Godzilla vs. Hedorah (1971)

PG, but this one is super brutal!  Like, there was a huge jump in what is acceptable to show in these movies.  People die.  I know that they died before.  But this one reminds you that mass casualties are composed of individual people.  So many people die on camera in gnarly ways.  Also, it feels like Godzilla took a beating in this one compared to the other movies.  Also, a main character dies!  Plus, Godzilla needs to eviscerate the monster to kill him, so there were lots of times when Godzilla plunges his fist into the creature.  Like, this movie pulled out a lot of stops.  Still, PG!

DIRECTORS:  Yoshimitsu Banno and Ishiro Honda

The answer to my last blog was "Yes, I am taking on too much to be effective."  I'm playing that older millennial game called, "If I can make it through this week and the next, life will get easier."  The novel is almost put entirely to bed before I have to go off and pitch it and I'll be done with Don Quixote, which means two of my major distractions from life will be gone and I'll be able to simply deal with my other absurd to-do things.  Trust me, for me this is exciting.

Guys, I thought that the later Godzilla movies were all going to suck.  That was the notion I had.  After all, it seemed that, for a while, many of the Godzilla sequels had forgotten their political core.  Then comes Godzilla vs. Hedorah, a movie I was barely willing to watch if it wasn't for the next movie in the box set.  (By the way, I'm closer to the end of this box set than I realized!)   But holy crap, I love Godzilla vs. Hedorah.  Now, is the political statement the most surface level messaging done in a movie?  Absolutely.  You have to understand.   Hippie movies during this age were in your face and simple.  I don't hate that.  As a guy who made it through all of the BBS films with Nicholson and the Monkees, I mostly dig this kind of stuff.  Hippies managed to boil stuff down into the most basic nuggets and then railed against it.  Trust me, we need some of that today (you know, if the hippies weren't the same people as Boomers who started nuking culture).  As a hippie movie, it's beautifully political, but the songs are insufferable and many of the characters act like complete morons.

But what does the movie do?  The movie understands that Godzilla movies tend to work when they have something to say about humanity ultimately causing their own destruction.  With the case of Hedorah, the monster is made from pollution.  Yeah, it's pretty basic and there's not a lot of thought going into that.  But if you asked me to make a pollution monster, I couldn't make one as cool as this one is.  Part of what makes Hedorah cool is the fact that he's killing people who just get near him.  Gone is the guesswork that says that the building that Godzilla just toppled is either empty or full.  Nope.  Hedorah spews toxic waste which burns people's faces off.  He also emits a gas that causes you to instantly rot in the street.  And, no pun intended, none of this is sanitized.  My biggest frustration with the Godzilla movies is that they often become action movies without consequences.  It's kind of hilarious how destroyed Japan has gotten over the course of all of these films. But this is the first time that I feel like the stuff that happens here is permanent.

But beyond that, I felt like Godzilla became a character here.  I won't deny that I still don't understand Godzilla's motivations.  (Look how pretentious this blog is!  I want Godzilla's motivations!) We know that he kind of shows up where he's needed, even though that should be against his character.  But there were times in this movie where Godzilla was being wailed upon.  Like, I was looking at that burn to the eye and, while I can guess that it isn't permanent, it felt permanent.  Maybe something that came out of the choreography that made the movie feel more visceral.  At one point Hedorah throws Godzilla into a giant hole and starts drowning him in acid.  That's a lot more than just guys in rubber suits wailing on each other.  Do you know what it reminded me of, besides Doomsday wailing on Superman?  King Kong always felt way more brutal to me than Godzilla ever did.  But watching Hedorah rip into Godzilla almost felt mean at times...and I oddly enjoyed it.

But there are some stuff that gets really weird.  Let's talk about silly hippies.  I already talked about how this movie paints a serious issue with goofy large strokes.  Again, no shame!  It is the product of its time and it thought that it was doing the Lord's work.  I can't complain about that.  I'm just talking about how silly the hippies are overall.  There's a lot of movie that is trying to play out the clock.  There's the protagonist family, the one with the professor who gets his face burned off.  But then there's the hippies who go to Mt. Fuji.  Apparently, it's a "going out with a bang" attitude that I just learned from the Wikipedia, which forgives a lot of the issues I have.  But still, they seem to be giving up hope pretty quickly.  If anything, there seem to be a billion steps before drawing attention to Mt. Fuji.   Think about how much frustration those people were bringing to the military.  They had to bring all that equipment up a giant mountain.  But then they vaporized Yukio and that kind of blew my mind.

But the biggest shock of the movie is the fact that it doesn't look like other Godzilla movies.  In some ways, I'm comparing this to Live and Let Die, when the politics of the era had a direct effect on the way that the film franchise looked.  Someone cared about this movie.  Honestly, this doesn't feel like something that was floated out there.  There are these weird animated interstitials that give the whole movie a certain hippie vibe.  When people care about what they're making, they do things outside of the formula.  And I know that I'm losing my mind over a Godzilla sequel.  But this one is honestly delightful and dark.  There's effort here and that goes a long way.