Mothra vs. Godzilla (1964)

Not rated, but this one has this one moment that I want to talk about for a second.  Let's establish, Godzilla movies exist in a world where we have to accept that massive amounts of casualties are just being ignored for the sake of telling a story where monsters can punch each other a lot.  A lot of people must die in these movies.  That's gotta be part of a parental advisory somewhere.  But there's one moment, and I'm not sure if it is for comedy or what, but the mousy little evil sidekick just starts beating on the evil moneyman and that dude is hemmoraging blood.  The mousey guy is shot and killed and the money man dies when Godzilla destroys his hotel.  It's a lot.

DIRECTOR: Ishiro Honda

I hate coming to any movie from a place of ignorance.  I love to watch things in order.  I want to be the most knowledgable film viewer ever.  But all rookies make mistakes and I have to admit that I made a mistake with Mothra vs. Godzilla.  I'm watching this movie and I'm not big on Godzilla lore.  I know what I know from the Godzilla movies I've seen and that's about it.  In my head, outside of King Kong, all of the monsters from Godzilla movies are original villains.  Apparently, that's not true.  First of all, Mothra's the good guy in this movie.  Secondly, apparently, this is Mothra's second movie.

I didn't know this.  I am watching Mothra vs. Godzilla and the people in this movie just know tons of lore about Mothra.  I Google "First Appearance Mothra" and get a short summary that tells me that this is the first on-screen appearance of Mothra.  (This is not true.  I should have clicked the link for more details.)  It also tells me that Mothra first appeared in a novel years before and my brain can't handle that so many people had read this Mothra novel that they could have gone to directly sequelizing this character in double hitter with Godzilla.  None of that is true.  The reality of the situation is that there was a 1961 movie named Mothra that wasn't included in the Criterion set and I just powered through a movie that was technically a sequel to a movie that I'll probably never see.

Do you know why I'll never see it?  As much as I was warming up to the whole old timey kaiju movies with Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Mothra vs. Godzilla ​reminded me that the formula for most kaiju movies is pretty bad.  For the sake of shorthand and the fact that I'm writing as fast as I can so my newborn doesn't wake up with my wife (she's making noises!), I'm going to call this movie Mothra, despite the fact that I'm talking about the 1964 film, not the 1961 film.  Mothra really hits the same beats as King Kong vs. Godzilla, which means that we have some characters that really film some archetypal roles in the movie.  Then, Godzilla shows up.  The military shoots a bunch of useless garbage at Godzilla.  Then something narratively bonkers happens (in this case, two tiny little ladies try to save Mothra's egg) before watching a LOT of army stuff try to stop Godzilla and then the two monsters fight.  I know.  I mentioned the military stuff more than once.  Because that's my real problem with these movies.  

Godzilla movies tend to understand that there isn't enough story to justify runtime.  To a certain degree, it is cool to see models try to blow up a guy in a Godzilla suit for a long time.  But imagine that those scenes actually mattered.  Right, you are blowing off this conceit and I beg you not to.  Imagine with get a cocky general say, "We're going to throw everything we got at him."  For the sake of this movie, it's going to be the electricity plan (which I kind of remember having a bit of validity based on the first Godzilla movie). Sure, we're going to see Godzilla squirm a bit.  But we know that cocky general isn't going to get it right. I mean, you at least need to throw a scientist in there or one of the protagonists.  But these movies have a lot of the general doing stupid stuff for a long time.

This one couldn't even fill the space with the general calling in support against Godzilla.  This one's a bit interesting because Mothra herself doesn't beat Godzilla.  There's something oddly bleak about Mothra being the contender in this movie because the two tiny ladies from Infant Island reveal that Mothra's basically on her deathbed and that this is just a suicide run at Godzilla for the heck of it.  My headcanon is that she's doing it for the egg, but whatever.  I'm already investing more than the people who made this movie probably did.  Anyway, it comes down to the two twin babies that hatch out of the egg.  These larvae look terrible.  I mean, Mothra looks great.  Even when the movie really embraces the aesthetic of two monsters fighting being the equivalent of a kid smashing his toys together, the design of Mothra is pretty rad.  The larvae?  Not good at all.  Straight up terrible if you ask me.  Anyway, if a general yelling at troops isn't repetitive enough, there has to be about ten minutes of footage of these two little slugs shooting webs at Godzilla.  It's the webs that beat Godzilla, by the way. 

I mean, I say "beat Godzilla", but that ending is unconvincing.  That seems like Godzilla should just be able to swim up.  But I digress.  There is so little actual movie in this movie that we have to keep watching the spraying of webs just to establish that there's something working here.  Again, I'm a guy who doesn't find modern Godzilla movies all that fun.  Those movies have fight choreography and CGI.  These are people who are desperately trying to make puppet fighting a compelling franchise.  So to see these two slugs just vomiting webs all over Godzilla while his radioactive breath does nothing is more than anticlimactic to say the least.

I have a feeling that I'm going to have a rough go of the rest of this box set.  I know that Mothra is one of the top tier Godzilla villains.  Even a layman like me knew something about Mothra.  Sure, I didn't kow that there was a 1961 film named Mothra.  That seems like it should be basic.  But if I'm not preaching Mothra vs. Godzilla, what's going to happen to mee when I get to the Godzookie era?  Like, i looked ahead at the art for the future episodes.  I already see that Mothra vs. Godzilla is phoning it in pretty hard.  I mean, there's the whole Jurassic Park before Jurassic Park thing with this movie, with the attempt to capitalize on genetic abnormalities as a plot. But it seemed like Mothra had this rich story and this movie did everything it could to avoid depth.  The scientist was there for exposition.  The newspaper man and photographer were tropes.  The only reason that there are humans in this movie is to remind ourselves that humans are terrible.

It's so funny.  If I had to pick a franchise to condemn humanity with, it would be the Godzilla movies.  But if we're using Mothra vs. Godzilla as our foundational text for why humans are terrible, we get barely any moments of understanding.  I mean, the government seemed mighty cool with letting the Happy Corporation buy a giant egg in a time period where Japan is regularly getting smooshed by kaiju.  And those guys suck so hard.  Here's me, comparing the 1993 perfect film Jurassic Park to a Godzilla sequel and expecting them to have the same amount of pathos.  But John Hammond was this guy who is clearly misguided from moment one, but believes he's the philanthropist in his story.  Then there's the guys from the Happy Corporation, who want to buy women the second they see them because it will help them make more money.  There's a shot of the bad guys looking at a wall of money.  That's a thing that happens in this movie.

The Godzilla movies should be fun, yet constant accusations, for how crappy humanity has gotten both environmentally, but also morally.  Godzilla should be a punishment for our sins.  Yet, I hear that this is the last one where he's an outright villain.  You can kind of read the writing on the wall with it too because Godzilla is hilariously clumsy in this one.  He seems like he's not always trying to actively murderball civilization because he just kind of falls into buildings in this one.  But he does flash fry that small village.  It might be because that's where he's fighting other kaiju, but most of the movie he just sucks at navigating the terrain.  It actually zooms into where Godzilla rolls his ankle as if he was wearing too tall Jimmy Choos.

Yeah, I had fun with the movie until I didn't. Maybe it was once the larvae were the heroes (and that they didn't fulfill the promise of eating everything in their way, as described) that I remembered that I really don't like these movies and I should stop holding out hope that they are going to change my mind.  A real fact that I'm aware of in the back of my brain?  I'm just waiting for Shin Godzilla and I want to have watched everything in order until I get there.  But for all I know, Shin Godzilla is just fine.