Godzilla vs. Gigan (1972)

PG and this one is important.  While the kaiju are often busy wrecking whole towns and leaving devistation in their wakes, there really hasn't been any blood or gore.  But in Godzilla vs. Gigan, Gigan has a giant buzzsaw for a belly and that thing tears into Godzilla, spraying blood all over.  At one point, the silly violence weirdly gets a little too real and it looks like the kaijus start trying to crush Godzilla's skull.  Still, we have to remember that this is mostly a movie for children.  We're in that period of Godzilla films where it really seems tailored for younger audiences.  

DIRECTORS: Jun Fukuda, Yoshimitsu Banno, and Ishiro Hondo

There's no way that I'm getting this done tonight.  There's no way.  It's almost midnight.  We just brought my newborn home this afternoon.  I then took my daughter to a Ben Folds concert and I'm probably going to be incredibly sleep deprived.  The problem is...I don't know when I'll have time to write a whole blog on a movie that few people have a strong opinion about.  I'm learning that this movie may have had a remake and I'm so curious where that movie went with the story because Godzilla vs. Gigan is a pretty hot mess.

One of my repeated complaits about this series is how much the series has missed the point.  Yes, I'm going to give props that this series once again decided to have environmental and social overtones to the story.  But I also feel like the Japan of the Godzilla-universe can't possibly exist in the multiverse.  Like, these movies don't understand what its population thinks about giant monsters.  The foundation of Godzilla vs. Gigan's human story lies in the fact that the protagonist is a manga artist for a line of kaiju themed comics.  When his editor finds his creations too over-the-top (which is saying a lot for a character in a Godzilla movie), he tries to sell them to a Godzilla-themed theme park.  In this world, kids love Godzilla and kaiju.  They love them.  They're meant to mirror an idealized Japanese reality.  I'm sure that in 1972, Japanese audiences were probably eating up Godzilla merch.  They kept releasing these things one-after-the-other.  The world inside the films was meant to almost model a fever pitch about these characters.  

The problem is that inside these worlds, they also understood that Godzilla and the monsters of Monster Island were existential threats.  When the kaiju come to shore, the army comes out and immediately unloads a payload of heavy weapons into these creatures.  And that makes sense.  Sure, it's a bit silly that after how-many-movies, the army doesn't understand that missles don't affect these creatures.  But from an in-world perspective, so much of the population has been destroyed by these giant monsters.  These giant monsters have been villains in other films.  Heck, there are villains in these movies.  The eponymous Gigan and also King Ghidorah are kind of big deals from a survival perspective.  These very disperate attitudes towards giant monsters are so opposed to one another, it actually makes it hard to watch the film.  The movie is begging you to shut off your brain because its human story can't possibly exist with the kaiju story.

That's what's really going on at this point.  I've always said that Godzilla films live-or-die based on how the human story plays out.  I know that there's probably a pretty intense audience who are all about seeing guys in giant rubber suits punch each other into scale models of buildings and could watch that stuff all day.  I'm going to confess that I'm not sure that these movies aren't reusing footage from other Godzilla movies when it comes to these fight scenes.  All these old creatures keep showing  up because they have the costumes.  But I'm watching some of these King Ghidorah scenes and I genuinely wonder if they asked a dude to refilm some probably annoying shots.  (Note: Is it just me or are there some scenes where King Ghidorah looks legitimately pretty cool?  Like, it's not a lot of scenes.  A lot of the shots of that three-headed dragon look like straight doo-doo.  But some of them?  Some of them look kind of rad.) 

This is not one of the good stories, by the way.  While I think that the human stories need to be great, I don't actually believe that the fine folks at Toho really cared about the human stories.  I mean, we are starting to repeat a lot of the bad sci-fi tropes of both previous Godzilla films and other American sci-fi B-movies.  There's just a lot that doesn't make sense or doesn't matter.  I don't mind spoiling the entire plot of this movie because I'm going to go ahead and say that I don't really respect Godzilla vs. Gigan.  If you like it, more power to you.  I wish I liked it more than I did.  But this is a movie where two random dudes (who apparently died the year prior) build a giant Godzilla themed theme park.  I don't know why it had to be Godzilla themed.  That bit seems almost counterproductive to their goals of summoning Gigan and King Ghidorah.  Those two dudes, by the way?  Cockroaches.  They're cockroaches in human skin.  (Hey!  Just like Men in Black!)  They want to take over the earth because the human equivalent on their planet enviornmentally destroyed their own planet, so they want to take over Earth.

Here's where I almost get mad.  It really makes zero sense for the protagonist to be involved in this story.  Because these two cockroach overlords built a Godzilla-themed theme park, Gengo got a job with them.  Why would they hire...anyone?  If the theme park was just an excuse to summon King Ghidorah (seeing how incompetent Gigan was, I really think that Ghidorah was doing the heavy lifting), why get people who would snoop around.  Like, Gengo saw these guys act all shady, chasing a girl after she stole a tape.  Why hire him?  Get that dude as far away from the plans as possible.  He ends up, despite being wildly inept at most things that he does, destroying their whole plans.  It's a lot of silliness.

And I think that I just don't have this degree of silly in me.  I feel like a silly little lad a lot of the time.  But there's a degree of silliness that I don't like in my cinema.  This one really overdoes it for me.  I really hate that Godzilla can talk to the other creatures on Monster Island.  On top of that, he does it through word bubbles.  On top of that, the discourse that these creatues have is way too casual.  If Godzilla is going to be barking out commands at his fellow creatures, I want something along the lines of High Valeryan.  Not "Okay" and "Got It!"  Nope.  

This is the biggest waste of digital real estate ever, but I actually have some nerdy complaints about Godzilla being able to discuss complex ideas.  Besides the fact that Toho seems to have forgotten that this series was about the dangers of nuclear power and weaponry, the conceit behind the original Godzilla was that Godzilla was a creature of instinct.  He's the villain in that piece in the same way that the tornado is the bad guy in Twister.  He's a force of nature that we created against ourselves.  It's not that Godzilla hates or loves us.  He's reacting to the thing being pushed at him.  Over the course of the series, Godzilla has become the hero of these pieces, protecting Japan from other invading creatures.  But these have been almost instinctual, like a trained animal. (I also hate this, so just be aware.) 

But if Godzilla is able to communicate complex thoughts, it kind of recontextualizes everything.   Before, we only had the sentient Mothra.  But Godzilla all of the other creatures having the same level of intellect, it gives the creatures agency.  Why even have the human storylines that are treated with such hamfisted disregard if Godzilla himself can make decisions and have reasons for choices that are made beyond self-preservation and protecting its symbiotic creatures.  But Godzilla, as a fleshed-out character, isn't really all there. It's almost like a child wrote him.  He's giving Axe Cop vibes.  If he's going to be sentient, I need reasons to understand this creature.  Yes, writing this makes me all the worst, but that doesn't mean that I'm necessarily wrong.

I wanted to love the meta commentary on the whole thing.  When the film starts and we get those rad manga pages, I thought that this was going to be a special Godzilla.  But as this movie progressed, I just felt my brain leaking out of my ears.  This was one of the dumber ones.