

There's a side-problem with something being toyetic.  If something in sci-fi is made to solve a problem that the characters are having, it just means that the problem is solved by that future toy coming to the rescue, the onus is taken off of character problems.  In the case of Destroy All Monsters, the problem lied with the heroes being unable to defeat the aliens' forcefields.  Okay, that's a problem.  Now, if this was character driven, there would have been an alternate option which forced the characters to think of a way to take forcefields out of the equation.  Maybe sneaking in before the forcefield could go up?  Maybe forcing the bad guys to come to them?  But by building an object that will become a toy, they have a machine that undoes forcefields.  That's frustrating.  Instead of being a valid problem for the characters, it is just a problem to be ignored, despite the fact that we were told that there was nothing that they could do.  In a weird way, it's a lie or a broken promise.  Being told one thing and then undoing it is weak writing.

Okay, but that's all small stuff.  What's the thing that really bothers me?  I've touched on it in a lot of Godzilla blogs, but I'm mostly talking about the Universal American Godzilla movies.  The original Japanese Godzilla was a stark commentary on the dangers of unbridled power in the form of nuclear weapons.  It was a criticism of what happens when man's hubris thinks that it can control the uncontrollable and how destructive that power is. While I didn't lose my mind over the original Godzilla, I appreciate that there was a purpose to the storytelling.  I agree with that message.  Making a disaster movie mean something beyond it's base message was important and I like that the movie worked hard to tell a powerful story.  Now, for a minute, I thought that Destroy All Monsters was going to continue the same commentary by showing the inverse narrative.  (The idea being that by thinking we had control of these monsters, we were lulled into a false sense of security.  Like the good Jurassic Park movie.) 

But Destroy All Monsters stands firm on the notion that humanity can control these beasts.  For a minute, it is wrestled away from the humans when the aliens take over.  But even when that control is destroyed, the monsters do the right thing and try to take down the aliens. If the point of the story is to not mess with destructive forces even for a good reason, what's the message of Destroy All Monsters?  Now, this is coming from a guy whose country wasn't bombed into oblivion.  You'd think that the Japanese people who were watching this in 1968 would remember 25 years into the past and think that the message was being ruined. But I like when a movie makes me question norms.  Also, it feels like we're spitting in the face of the original film, especially with something so vapid.  Because the movie is vapid.  Even the good parts, pretty devoid of substance.  It's a lot of scientists in rocket ships shooting bad guys.  

This artificial disc trilogy was a slog. I'm oddly excited for this era of the Godzilla films to be over.  I know. This is the stuff that Criterion put out.  But I just need something to have consequences.  I don't want to see all the monsters fighting together just to say that it was a giant crossover.  The reason why I like the end of Avengers: Endgame was because everything felt like it had a purpose building up to it.  This felt like it was just a bunch of guys in rubber suits improving a fight against another guy in a rubber suit.  Also, why did the aliens think that King Ghidorah would be more than a match for all of Earth's aliens?  He's been beaten twice by far less.  Sorry, movie.  But the second you get lost in your "rad" scenes, the movie gets dumb for me.