“You’ll go underground… with your spaceship.”
If a timeline of the Showa Godzilla series was turned into a standard line graph with the x-axis indicating the year and y-axis representing overall film quality, it would peak in two specific years for two films almost every kaiju fan could agree on. Those two films are of course 1954’s Gojira and 1964’s Mothra vs. Godzilla. Back on our graph, we would see a gradual negative slope at the start of the 1970s before bottoming out with Godzilla vs. Megalon and finishing with a major uptick in the middle of the decade with the two Mechagodzilla films. I argue that the Showa series also peaked a third time during the 1960s.
Let us examine the film in question. It stars Akira Kubo and follows a team of hero-astronauts who use their iconic, retro-futuristic spaceship to investigate the source of extra-terrestrial signal interference causing problems on Earth. The alien race creating the disturbance uses their technology to control Godzilla and other monsters as weapons of conquest, and their arrogance results in our heroes solving the technological riddle to free the kaiju from alien control. This movie’s finale is a climactic battle between the Earth monsters and King Ghidorah.
If you have not already cut through the thick irony of the last paragraph, the film I speak of is obviously Invasion of Astro-Monster.
But what about Destroy All Monsters, the movie this article is supposedly written about? You know, the 1968 kaiju epic that was the last hurrah for the founding fathers team of Honda, Tsuburaya, and Ifukube, and had the largest monster cast ever seen up to that point? Well, I’m afraid it’s just a tad overrated. This is not meant to downplay the cultural impact of seeing a film of such unprecedented scope on the big screen back in the sixties. Destroy All Monsters (DAM) was revolutionary in its time and is still undeniably one of the greater Godzilla movies, even today. What it is not is a better written, directed, and acted film than Invasion of Astro-Monster.
I’m not going to spend this entire piece simply comparing and contrasting the two films to prove my point, but if you read my intentionally-misleading description of Astro-Monster and apply it instead to DAM, you’ll see that they are very much the same movie. Only where DAM amazes with quantity and size, it forgets all the intricacies like complex characters, relationships, and motives with clearly defined goals and stakes. And it’s most innovative idea, Monsterland, a quarantined island complex for the study and containment of kaiju, is never utilized to its potential or made integral to the plot.
DAM’s biggest mistake is the depiction of the Kilaaks, the second alien race Toho conjured up for the Godzilla series after the Xians. In Astro-Monster, the Xians are after Earth’s water and intend to govern humanity as a colony, giving them free-reign to take over our natural resources. The Controller lays out a precise set of demands and a deadline for which to comply. The stakes and urgency our protagonists are up against are made perfectly clear, and then the Xians make things even worse by attacking early when they gain wind of the plan to resist them. The Kilaaks issue no such ultimatum, nor are explicitly after anything in particular. The Kilaak leader merely states that they want to build a new scientific civilization on Earth, and lots of people must die to accomplish it. Well, why do they need to build this “civilization” and why do they take the actions they do? What do they want us to do? And by when?
A lack of plot specificity on the part of the villain severely hampers the story DAM is trying to tell. The crew of the Moonlight SY-3 spaceship, the human heroes of the film, simply move along from one task to another until it’s time for Godzilla, Anguirus, and Gorosaurus to take on King Ghidorah.
Much like its more modern contemporary, Godzilla Final Wars, spectacle seems to be the main concern filmmakers had in DAM. In particular, the introduction to Monsterland, the multi-kaiju raid on Tokyo, and of course the Earth vs. Ghidorah fight at the end feel almost breathtaking after spending the last two films held up on tiny tropical islands. The special effects sequences are the most extravagant and highest quality seen since Mothra vs. Godzilla and the urban destruction is probably greater than any entry save for Gojira.
That’s why it is so unfortunate that every character in the film, save for Yoshio Tsuchiya’s Dr. Otani who dies thirty minutes in, is almost painfully one-dimensional. The lack of screen time for Godzilla in Astro-Monster is mitigated by the fact that every character onscreen is unique with their own individual flair and charisma. Glenn, Fuji, and Tetsuo form a perfect triad protagonist and the Planet X Controller is probably the most entertaining figure in the movie. There just isn’t anybody like that in DAM. It is a very good thing that Toho’s heightened budget allowed for more and longer effects sequences, because the human characters in this one just can’t carry the load.
DAM is also noteworthy because it is the first film in a while where Godzilla is really allowed to act like Godzilla again. We get to see him incinerate the United Nations Building in New York, thwart several attempts by our heroes to access the Kilaaks, and demolish huge sections of Tokyo, and basically party like its 1954! Granted, all of this is while he is under alien control, but it’s still good to see him perform like an actual kaiju again. The Tokyo sequence is especially well-done, making it a shame that a Godzilla against Manda fight was cut from the finished film. This was supposedly done because two Kilaak monsters fighting each other would undermine their perceived ability to control them. Honda probably could have left the scene in, because dialogue from a later scene when the heroes gain the Kilaak’s control system for themselves indicates that it can simply point monsters in the right direction, not dictate their every action.
A word on Godzilla’s Revenge (All Monsters Attack): The next installment will focus on Godzilla vs. Hedorah instead, even though Revenge is chronologically the next film in the series after DAM. Godzilla’s Revenge deservedly gets lots of flack for being quick cash-grab made for kids that uses liberal amounts of stock footage instead of new material. I will not be discussing Godzilla’s Revenge for the lone fact that I really don’t have anything insightful to say about it. Reviews of the Godzilla movies are a-dime-a-dozen, so I try my best to find some new angle or point of view to approach them from. With Godzilla’s Revenge, there simply is not one I’m interested in writing.
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