THE SCORPION KING 2: RISE OF A WARRIOR (2008)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

When I reviewed the third iteration of the SCORPION KING series, I remarked that it wasn't as fun as the first film, and that I barely remembered the second film in the series. However, though KING 2 certainly had the outward appearance of being just another routine DTV franchise-sequel, a closer look caused me to realize that despite its obvious flaws (lame acting, lousy FX), the story was actually a little more mythically portentous than the original flick.

The behind-the-scenes credits would seem to encourage such a belief: credited scripter Randall McCormick barely worked on anything that wasn't a sequel, and director Russell Mulcahy was a long way from his one indisputable hit, 1986's HIGHLANDER. Nevertheless, the script follows an interesting quasi-Freudian pattern. In the character's first appearance, he was actually an archaic man turned into a modern-day monster in the course of the second MUMMY film, while the 2002 film showed Mathayus at the apex of his career as a hero in the mostly fictional ancient realm of Akkad.

KING 2 pursues a familiar strategy: showing Mathayus as a teenaged barbarian warrior (Michael Copon). The youth is defined as a son seeking to emulate his respected warrior-father Ashur, who's respected for his prowess with the king's bodyguards, the Black Scorpions. Ashur forbids Mathayus from following in his footsteps, but the teenager joins a mercenary training-camp anyway. There he encounters Layla, a teenaged girl with whom he's grown up, and who wants to be a warrior. Both teens get on the bad side of their trainer Sargon, but Ashur's pull with King Hammurabi saves them from punishment.

Sargon, however, is more than just a trainer of mercenaries; he's also (very improbably) a guy who's made a deal with some Akkadian devil to get mystic powers. He uses his powers to secretly slay both Ashur and Hammurabi, and then (even more improbably) ascends to the throne of Akkad. Both Mathayus and his widowed mother Inanna know that Sargon killed Ashur but cannot prove it. Mathauyus continues to train as a warrior, waiting for the chance to slay his father's killer.

After coming back from some campaign, Mathayus has a brief scene with his widowed mom, and then meets the new king, who doesn't seem to remember the son of Ashur. Sargon takes a quasi-paternal interest in Mathayus, inviting the latter to join his bodyguards-- the first move that moves Sargon from the role of "father-killer" to "bad father." 

Mathayus bides his time, which gives him the chance to accept the king’s hospitality by dallying with a few slave-girls. Then the hero tries to slay the usurper. However, Sargon's magical powers render him  invulnerable to ordinary weapons. Mathayus flees the king’s forces and seeks a method to slay his enemy.  He meets Layla again, and their liking for each other is transparent. The two of them are joined by Ari, a young Greek scholar, who persuades them that for a price he can lead them to a sword capable of killing Sargon.

Ari leads the other two to Knossus, where they invade the temple of the Minotaur and slay a very badly-done bull man. Ari then reveals that the sword is in the underworld, the land of the dead. Mathayus remains firm on slaying his father's killer, and even makes a few more converts in the temple: Greek warriors eager to loot the underworld of its treasures. Their leader Pollux is sort of a 'good father stand-in," for he knew Ashur in life and is roughly the same age as the hero's daddy. During the group's trek into the netherworld, Mathayus also sees a dead spectre whom the hero thinks is Ashur, though the viewer does not see what the hero sees.

After the would-be thieves have slain a few underworld monsters, the domain's queen Astarte shows up. She claims to be "the goddess of love and war" but takes a shine to Mathayus. While she tries to tempt him into becoming her consort, some of the warriors sneak away to look for the magic sword, which they find and successfully pilfer. However, Layla can't stand seeing the goddess mess with her chosen man, and challenges Astarte to a fight, significantly insulting her as a “cradle robber.” 

After a short battle between the young and the ageless, Astarte cheats and wins the fight.  She then tells Mathayus that she has Ashur with her in the underworld with her, and, though she doesn’t quite state her relationship with him, it's not impossible that she's dallied with him as she now dallies with the hero, which would make her the "bad mother" against Inanna's "goiod mother." Despite Mathayus offending the goddess by rejecting her,  most of the expedition escapes-- though "good father" Pollux perishes and remains behind.

While the good guys journey to meet "bad father' Sargon, "bad mother" Astarte meets him first. In fact, while Sargon is having sex with some slave-girl, Astarte possesses or replaces the girl just as Sargon's trying to have sex with her. Astarte hasn't come for pleasures of the flesh, though: she wants to be sure that Sargon-- who has apparently received his occult powers from her-- retrieves her sword. Sargon asks her for more power and she bestows on the villain the ability to become a scorpion-monster-- thus foreshadowing Mathayus's final fate in the second MUMMY film.

Amid other complications, Mathayus confronts Sargon, but the wily villain disguises himself as Ashur, thus providing yet another link between “the two fathers.” The disguise doesn’t fool the hero, since he believes that he saw his father in the underworld. Sargon then reveals that he's been the prime mover in the hero's quest, for he suborned Ari the Scholar to steal the real sword and bring it to Sargon. However, Ari double-double-crosses Sargon, so that Mathayus gets the really real weapon and eventually slays his enemy in a big battle. 

Once the "bad father" dies, “bad mother” Astarte shows up to reclaim her sword. She's tempted to kill Mathayus and take him down to her realm with her, but he improbably convinces her to let him live since she'll have him one day. The last thing Mathauys sees before swooning is Astarte, and when he wakens, the next thing he sees is his real mother Inanna (the second of her two scenes in the whole film). All of Mathayus's surviving allies are there as well, with Layla taking over as the hero's destined squeeze. Since the first film focuses on how the character first became "the Scorpion King," this teen version of the hero doesn't attempt to ascend to the Akkadian throne. A final voice-over reminds the audience that Mathayus does have a somewhat tragic fate in store, and that his heroic propensities will at a future date lead to him becoming a monster not unlike the "bad father's he's slain.

On a minor but not irrelevant note, the name "Layla" strongly resembles that of a Near Eastern goddess called variously Lilith and Lilitu, and this goddess also shares characteristics with two others whose names are evoked in the film: Inanna (also called Ishtar in antiquity) and Astarte. I don't think that this name-association  can be simple coincidence, and I find it more probable that writer McCormick intentionally gave all of the women in the hero's life roughly-similar names. I would not press the Freudian comparisons too far. Still, given that his real mother Inanna barely has any purpose in the script, her appearance so close to Astarte at the climax may have been informed by a quasi-Freudian notion of the basic identity of the two mothers-- and even of the prospective mother of the hero's future children, if any. Similar, there are so many good and bad versions of the father in the film that some Freud is justified. This intellectual debt, however, may not do much for many viewers, who would be justly irritated by the film's unfunny lapses into contemporary phrases like "music hath charms to soothe the savage beast" and "what fresh hell is this."

SLAVE GIRLS FROM BEYOND INFINITY (1987)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*


SLAVE GIRLS FROM BEYOND INFINITY has a spoofy title, and there are many risible lines that suggest that writer-director Ken Dixon wasn't taking the project too seriously. (It seems, incidentally, to be Dixon's final work in films or TV, according to IMDB.) However, though SLAVE GIRLS isn't particularly riveting, it aligns more with adventure than with comedy.

The basic plot is transparently lifted from the 1932 film-adaptation of Richard Connell's THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME, aside from the opening. Two scantily-clad women, Darla (Elizabeth Kaitan) and Tisa (Cindy Beal), are chained in a cell on space-prison ship. Darla-- who is clearly the stronger and more combative of the two, and thus lines up with the Joel McCrea role from GAME-- breaks loose from her chains with no help from Tisa, who is more or less the Fay Wray of the movie. Darla helps Tisa break Tisa's chains, and the two prisoners escape in a shuttlecraft. (There's no mention of what offenses the women committed, nor do any authorities pursue them.)

Darla and Tisa crashland on an obscure planet, where a recluse named Zed-- the film's version of Count Zaroff-- lives in a fortress, served by two intelligent robots and (to some extent) a cyborg-alien, who are presumably loose approximations of Zaroff's servants. Zed has a couple of guests, who are also brother and sister like the cannon-fodder from the 1932 film. In GAME the fate of these guests foreshadows the battle of the McCrea and Wray characters against Zaroff, but in INFINITY the guests serve little purpose beyond eating up a little time before the climactic scene in which Zed hunts both Darla and Tisa, just as Zaroff hunts his principal victims. There's a minor SF-trope thrown in, in that Zed warns the girls to stay away from a mysterious area called "the Phantom Zone." (The context makes this seem unlikely to be a conscious homage to SUPERMAN comics and more likely to be an accidental duplication.) The girls fight off a couple of zombie-like aliens, who aren't explained any better than the cyborg-guy, and get some weapons. However, their next encounter with Zed ends with Darla apparently falling to her death, and the villain taking "the girl" back to his fortress to be raped. As in the 1932 film, Darla heroically returns and fights Zed, the robots, and the cyborg, who turns against Zed for no stated reason. Then the "slave girls"-- who are never said to be have been slaves, nor get treated as slaves during the story-- swipe a ship and escape into space while Zed perishes.

This is harmless fluff with a few cute lines. Elizabeth Kaitan isn't all that good in the fight-scenes, but she at least puts more effort into this film than she did in the VICE ACADEMY entries.

STAR TREK: "DAY OF THE DOVE" (1968)

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


In my review of A PRIVATE LITTLE WAR, I noted that its reputation as an anti-Vietnam screed was largely undeserved. If any Classic Trek episode deserves that honor, it would be DAY OF THE DOVE.

The short version: both the representations of the Federation and of the Klingon Empire are maneuvered into a conflict by an alien entity that feeds on the negative emotions of warfare. The alien, never seen as anything but an animated effect, shows intelligence in that it's capable of advance planning, for it lures Kirk's ship, and that of a Klingon named Kang, to a deserted planet with false distress signals. Kirk manages to get the upper hand on Kang, and takes the Klingon and his landing-party aboard the Enterprise as prisoners. At this point the alien reveals matter-manipulation powers, confining most of the Enterprise crew below decks and orchestrating an ongoing battle between Kirk's faction and Kang's-- but one in which both sides are armed only with swords rather than phasers. The Klingons, routinely portrayed as savage types, embrace this conflict while Kirk and Spock try to figure out what's going on. Even the Vulcan isn't immune to the alien's mental manipulation, though, and some crewmen, such as Chekhov, become totally invested in the wholesale slaughter. At last Spock concludes that they can get rid of the alien by ceasing to feed it (a rather diabolical take on the Tribbles plotline!), and Kirk uses logic and reason to make peace with Kang's forces.

Though DOVE isn't precisely abrogating the necessity of military action, Jerome Bixby's script is prescient in critiquing America's involvement in the Vietnamese "war of attrition," which had not in 1968 become as universally rejected by the populace as it is now. Bixby's script is equally dextrous in terms of describing the role of xenophobia in keeping the war-fires burning. Some TREK episodes are guilty of becoming preachy on this topic, but Bixby keeps the moral resonant by using "good" characters, such as Scott and Chekhov, to channel racist sentiments.

On a side-note, the savage Klingons of this episode seem to be the direct ancestors of the ones in all the later TREK serials, as opposed to the sneaky Klingons of earlier episodes.

ELECTRA ONE (1967)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *sociological*


Though I enjoy Eurospy flicks, they tend to be undistinguished visually. Thus I was rather surprised when I saw director Alfonso Balcazar's ELECTRA ONE making far more use of artful close-ups to create his Bond-on-a-budget.

Balcazar did most of his directorial work on spaghetti westerns, at least one of which was a collaboration with ELECTRA'S central actor George Martin. Martin never made another Eurospy film, which is a minor shame, since he projected a little more charming insouciance than most actors in similar roles. His character is a little different, too, for he's not a spy, but an international thief known as "the Lynx" (though he goes by the single name "Gary" during mundane encounters). Moreover, he actually has a romantic arc atypical of Bond-imitators.

ELECTRA ONE is named for its villain, though there's no explanation as to why a middle-aged schemer would use a code-name modeled on an archaic Greek heroine. The film opens by quickly establishes the nature of the villain's menace: he uses an insidious formula to make a U.S. military officer go berserk and almost trigger a nuclear-missile launch. Many Eurospy films toss out some devilish device or fiendish formula to motivate the hero against the villains, and then they proceed to forget about it. Some films, like THE SPY WHO LOVED FLOWERS, content themselves with just talking about the gizmo. ELECTRA ONE's opening at least establishes the possible peril of the dingus, even if most of the rest of the film has the hero chasing around after an antidote.

While the Lynx is performing a heist-job, he crosses paths with the henchmen (and one henchwoman, the gorgeous Rosalba Neri) of Electra. They've killed the scientist who concocted the antidote, but his lovely female assistant Monica (Vivi Bach) has the formula with her. Gary the Lynx gets hold of the formula and tries to get as many bidders as possible to pony up for it. However, Gary's also more than a little smitten with Monica, so that he ends up defending the formula against Electra instead of merely turning it over to the highest bidder.

The action is nicely handled, but there are no gadgets aside from the insanity-formula and its antidote, though Electra does have a secret base. Neri, despite her status then as a prime Euro-babe,  doesn't get to do much of anything.

AVENGERS: ENDGAME (2019)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, psychological*


(SPOILERS OUT THE WAZOO, naturally)

Like the George Lucas STAR WARS films, Kevin Feige's "Phase One" MCU have become such cultural events as to resist criticism, either from the mainstream or from hardcore fans. Nevertheless, I'll give it a try.

The comparison of "Lucas Wars" and "Phase One" also holds with respect to the execution of elaborate plotlines. Audiences remain enthralled with the "New Hope" trilogy, and less than mesmerized with the prequel trilogy that established Who Darth Was and How He Came to Be. Kevin Feige certainly intrigued many viewers with his early hints of a massive story-skein derived from Jim Starlin's "soul gems" concept. But here too the resolution of this plot leaves much to be desired.

Genre fiction walks a tightrope. Move too far in one direction, seeking to give the audience (or internal business interests) what they want, and you fall into the abyss of predictability. Move too far in the other, seeking to present the audience with a sense of novelty, and you risk blundering into the darkness of incomprehensibility. To my knowledge there were no leaks of ENDGAME's script to fans, but nevertheless, many of them guessed pretty much how Feige and his collaborators would seek to resolve the plot set up by the cliffhanger ending of AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR. Feige knew that fans would snatch up all of the "Easter eggs" he left around, and thus there was no real mystery that ENDGAME would have to use time-travel to resolve the cliffhanger, which ends with the evil Thanos obliterating half the living beings in the universe with a snap of his fingers.

I've criticized Feige's MCU for being uninterested in the nuts and bolts of the Marvel fantasy-verse, and sure enough, Feige's idea of time-travel is built not on SF-logic but on jokes to the effect that all previous time-travel movies (TERMINATOR, BACK TO THE FUTURE) are just "bullshit." This spoof is merely Feige's strategy for saying, "Time-travel works however my narrative says it works." TERMINATOR 2 , for instance, gets by with intimating that Skynet can be destroyed in part by constructs originated by Skynet. But this "becoming your own grandfather" paradox is small potatoes, next to having ENDGAME Character A die in the time of her later self, Character B, so that A vanishes from the very timeline that led to B's creation. And this development takes place some time after one of the main characters tells his fellow time-travelers not to risk changing the past by interacting with one's past self.

So the resolution, purely in terms of plotting, falls into the predictability abyss. Yet I have to appreciate how skillfully Feige makes his audience want the predictable. In comic books, major catastrophes are usually reversed quickly, as soon as a group of goodguys like the Avengers can find the way to effect said reversal. Feige, though, has the Avengers fail to undo Thanos's evil deed. For five years every inhabited planet has to deal with the after-effects of cosmic genocide.  Though I've read no reviews at this time, I'm sure that by now several someones have related the first thirty minutes of ENDGAME to 9-11. Of course, the 20th-century "reign of terror" had been building long before 2001, with terrorism taking the place of warfare as a means of asserting hegemony, but ENDGAME is not able to swim in waters that deep, and is content to focus on the Marvel heroes suffering for their "feet of clay." To be sure, Feige doesn't treat all characters with an even hand. The Hulk barely appears in this section, and Thor is reduced to a buffoon. Not much happens to Black Widow either, though this has more to do with her ultimate fate in the movie, while Hawkeye loses his family to the catastrophe and, in reaction, essentially turns into the Punisher. Where Hawkeye loses a family, Iron Man gains one, though by the film's end this equivalence will be overturned, less because Feige is being generous to Hawkeye than because he needs to be rid of Iron Man. Even Captain America, the embodiment of can-do optimism, is reduced to attending "survivor guilt" programs and musing over missed opportunities.

This dirge-like opening functions on another level than making the audience really want the reversal: it's a threnody for Phase One, since by the film's end the Big Four, with whom Feige built his world, must be shuffled off in one way or another, to make room for Phase Two. When the heroes get their act together and start their time-travel quest, ENDGAME is refreshingly free of the tedious overbaked FX-orgies seen in ULTRON and many other MCU films, orgies whose only raison d'etre is to keep the audience from noticing plot-holes. The time-quest section, for all its logic-problems, is the film's best section, recalling the leaner, meaner 2012 AVENGERS.

Once we're back in the present, predictability sets in again: the main good guys struggle for a while against Thanos (who's time-traveled forward to give them another crack at him). The erasure gets erased, the other heroes come back, and evil is banished, though all the people who have returned have still lost five years of their lives. Many of the heroes who return from death will be a big part of Feige's Phase Two, but Feige doesn't allow the new kids to overshadow the sendoff of the Old Guard (with the exception of the new Captain Marvel, who, though merely charmless in her own movie, comes off as terminally insufferable here).

Again, some sendoffs leave something to be desired. I expected little for the Hulk, and got what I expected. Despite Feige's near-total cockup of the Thor franchise, the thunder god does get a few good moments of both action and characterization. Iron Man's fate is telegraphed but adequately handled. The only surprise in the film is the fate of Captain America, which is another one of Feige's "time does whatever I want it to do" schticks but manages to work in terms of his character arc.

I mentioned Black Widow earlier: though not one of the Big Four, Feige sends her off too, though her character-arc isn't executed well, and her franchise-potential is sacrificed on the altar of her old partner Hawkeye, who's already slated to take part in a live-action spinoff series. Feige's plate is certainly already full with proven franchises like Spider-Man, Black Panther and the Guardians, to say nothing of potential interaction with Disney's new Marvel acquisitions. There's a decent big-freaking-battle at the end, not a classic but serviceable, aside from a tedious bit of irrelevant "girl power" virtue signaling.

Despite my many reservations about the Feige-verse, I'm a little sad that the Phase One ride is over, particularly since I'm getting the sense that Phase Two may not have much more to offer but endless virtual signaling. And, of course, jokes. But at least Feige does a better job getting rid of the Old Guard than Disney did with that of STAR WARS.

THE TIME MACHINE (1960)

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


Though George Pal's TIME MACHINE appeared in theaters at the beginning of the 1960s, I would argue that it is, in essence, the last great SF-films of the 1950s. I'm not talking about the base fact that some of the movie's scenes were filmed in 1959. Rather, it's more to do with my perception that the 1950s, no matter how many bad SF-films may have appeared, still evinces American cinema's first true investment in the SF-genre's concept of "thought experiments." In contrast, the early 1960s show marked a waning enthusiasm for such experiments, though arguably the genre made a comeback in 1966 with FAHRENHEIT 451 and recovered somewhat with recognized masterworks like PLANET OF THE APES and 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, both in 1968.

To date, no other filmmaker has managed to craft an adaptation of the Wells novel that has rivaled that of producer-director Pal and writer David Duncan-- which is quite an accomplishment, given that Pal and Duncan change so much of the source material.

As I pointed out in this essay, Wells is so devoted to his theme of cosmic degeneracy that he devotes scarcely any time to having his Traveler play about with his time-hopping machine, but instead has the character vault into a future thousands of years distant from his own. Duncan, however, is extremely concerned with having his traveler, name of George (from Wells' middle name), interact with 20th-century developments. Of course, Duncan had an advantage of hindsight that Wells did not have, but there's also a concerted attempt in the script to make Wells' future reflect the priorities of 1960s culture. Thus George (supposedly an Englishman, though Rod Taylor plays him as a practical-minded Yankee) makes his first temporal forays into World War I, World World II, and a 1960s atom-bomb war, the last of these playing to contemporary fears that such a conflict was practically right around the corner.

Improbably, despite the many thousands of years that ensue between the 1960s and what I'll call "Morlock-Earth," the patterns of the 1960s become indelible templates for the future. Duncan is basically true to the sociological patterns suggested by the Eloi and the Morlocks, but he adds in the contemporary reference of bomb shelters, which are loosely responsible for the divergence between the two species of humankind. The Morlocks are still the "engineer-types" who chose to remain underground even after the bombs stopped falling, but now the Eloi, the descendants of people who ventured back to the surface, have unaccountably lost all ability to think rationally. The movie-Eloi even have, unlike Wells' version, access to fallen cities that come complete with recording-devices that reveal to George (in English!) the circumstances of civilization's fall.

Perhaps because these Eloi are no longer covalent with "the idle rich" of earlier civilizations, Duncan stumps for the idea that the fragile flowers of the future are not beyond redemption. As in the novel, the Eloi seem blandly indifferent to one another's fates, even when one female, Weena, almost drowns in a river, only to be rescued by the Traveler. However, in the film George's heroic action provides a model for redemption. In the novel, Weena is described as child-like, and there's no sense of a budding romance between her and her savior. As played by Yvette Mimeux, though, Weena is ineluctably a mature female, and her association with George marks her slow journey to maturation (characterized by her desire to compete with the women of George's time-frame).

As in the novel, George's time-device is stolen by the Morlocks, forcing the hero to descend into the metaphorical underworld and fight these cannibalistic "devils." Unlike Wells' Traveler, who doesn't appear to fight very well but manages to stave off his foes with the help of an iron bar, Taylor's George is seen as a good brawler, and his actions cause at least some of the male Eloi (but not the female ones!) to fight their long-time oppressors. George returns to his own time, but the coda suggests that he will return to the Morlock-Earth and use the knowledge of his time to reform the fallen world.

Even before Pal's adaptation, though, it might be argued that Wells' scenario was broadly adapted in the 1956 film WORLD WITHOUT END, which simply re-arranged matters so that the people in the underworld became the helpless wimps and the people on the outside mutated into horrendous barbarians.

GODZILLA VS. MEGALON (1973)

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

My initial reaction to GODZILLA VS. MEGALON was about the same as that of most critics. I thought it a terrible exemplar of the "kiddie Godzilla" films of the last Showa years. particularly withe respect to having the Big G team up with a giant-robot superhero named Jet Jaguar.

However, in my more recent viewings, I found MEGALON somewhat appealing on the purely kinetic level. Though it was made by roughly the same team that executed the previous film in the series-- GODZILLA ON MONSTER ISLAND, execrable for its grating use of stock footage-- and was also shot on a rapid schedule, director Fukuda turned out what may be the best of the "cotton candy" Godzillas.

The action may be marginally better this time because MEGALON wasn't conceived as a Godzilla film, but as a pilot for the robot-hero Jet Jaguar. Thus on some level the filmmakers started out with the idea of doing a lively kids'-action film, rather than just churning out another routine entry in the Godzilla series. Thus, even after the bigwigs had ordered the inclusion of the Big G to make MEGALON more marketable, Fukuda and company had already thought out the project in terms of the "giant robot" subgenre.

The principal human actors are an inventor, his nephew and his buddy, all involved in testing Jet Jaguar (who varies between being human-sized and gigantic). As characters they're negligible, but Fukuda puts them through some decent action-sequences, in marked contrast to the stultifying antics from MONSTER ISLAND. As for the big monster-battle, Gigan, also improbably recycled from MONSTER ISLAND, is as boring as before, and Godzilla seems out of place in this world. However, Jet Jaguar and the beetle-like Megalon have some OK moves in some scenes, and so the monster fights are slightly better than those of MONSTER ISLAND-- even if MEGALON does include a much-derided scene in which Godzilla launches a "flying kick"-- twice!-- at one of his opponents.

The Seatopians are the monster-unleashing villains this time. They're a race of humans who dwell in a sunken city and take exception to the nuclear tests on the surface, and they unleash Megalon to quell impudent humanity. They're also a marginal improvement on the villains of MONSTER ISLAND, but only just.

This is one of the few Godzilla films of the Showa period with no significant female characters.