GODZILLA FINAL WARS (2004)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *cosmological, sociological*

Whatever its flaws, GODZILLA FINAL WARS does a better job summing up the "Millennium" cycle of Godzilla films that GODZILLA VS. DESTROYAH did for the "Heisei" series. At least in the former flick, the Big G goes out on top.

Ryuhei Kitamura directs his only Godzilla film with a fast-paced style reminiscent of such music-video-and-commercial directors as the American McG. The script for FINAL is generally better than your average music video, but the pace is so rushed and heedless that the potential for even basic characterization of the human characters get kicked to the curb. To his credit, Kitamura provides lots of kaiju eye-candy to take the place of drama, which one may justify on the grounds that most of the time the "human bits" in Godzilla films mostly serve to provide a sense of contrast to the battling behemoths.

Kitamura also makes clear from the outset that these "wars" are a tribute to all the "monster mash" elements of the Showa era. The opening asserts that in this world all the countries of the world have reached some sort of accord as the result of their constant battles with giant monsters (some of which appear only in old film-clips). This slightly futuristic setting is more or less a riff on DESTROY ALL MONSTERS, as is Kitamura's opening gambit: to have various countries other than Japan-- the U.S., Australia, France and China. The one monster who's out of the picture is Godzilla, who was entombed in ice by Captain Gordon (mixed wrestling champion Don Frye), who used a super-submarine to consign the Big G to his frozen prison. The submarine, "the Gotengo," is a shout-out to the one in ATRAGON, while the monsters on the loose include such sixties favorites as Rodan, Manda, Ebirah, Kumonga, the Kamacuras, Minilla, Anguirus, and (eventually) a version of King Ghidorah. Kitamura also works in the less celebrated critters of later eras, such as King Caesar, Hedorah, Zilla (a renamed version of America's 1998 GODZILLA), and Gigan. Further, Gordon belongs to a standard "Earth Defense Force"-- also a standard element of kaiju films-- but FINAL's defenders include a bunch of black-clad "mutants "(all Japanese) who don't demonstrate powers so much MATRIX-style martial arts, and these mutants seem like a cross between the X-Men and one of the many *sentai* teleserials that channeled elements of Japanese kaiju films.

Gigan gets an upgrade from his jejune beginnings in GODZILLA ON MONSTER ISLAND. In that film, he was just a big kaiju stooge to his alien masters. Here, he was sent to Earth 12,000 years before the film's present by an alien group, the Xielens, to conquer Earth, but the monster was defeated by a prehistoric incarnation of Mothra. Gigan's body remained submerged in the sea until discovered by the Earth Defense Force, and a cute lady biologist determines that there is a special genetic marker, "M-base," in the body of the dead monster. This genetic marker also appears in the bodies of the Matrixy-mutants, including the only one we get to know, Shinichi Ozaki. But does this strange discovery have anything to do with the sudden upsurge in monster activity?

Then the Xielens show up on Earth, but they present themselves as having come to be of service to mankind (as opposed to serving man, heh heh). The aliens somehow banish the monsters, and sign an accord with the humans to help them against a yet greater threat, an asteroid that may hit the Earth (and nostalgically named after the offending celestial body in GORATH). However, Ozaki, the lady biologist and a few others are given some inside info by the Faerie-Handlers of Mothra, who tell Ozaki that he's bonded to the evil of Gigan but that he still possesses the freedom of choice. They even give Ozaki a talisman to help him, though this item disappears from the story until needed at the climax.

The name of the Xielens is indebted to the alien villains of Planet X from MONSTER ZERO, and the FINAL script underscores by giving us a main villain who quixotically dubs himself "X." X takes less time than his predecessors to reveal his real plot: like the Planet X'ers, he and his people have engineered the upsurge in the monsters. The monsters are controlled through the M-base-- which X also plans to use to control mutant defenders, including Ozaki-- and the impending approach of Gorath is part of a really overcomplicated plan to bring a new version of Gigan and a new version of King Ghidorah to Earth as well. (The latter is apparently dubbed "Keizer Ghidorah" to distinguish him from the original, though the script had no problems rebooting Gigan's origin-- possibly because few people care any more than I as to the original.)

Once the Xielens have control of both the monsters and many of the mutants, the remaining good guys have only one resort: to revive Godzilla, who for some hard-to-believe reason cannot be controlled through the M-base. Once Gordon releases the Big G, he stomps off to Japan and begins the first of his "final wars" with various monsters, most of which are more like tussles. (I did like the one where Godzilla swings Kumonga around on his own webbing.) Godzilla does defeat one version of Gigan with ridiculous ease, but when Gorath arrives, the asteroid births both a second, tougher version of Gigan and the aforementioned Ghidorah. Godzilla gets a rough time from these two, and even some last-ditch help from Mothra doesn't make much difference. Ozaki, who is briefly suborned by X, manages to make his "choice" and send Godzilla enough power to revive the big lizard. Meanwhile, Ozaki has a big Matrix-fight with X and kicks his ass-- though the fight never sustains any emotional interest because Ozaki is so thinly drawn. (He doesn't even get a romantic arc with the lady biologist, though their opening scenes imply that they like each other.)

The FX are strong and produced with traditional "suitmation" techniques to the best of my knowledge, and Godzilla gets to be the consummate badass. He even menaces the good-guy humans at the end, but they're saved by the compassionate Minilla. And while this ending almost sounds like a "puppies and rainbows" conclusion, the script undermines that tendency by giving Ozaki the last word, as he states that this is just "the beginning of a new war." I wish that the whole script had followed something like this insight; that the release of the chaos of Godzilla isn't going to make everything safe, and that at some point in the future, monsters and humans are going to battle again, and that there will be no "final war."