Movie Review: GODZILLA: MONSTER PLANET

 

I miss Godzilla.

I miss his personality, his animal intellect, his occasional joie de vivre he would exhibit in his happier moments.

I miss the convoluted plots with aliens, flying saucers, giant robots, time travelling and diminutive twins.

I miss his rubber-suited energy, brought to life by Nakajima and Satsuma with much verve and vigor.

I miss his stable of charismatic monstrous friends and foes, sending crowds fleeing in terror from their thunderous confrontations.

Something got lost over the years, and it seemed to peak at the turn of the new millennium.

The 1998 Roland Emmerich American version may not have done the radioactive beast any favours in corrupting his appearance and behaviour, pushing fans to call him Gino (Godzilla In Name Only), but one could say that Godzilla ultimately was killed for good by the puerile mess that was Ryuhei Kitamura's GODZILLA FINAL WARS in 2004.

It took 12 years for the massive creature to reappear on Japan’s shores, of course after Gareth Edward brought the beast back in 2014 in another American iteration of Japan’s favorite Kaiju, in a film that promised a lot but offered little to be excited about.

SHIN GODZILLA was a mixed bag to be certain. While it served a rather clever sociopolitical satire of Japan’s stifling bureaucracy (something Shusuke Kaneko had already explored beautifully in his 1998 remake of GAMERA) and an eerie comment on the recent Fukushima disaster, Godzilla himself was a mere shadow of himself. Ponderously plodding across the Japanese countryside, stiff and monolithic, he was now a mere symbol for man’s folly and destruction, harking back to the 1954 film that started it all. A noble intention, but lacking the sense of menace the original Ishiro Honda directed classic conferred to the Big G. Arguably, I would say that Shusuke Kaneko (him again) managed to create a more intensely savage and terrorizing beast in the 2001 monster mash GODZILLA, MOTHRA AND KING GHIDORAH: GIANT MONSTERS ALL-OUT ATTACK.

A face only a mother could love; the mangled twisted vision of Godzilla in SHIN GODZILLA.

Nevertheless, the film’s social commentary helped the film achieve critical and box-office success in Japan, triumphantly bringing back the creature to his home turf.

Which brings us to GODZILLA: MONSTER PLANET, (Hiroyuki Seshita, Kobun Shizuno) which is the first feature length animated film featuring Godzilla (we will not mention the embarrassing 1978 Hanna-Barbera cartoon series, or the 1998 animated Spin-off of the Emmerich film).

The film has a very intriguing premise: Earth has been devastated by Godzilla and his monstrous ilk, forcing humanity to escape to space, in search of a more habitable planet. Their quest bearing no fruit, and their life support running low, they decide to come back to their home planet, hoping that the 10,000 years that has passed on Earth since their departure will have left behind a less hostile world waiting for them. I think the title of the film points out this hope is crushed under a gigantic radioactive foot.

Sporting a gorgeous animated style, mixing adeptly a more classical style of animé with computer animation, the film is lovely to look at without a doubt. The music by Takayuki Hattori (who had previously scored GODZILLA VS SPACE GODZILLA and GODZILLA 2000) is appropriately bombastic, evoking Akira Ifukube’s work on the original series.So the film SOUNDS good too.

The film exploits poorly its promising classic science-fiction premise, though, preferring to focus on the tired cliche of Captain Ahab obsessed by his own white whale. The main character Haruo Sakaki elicits little sympathy with his constantly breathless snarling performance, and his ill-fated quest for revenge endangers many hundreds of his compatriots. He is surprisingly delivered command of a mission to destroy Godzilla based on a plan that is reminiscent of the rebel’s scheme to blow up the Death Star in STAR WARS. Tensions between the characters is kept at a strict minimum, to help propel the fragile script by Gen Urobuchi along at a pace that is still quite a bit deliberate. Even then, little time is spent on how life could be sprung forth anew on this future Earth where only fossils of its once great structures remain and where monsters dwell. This being the first in a proposed trilogy, one can only hope this aspect will be explored further in the following chapters. Will I feel compelled to watch them is the question.

As for the true star of the film, he is sadly no different in characterization from SHIN GODZILLA’s lumbering lifeless husk, heavily wrecking havoc with little signs of conscience of his surroundings. More plant than animal, he most likely is meant to represent literally a force of nature (something not new in the 64-year-old series) which rips away any chance of being more than a growling allegory. By doing so, there is a somewhat pretentious attempt to make Godzilla relevant again, like SHIN GODZILLA did a year prior. But should it come at the expense of his identity that he developed over the last 60 plus years?

I’m not asking for him to dance a victory jig like in INVASION OF THE ASTRO-MONSTER, or entertain conversations with his fellow monsters with the help of word balloons as he did in GODZILLA VS GIGAN. But surely there is a way to portray him as a living being with emotions and even motivations and still keep a sense of that precious symbolism alive. There is no need to make him into this grandiose empty vessel, only meant to carry the weight of his crushing metaphors.

Sigh…

I miss Godzilla.