1godzillafan's Toku Corner (Ultra Q)

Original title in Japan translates to numerous things and all of them look like word salad.  Let's just say it's called City on the Edge of Battle also.

Premise:  After the original Godzilla unearths and reveals itself to be still alive and astoundingly large 300 meters tall, humanity takes refuge in the facility that housed the experimental Mechagodzilla, which has been mutated into a "Mechagodzilla City" via nanotechnology.

I'm hard on these anime films.  And they deserve it.  They squander so much about the Godzilla legacy and rework it into inane psychobabble, and leave the giant monsters to the sidelines while they shoot their own potentially interesting stories in the foot.  The one thing that can save a bad Godzilla movie is good monster action.

I mean, Mechagodzilla City?  For fuck's sake...

If I were to cite a "favorite" among the group, I'd probably hold the second one to higher esteem than the first and third.  At least it was the one I felt the least irritated while watching.  I enjoyed how the film explored this new lore of a planet that had been ruled by kaiju for 10,000 years and seeing little links between traditional Godzilla portrayals and it, such as the natives being an evolution of the concept of the Infant Island natives in Mothra (which is spelled out with twin ladies among them).



When it's presenting something new, I found myself a little intrigued too.  Mechagodzilla City isn't an unappealing concept, it's just a nutty attempt at an incarnation of Mechagodzilla.  The conflict of the city assimilating those who enter it is a fairly good human conflict and provides proper tension for the third act between those who desire it and those who fight against it.

Probably the basic problem with City on the Edge of Battle is that it probably shouldn't be a Godzilla movie.  Godzilla lumbers around for the duration and gets fired upon in the climax, before firing his heat beam back because his character model is too bloody immobile to do anything else.  If you aren't going to use Godzilla, why is he here?  This goes back to the point of my first paragraph, though.  Telling a human story in the Godzilla universe isn't an impossible task, but it's one that you must proceed with caution on.  If you fail, and your Godzilla action isn't good enough to fall back on, your movie sucks.

I'm tired of talking about these movies, though, and I'm glad this is the last time I will on this list.  It's time to bitch about some REAL Godzilla movies.

Premise:  Using the telepathic gifts of Miki Sagusa, G-Force concocts a plan to try and enhance her brainwaves to control Godzilla how they see fit.  Their plan is interuped before it can be fully developed, because somehow Godzilla's DNA winds up in space, goes through a black hole and comes out a white hole (don't ask me to explain it further), and mutates into a cosmic creature resembling the King of the Monsters.  SpaceGodzilla makes his way down to Earth where he challenges Godzilla and imprisons his son, Little Godzilla.  G-Force must abandon their plans and pilot their new giant robot, MOGUERA, to help Godzilla destroy the new beast.

Objectively Godzilla vs. SpaceGodzilla is one of the worst movies in the franchise.  It's a half-baked story that was rushed into production, features probably the most gloriously fakey special effects of the Heisei era, and just in general makes no goddamn sense.  But I'll confess to being a little bit charmed by its nonsensical vomited-up storyline and goofball presentation.

There are elements here that I think show promise, but aren't given any ample room to develop.  I like the character of Yuki, and how he has some sort of death wish vendetta against Godzilla, and I am endeared to how he chases the monster around and tries to kill him single handed.  Whether his plan to kill Godzilla by shooting him in the armpit with a bullet full of blood coagulant has any basis in reality, I'm not the one to answer that, but it's a Godzilla movie.  Reality was flung out the door long ago.

This movie also gives Megumi Odaka's character of Miki Sagusa the most to do out of all the films she's been featured in (she's the longest recurring character out of any of the Godzilla movies, at six films).  It's too bad that all it amounts to is her being whiney about people being mean to Godzilla and being a damsel in distress later in the film.  Speaking of that bit, there's a subplot in this film that really goes nowhere and furthers nothing in the film, in which Miki is kidnapped by the Yakuza so they can use her to control Godzilla, which was something that backfired on G-Force by blowing up their equipment.  The mole science guy that kidnaps her restrains her and does the exact same thing he did on the island, then gets all pissy when he gets the exact same result.  Miki then pulls telekinetic powers out of her ass to help her rescuers get her out of there, though I feel this movie misses a golden opportunity to let Miki go Carrie on everyone's ass.  Now that's a Godzilla movie worth watching.

Oh yeah, and I guess Miki has a romantic sublot with a G-Force officer, which is just them getting into arguments over whether it's right to control Godzilla throughout the movie.  Then at the end of the movie they're holding hands while strolling on the beach and I suddenly realize "Ohhhhhh.....that was supposed to be sexual tension...must be a Japanese thing."  I'm sure they spent the next few weeks fucking like jackrabbits, only to breakup because they can't stop whining at each other.  This is probably likely since her G-Force fling is nowhere to be found in the next movie.

As for Godzilla, I like the idea of using Miki's telepathic link to the creature and trying to weaponize it, and the first act of the film plays with it fairly well, though it drifts off and evaporates after the Yakuza subplot farts off.  Godzilla's vendetta with SpaceGodzilla is decent, as Little Godzilla's predicament is humiliating and cruel, though I think it makes SpaceGodzilla a little too human-like.

SpaceGodzilla is a good looking design, though his motives or intentions are unclear.  The movie presents a hypothesis as to why he exists, which is somehow both mindblowingly thought out yet frustratingly vague at the same time.  It's funny how they try to justify how he was created by giving two scenarios where Godzilla's cells floated out into space, once when Biollante ascended and another after Mothra battled Godzilla and went to space immediately afterward, while letting the audience figure out which one was what happened.  I think the movie wants us to believe it was Biollante's scenario, since SpaceGodzilla shares similar facial features to her final form, but in the end this entire scene is trying to justify that they have a space monster that looks exactly like Godzilla, and they're doing a shit job at it too.  I'd like to see an alternate version of this movie in which all of this is dropped and SpaceGodzilla were actually Gigan instead, where they don't have to explain the giant metal, space chicken and just accept that it's there.

Also here is the new mech, MOGUERA, based on a space robot from The Mysterians.  I'm not entirely sure why G-Force thinks MOGUERA is a step up from the obviously more advanced Mechagodzilla from the previous film, but I have a soft spot for the clunky POS.  I like that it's a combiner of a flying vehicle and a giant drill, making the movie feel even more like Power Rangers.  At lot of the movie's clunkiest special effects are at the expense of this thing, including a laughably bad space battle in an asteroid field.  Though, it's giving MOGUERA too much credit to say that he's the only one with bad effects work, since SpaceGodzilla's crystals never look like anything else other than plastic and there's even a scene where the tip of Godzilla's tail falls off on camera.

As if I needed more evidence that this movie is all over the map, Mothra has a storyline here too.  And like everything else in this damn movie, it goes absolutely nowhere.  Mothra sends down little fairy Mothras to help the Cosmos twins communicate with Miki and warn her of SpaceGodzilla.  It's easy to forget these things are a thing in the movie, because they contribute very little.  Every once in a while a little plush toy on a string flops down in front of her and they have a chat.  At the end of the movie, the Cosmos say in monotone "Congratulations!  You've saved planet Earth!"

Cool.  I'm so glad we needed them to tell us this.

Godzilla vs. SpaceGodzilla is a very bad, very stupid movie.  It also takes a certain kind of bad film lover to see the little things about it that are amusing, even if the whole is a mess.  I can pop in this one on a rainy day.  Sometimes I regret it.  Sometimes I laugh and accept it.