1989’s Godzilla vs. Biollante may be the most underrated film of the series. In fact, I was so high on the movie at one point that I ranked it the third best out of a total twenty-eight. Then I got shredded on Facebook for it. I usually wouldn’t care, but since I try to find a unique angle from which to analyze each film for G60, I felt like it might be worthwhile to re-examine my stance. Was I really so far off? Well sure, I mean, why not? After all, I could be overrating it just as much as I think most fans underrate it.
I decided to re-watch GvsB specifically to identify what I liked about it so much as well as what might be major turn-offs to others:
1. The Tone.
I love the super serious take on Godzilla writer and director, Kazuki Omori, went for. He is never played for irony or laughs. Not once. Godzilla is treated with reverence by every character as both a harbinger of death and man’s great scientific blunder. Just look at the suit! The Biogoji costume worn by Kenpachiro Satsuma is fierce and uncompromising. It doesn’t lend itself to emotion and it shouldn’t. This Godzilla an animalistic juggernaut who kills and destroys A LOT. The human characters never develop sympathy for him, nor does he give even one iota of thought to backing off the throttle and sparing them.
But this also means you cannot really root for him. Godzilla doesn’t display any human mannerisms or anthropomorphic tendencies to help the audience identify with him. If for you, these movies are all about having fun, this is not going to be your interpretation of Godzilla. GvsB can definitely be enjoyable, if dark, serious, and complex material is the kind of thing you enjoy. If not, then I suggest you wait for the next film in the series.
2. The Plot.
If anything, it’s inventive. If anything else, it’s cluttered and complicated. The gist of it is that organizations from Japan, The United States, and Saradia (a fictional Middle Eastern nation) all try to collect or steal samples of Godzilla’s cells from each other that are left over from Godzilla’s rampage in 1984. Saradia needs the cells’ regenerative properties to harvest genetically engineered crops that can grow in their deserts. Japan needs them to develop anti-nuclear-energy-bacteria to protect itself from Godzilla and undermine the use of nuclear weapons. America wants them simply to stop the other two from using them. This back-and-forth takes on elements of espionage, genetic engineering, and terrorism. Want to see something you’ll never see in a serious film today? Well America resorts to downright terrorist acts to get the cells, using the threat of releasing Godzilla from a volcano in order to get their way. Oh! And there’s also the Super-X2, a scientist who’s deceased daughter’s soul somehow ends up inside a rose bush and then in Biollante, a lengthy subplot about a psychic girl, and an experimental technology that can artificially control the weather!
We’ve come a long way from alien cockroaches who just want to build an amusement park. You’re either going to love it or hate it.
3. The Characters.
There are a ton of them and they probably are not all necessary. Why don’t I list them? We have Dr. Shiragami (biologist grieving over his daughter, and Biollante’s creator), Miki Saegusa (teenage psychic who communicates with dead girls trapped in roses and who tries to telepathically STOP GODZILLA), Colonel Gondo (the action hero), Colonel Kuroki (young guy in charge of anti-Godzilla operations), Dr. Kirishima (basically just the guy who advances the plot by default by linking everyone else together), Asuka (Miki’s “handler” and Kirishima’s love interest who no one cares about), a Saradian secret agent, and a pair of American stooges from a corporation with terrorism on the mind called Biomajor.
What’s more, nearly all of these people are major characters with multiple integral scenes and their own subplots. It’s definitely a lot and something I may have incorrectly downplayed in my Godzilla Countdown article. The two scientists, Shiragami and Kirishima, should have been combined into one person who would have been the clear, main protagonist. Then Asuka could be dropped altogether, allowing the psychic, Miki, to be more active and play the love interest herself.
4. Biollante.
You’ll notice I’ve hardly brought up Biollante at all in this piece. This is for good reason, because this movie might as well be called, “Godzilla vs. Science and Corporate Espionage.” Biollante is an absolutely fantastic kaiju, she is just underutilized (and as the movie tells us, Biollante is no-bones-about-it, a girl). Its first stage, when the monster is literally a giant, tentacle ROSE, is all at once terrifying, tragic, and oddly delicate for a kaiju. She is a genetic cocktail gone-bad of Godzilla cells, rose DNA, and the spirit of Dr. Shiragami’s daughter, Erika. The film never makes it clear exactly how that third part happens though. Biollante’s second form resembles more of an “Alligator/Godzilla/Mangrove Tree” and absolutely dwarfs its genetic donor in size. The prop that brings it to life is one of the most awe-inspiring effects Toho has ever done and still looks photo-realistic twenty-five years later. Using Toho’s official statistics, Biollante is still the largest and heaviest kaiju ever imagined for the Godzilla series.
The English dub, one of the few examples that is arguably better than the original Japanese dialogue, sums up exactly what it means to be Biollante with an incredible line from Shiragami: “I wonder, did Godzilla come all this way to see Biollante because it knew they were made from the same cells? More than just the same family, they’re identical, the same thing. Not brother and sister, they’re both the same creature.”
So, did I overrate Godzilla vs. Biollante? Not necessarily, though I am certainly more aware of its flaws. In hindsight, it probably belongs 2-3 spots lower in my rankings. What I don’t doubt is that it is still easily one of Godzilla’s very best.
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