Mothra vs. Godzilla
Up until this point, I have only seen “six” movies about that terrifying nuclear monster, Godzilla: Ishiro Honda’s 1954 masterpiece; the 1956 “Americanized” version of Honda’s film, with a spliced in Raymond Burr; the silly “Son of Godzilla”; Roland Emmerich’s awful 1998 movie; “Godzilla 2000”; and Gareth Edwards’s recent blockbuster reboot of the creature (the review of which is coming). Now, it’s time to get into the many monster match-ups the big guy has had over the years. It seemed natural to start with Mothra.
I was puzzled by how Toho Inc., the studio behind the Godzilla franchise, got Honda to direct this film until I did my research, and saw that indeed, Honda directed several of the “Godzilla” films over the years up until his death in 1993. Seeing his original film last year, there seemed to be something deeply personal to him about the film, made less than a decade after Hiroshima and Nagasaki made nuclear destruction a real possibility. All of these sequels and mash-ups and such feel like a selling out of that personal work, but I have to wonder, what if there’s something more there?
Whatever it is, that “something more” certainly is missing from the first portion of the film, where a giant egg has been found on the Japanese coast. A reporter and his new photographer are on the scene, as is a corporation that has taken possession of the egg, and plans to experiment on it. But two miniature women from the island the egg comes from is here to warn mankind: return the egg, or it will hatch, and what’s in it will return on it’s own. I’ll give you one guess who wakes up pissed at mankind’s decision, and one guess as to how the government responds. I’ll give you a hint on the latter: it involves a giant moth…
No, there’s no subtext or symbolism present in “Godzilla vs. Mothra,” but that’s not a bad thing. Honda does a fine job with large-scale destruction and two monsters going at one another, even if the tanks are obviously toys, and Godzilla is obviously a man in a suit. This is the charm of many of these films for many people, and Honda and Toho deliver it in spades, and this film understands that well. A great film it is not, but it is an enjoyable monster movie that has a lot to recommend it for fans of the franchise, and old B-movies in particular. I’ll definitely be watching more of these in the future.
