Godzilla vs King Ghidorah

It sucks. 'Nuff said.

Oh, wait, you want more than that? Okay, it really sucks. What's that? You want more? Dammit, since you insist...

I had the opportunity to see this stinker again this past weekend, during a Kaiju marathon at a friend's house that lasted from about 9:00 Friday evening to around 3:00 Sunday morning (with a couple of hours' break to let the projector's bulb cool down). I was reminded why this one was one of the worst Gojira films ever shat out by Toho Studios.

Don't get me wrong, I am a fan of the Godzilla movies and as far as I'm concerned Toho has produced the best Japanese Kaiju (big battle) films. But the studio has produced some real bombs in its time, and 1992's Godzilla vs King Ghidorah was one of them.

To recap: in 1989's Godzilla vs Biollante, the king of the monsters fought a creature that had been genetically engineered from DNA derived from a rose bush, a human girl, and cells from Godzilla. In the film, Big G was infected with specially-created bacteria that break down nuclear radiation -- an attempt to generate a safe way to quickly dispose of nuclear waste and clean up accident sites from radioactive contamination. As that film closes, Godzilla lumbers into the sea to hibernate so his body can recover from the bacterial infection.

Godzilla vs King Ghidorah opens with a submarine closing in on a very battered and submerged Ghidorah, which has apparently been lying at the bottom of the ocean for centuries following its last battle with Godzilla. In 1992, Big G is still slumbering at the bottom of the Pacific; the bacteria have rendered him unable to leave the relatively cool depths, because if he leaves any rise in his body temperature will reactivate the germs and continue to drain the nuclear energy that helps sustain him. Terasawa, a science fiction writer, wants to write non-fiction stories and decides to research a dinosaur that was allegedly observed during WWII on an island in the Pacific. It is his theory that this dinosaur was bombarded with radiation ten years later and as a result became one of the Godzillas that went on to attack Japan in 1954 and 1955. (The creature from 1954 was destroyed by Dr. Serizawa's oxygen destroyer and the beast in 1955's Godzilla Raids Again and all sequels until Godzilla 1984 is presented as a separate monster of the same species, though most films from the 1980s onward ignore all but the original '54 movie. Don't you just "love" Japanese writers' devotion to continuity?)

Meanwhile a spaceship has been spotted flying around the skies of Japan, eventually landing in Tokyo. Soon thereafter a hologram of the three human crew members -- Wilson, Grenchiko and a Japanese woman, Emmy -- appears. Introducing themselves as having come from the early 23rd Century, they bring a dire warning: because of Japan's reckless use of nuclear energy, Godzilla will soon appear and ultimately destroy the country. Emmy shows the book that Terasawa will go on to write as evidence that the writer's theory was correct. The trio from the future propose traveling back in time to remove the dinosaur that would become Godzilla from history by relocating it out of the path of the atomic bomb test that destroyed its island habitat. Teraswa, his friend and Godzilla-research collaborator Professor Mazaki, and psychic Miki Saegusa (Odaka Megumi, reprising her role from Godzilla vs Biollante, is the first actress in a G-series to play the same role throughout multiple films) are recruited to assist the "Futurians" in their mission.

Using a smaller time craft, four humans -- Emmy, Terasawa, Miki and Mazaki, along with an android named M-11 -- travel back to 1944 to Lagos Island, where the atomic bomb that created Godzilla was tested in 1954. As they try to avoid meeting the Japanese soldiers who also feature in the 1992 portion of the movie (not even bothering to avoid being seen by American forces), the Godzillasaurus attacks G.I.s who have a much smaller Japanese garrison at their mercy. They manage to seriously wound the animal, which is huge even for whatever species the future Godzilla is supposed to be, but not before it decimates the entire land contingent of American soldiers. The naval forces depart, figuring that the beast is sure to finish off any remaining humans on the island and that no one would believe them if they go back with stories of a massive dinosaur. Yeah, I know, it's ridiculous -- but then, so is the "story" in this piece of cinematic refuse.

Anyway, the Futurians teleport the wounded dinosaur to the ocean floor once the remaining Japanese soldiers have departed. Before leaving for 1992, Emmy shoos three bat-like "Dorats" out of the time ship, leaving the tiny creatures stranded in 1944. Why she does this is never explained, though the clearly too-drunk-to-care scriptwriters obviously used this as the set up for introducing "King" Ghidorah once the humans and M-11 have returned to the present.

And this is where the continuity problems really begin. Returning to 1992, Godzilla appears to have been erased from history. I say appears, because he really hasn't; Terasawa's publisher is still excited about this "non-fiction" piece the writer has proposed, which is odd because if there were no Godzilla to appear in 1954 there would be no reason for him to pen a book exploring the monster's origins, would there? That's what we who speculate about time travel's effects call a paradox, and it's a pretty huge one for the alleged story in Godzilla vs King Ghidorah. Logically, there should be no proposal for Terasawa to pitch. Yet it remains in the film anyway.

But that's not the worst of the movie's problems, and or the "story's". Those three adorable little Dorats got hit with the atomic blast meant for Godzilla, merging them into an enormous monster -- Ghidorah, who between his last appearance in a Toho film and this one somehow managed to get himself declared king. King of what, we never find out. But considering the major league ass-whupping he receives later in the film we know it sure as hell isn't of any monsters.

But I digress. Realizing they've been tricked by the Futurians into replacing Godzilla with an even bigger threat, Terasawa, Miki and Mazaki are horrified to discover that the dinosaur never had posed a threat to Japan, and that their country in the original time line would have gone on to become the world's sole superpower of the 23rd Century. The Futurians, who admitted earlier to having stolen the time ship and its smaller shuttle, came back to make sure Japan wouldn't come to dominate the globe. Why Emmy, who joins up with the three 20th Century comrades, ever agreed to such a thing is never explained, but she clearly regrets it and now decides to help straighten things out.

Meanwhile, the Japanese government has decided that King Ghidorah is too powerful a monster to handle and their plan is to send a nuclear submarine from Shindo Heavy Industry (a corporation headed by the commander of the Japanese forces from the Lagos battle in 1944, who went on to found his financial empire on dino-driven wealth in the original time line) to the site where the dinosaur was transported to recreate Godzilla. Which is an odd thing, because how can you "re"-create something that was never created in the first place? Again, continuity and logic cannot restrain this movie. But when the submarine arrives, it is destroyed by a massive Godzilla, which had apparently already received a huge dose of radiation from an earlier nuclear sub wreckage. Absorbing the energy from the second vehicle, Godzilla has grown into a beast more than twice the size and mass of the original creature -- it has gained its powers from modern and more powerful nuclear weapons, and therefore is larger and stronger than ever before. From this movie until 1994's Godzilla vs Destroyah, the real King of the Monsters would stand at 100 meters tall as opposed to the 50 meters of the 1954 beast and 80 meters of the '80s version.

Wilson and Grenchiko send Ghidorah to battle Godzilla, but it isn't long before Big G bitchslaps the three-headed dragon into the ocean, blowing off its middle head and severely damaging its wing in the process. The fight is in Ghidorah's favor at first, but when Emmy and a reprogrammed M-11 destroy the computer controlling the monster it loses its senses. And, because Wilson and Grenchiko were such bad little boys, Emmy teleports them and the mothership into Godzilla's path, where he blasts them into oblivion. But now Godzilla is out of control, because unlike(?) his unaltered self is aggressive and unfriendly (like he wasn't before?!? What the fuck kind of idiots do the writers take us for!?). The monster goes on his usual rampage through Tokyo, pausing for an inexplicable farewell stare between himself and Shindo before annihilating the corporate CEO's building with him inside.

Emmy decides to return to the future to revive Ghidorah, figuring that the monster is now the only thing capable of halting Godzilla's rampage. Why she thinks this, we don't know, because that big ol' dragon wasn't exactly friendly to Japan before and one presumes that the government wouldn't be too keen on the idea. But as I've said before, logic isn't something that can hinder this sorry excuse for a story. The movie comes full circle at this point, returning to the scene at the opening to recover the miraculously still-living (but just barely) Ghidorah. Emmy returns to 1992 piloting Mecha-King Ghidorah! With M-11 now reduced to a CD-holder sharing the cockpit with her. Emmy manages to get her cyborg monster destroyed again, but not before she drops her opponent into the ocean; as the mighty beast falls, it gives one final blast of nuclear fire, leading to Ghidorah's second destruction.

Before flying off back to the future in the small time craft, which she somehow managed to hide in Ghidorah's body and which she uses to escape Ghidorah's explosion, she reveals that she is a descendant of Terasawa, who puts his arms around his female publisher in a hint that the two will go on to marry.

If I've given away the movie for you, that's intentional; I don't want you to waste your money renting this crap, much less buying a copy. The "story" is rife with continuity problems (as you'll come to learn, I am incredibly attentive to continuity in movies), and then there are the rip-offs, which are unbelievably irritating. In the 1944 portion of the film the smaller time ship flies over an American cruiser, which inexplicably doesn't bother to alert anyone or fire on it thinking it might be a Japanese craft. The sailor who spots it? His name is Spielberg. Like we couldn't see that coming a mile away, and as if we really needed that. And M-11 does the worst knock-off of the Terminator you'll ever see.

Now me, if I'd been writing the screenplay for this film I would have just decided to let the cooler waters of the Pacific allow Godzilla's established rapid-healing to factor slow and finally subdue the bacterial infection in him. And then, once that infection was eradicated, throw in the powerful nuclear submarine that both revives and enlarges the monster. If I had to add Ghidorah to the mix, I'd have used a helluva lot better excuse for bringing him in than time travelers from the future. Or if I had to introduce time travelers, I'd have made it so their attempt to alter history failed and have them leave the Dorats behind by accident. But that's just me.

And then there's the flagrant disregard for history and logic in this stinker. OK, I get that the time travelers wanted to alter their present by changing the past. But why not simply avoid going to 1992 and directly to 1944 in order to carry out their mission? What was the purpose? The closest guess I can make is that Toho obviously meant to revive the Godzilla series for the 1990s, while offering a somewhat plausible explanation for the monster's overcoming the anti-nuclear energy bacteria that crippled him in the previous film. Toho also must have wanted an excuse to make the Godzilla suit much larger in scale to the models the Kaiju actors would demolish from then on, for bigger and better-scale battle sequences. I suppose time travel might have worked as a plot device, if it had been used by competent writers who knew theories on the subject and about things like paradoxes. But Toho wasn't about to spend money better used for monster effects on writers who could actually write a half-way plausible time travel story, so we ended up with this tedious exercise in ridiculousness. That still doesn't answer the fundamental question, though: why go to 1992 at all? Apparently, Wilson and Grenchiko want to control Japan's development from the 1990s onward. But this sorry excuse for an explanation doesn't make sense, because they could just as easily have done that in the 1940s following post-war reconstruction.

But here's what really bothers me about Godzilla vs King Ghidorah: aside from the continuity errors and bad acting, there's the obvious failure on the part of the writers to create even a token plausible story -- and there's no character development whatsoever. We never really get to know why Emmy does what she does. I've only ever seen the American dubbed version, so I can only hope that some explanation was omitted in the editing and translating process. But we clearly see her deliberately shooing the little bat-like creatures from the shuttle before it departs for 1992, so she must have been in on at least part of her comrades' plan. So why is Emmy surprised to learn what became of the Dorats upon her arrival in 1992, or the motivation behind her comrades' actions? Did they lie to her about what they had intended for the Dorats? Did she think they would use Ghidorah more or less benignly, that they would somehow keep the damage and casualties to a minimum? And why did she even do any of this in the first place? Was Emmy a patriot who felt Japan had gone too far in its imperial ambitions and needed to be taken down a notch? We are never allowed inside her head to see what motivates her to help first her comrades, and then the Japanese of 1992. And the only explanation we are given is by way of a plot twist so predictable and unnecessary that I wonder why the writers even tried to surprise us by withholding this information until the end. Then again, the writers had developed some chemistry between here and Terasawa over the course of the film so maybe they figured it wouldn't do to have that as Emmy by film's end would have to return to her own time. Another thing that really bothers me is this: inexplicably, Emmy's former comrades have her repair a battle-damaged M-11 without any supervision whatsoever, apparently trusting a turncoat to fix their most powerful weapon against the humans. What the hell were these buffoons thinking? One just has to wonder how they managed to trick the Japanese of 1992 so easily, being so unbelievably dim themselves.

If you want to see the Godzilla films of the 1990s, you really ought to avoid this insipidly stupid vehicle and go with the more imaginative and plausible suggestion I offered for why Godzilla was able to return. It'll hurt your brain less.

My Dinner with Andre

Year of Release: 1981

Director: Louis Malle

Stars: Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn

Screenplay: Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn

If you haven't seen this little gem of a movie, I highly recommend that you go out and rent a copy (although, if you enjoy this movie as much as I did, you might do as I did and buy it). The film consists almost entirely of two friends, Andre and Wally, talking over dinner. Based on real-life conversations between the two actors, the subject matter ranges from the necessity of attentiveness in our every day lives to "experimental theater, the nature of theater, and the nature of reality." You may not find a movie featuring two guys talking to each other very exciting, but if you're looking for intellectual stimulus you could do a lot worse. As Roger Ebert wrote of it, "[i]t should be unwatchable, and yet those who love it return time and again, enchanted."

If you read the book form of the screenplay, the foreword sums up the genius of the idea behind this film: take conversations and events that happened to you in real life, condense them into a dialog, and then film it. It sounds pretty easy, though I'm sure actually trying to do this isn't. The genius lies in using real life to create a conversation on film that you, as a member of the audience, might very well have or have had yourself. For a couple of hours, you get to become almost a participant in the conversation between these two men -- or, at least, a fellow diner compelled to listen in.

The film opens with Wallace Shawn, playing a fictionalized version of himself, on his way to a restaurant to which he has been invited by old friend Andre Gregory (also playing a fictionalized self) -- whom he has not seen in years and dreads meeting because of rumors he's heard that make him worry about the other man's mental state. Shawn plays a guy struggling to pay his bills and just get through life, and the last thing he wants is to have an encounter with someone who may turn out to be unhinged from reality. Nevertheless, since this invitation to dinner presents a break from the humdrum of his existence, he has accepted.

Meeting Andre Gregory at the restaurant, the two sit down to dinner and the rest of the film until the closing scene is comprised of conversation. The more grounded Wally, who is mostly concerned with maintaining his cozy, oblivious existence, does most of the listening while Andre does most of the talking. The ideas put forth in this film ultimately leave one of the two friends with a transformed outlook on life. And what are these ideas? Watch the movie and find out, because if I go into any detail I won't be able to stop, and I'll have spoiled it for you. Suffice to say, however, that while there are moments of despair (Gregory laments that the 1960s were the "last burst of the human being before he was extinguished"), there are also moments of satire, humor, and a bit of the surreal.

Roger Ebert describes the film as exploiting "the well-known ability of the mind to picture a story as it is being told," and I heartily agree. Andre Gregory weaves his tales as only a master storyteller can, and I could very easily see in my mind the events as they are described. What I enjoyed most about the movie is the lessons it teaches about being aware of our surroundings and the people with whom we share our lives, and finding enjoyment in pursuing answers to life's questions even if the ones we find aren't the answers we start out looking for.

The late Louis Malle (1932 - 1995) greatly demonstrated with this movie why he was one of the 20th Century's best directors. My Dinner with Andre was filmed over the course of weeks, in an abandoned hotel. But Malle pulls off the illusion that the movie was shot in real time, in a bustling restaurant. Everything, from the camera angles and closeups of the two stars to reflections in mirrors designed to make the set appear more crowded than it is, was expertly calculated and choreographed.

If you don't want to sit through two hours of two men talking, you can buy the book version of the screenplay. It's as good a read, if not better, as it is a movie-watching experience. An affordable DVD is hard to track down (Amazon.com has copies starting at more than $100!), but if you still have a VCR you can buy the VHS format. Whichever route you take to becoming familiar with this gem, by all means take it. For truly, My Dinner with Andre is one of those rare feats in cinema: the perfect combination of story, character development, and directing, resulting in a remarkable and transforming film. How transforming? Watch this clip.