To quote Fight Club: “On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero” and this proves to be true even to the legendary juggernaut known as Godzilla. That’s right, in his 22nd feature outing and the final installment of the Heisei series, Toho’s big gimmick to keep the King Of The Monsters relevant (and to pave the way for the infamous Sony/Tri Star American reboot) was to kill the moody bastard off as publicly as they possibly could.
As a result, we got a movie that’s not only strangely moving, but also gave the Heisei era the big, emotional send off that helped cement that section of Godzilla’s history as probably the most complete the franchise has ever known.
Gathering up a clutch of plot points that had been brewing of the past few movies, such as the growth of an infant Godzilla and the continued involvement of psychic, Miki Saegusa since Godzilla Vs. Biollante, this “final” entry also went right back to Godzilla’s roots in order to provide a suitable foe to hasten the demise of the King of the Monsters.
Thanks to sudden destruction of Birth Island, Godzilla’s internal nuclear core is on the fritz and his body temperature is rising dangerously so dangerously that no amount of chamomile tea could hope to calm down a catastrophic meltdown if it goes critical. Showing up in an enraged state, even the Kaiju’s appearance shows that something is terribly wrong as his body is dotted liberally with glowing super heated red patches and he’s steaming like 90 foot tea kettle. As a result, Godzilla rampages through Hong Kong in a pain infused red mist, obliterating anything in his path with a far away, crazed look in his eye you’d normally see in that one guy in a pub everyone tells you to stay away from. As his young ward, now grown enough to be known as Godzilla Junior, travels across the globe doing Godzilla-y things, the adult follows causing yet more destruction as his biology grows ever closer to a becoming literal time bomb.
To counteract this, the JDSF hire Godzilla nut and college student Kenkichi Yamane (grandson to Dr. Kyohei Yamane from the original 1954 movie) to figure out what’s going on, while Kaiju sympathiser, Miki Saegusa, uses her fading psychic powers to track down a wayward Godzilla Junior. Also leading the struggle against Godzilla melting down and igniting the earth’s atmosphere like a skyscraping arsonist, is the retooled Super X III, that’s employed to use its low temperature lasers to freeze the Big G and slow his meltdown – but this only proves to be a temporary measure.
To make matters even worse, hundreds of 10 foot tall crab-like monsters have appeared in Tokyo that can assemble to form a towering demonic crustacean creature called Destoroyah and among it’s many weapons (aside from its name being vaguely unpronuncable and a complete bastard to spell) is that its creation is directly tied in with the only weapon has ever killed a Godzilla – The Oxygen Destroyer.
There are many aspects that make Godzilla Vs. Destoroyah such a worthy end to a thread that began back in 1984 with Return Of Godzilla, but surely the true masterstroke is putting Godzilla himself on a ticking clock before his meltdown would essentially be the China Syndrome on a global scale. The countdown aspect of the plot creates the type of race against time aspect you got from films like Jan De Bont’s Speed – but instead of a bus exploding if it drops below 50mph, if Godzilla’s core temperature hits 1,200 ⁰C, Godzilla go boom and adds a sense of urgency not usually felt in Kaiju movies.
As well as that there’s a real feeling of fate tragically moving against our gargantuan anti-hero as every effort that is made to cool his rapidly heating biology is soon thwarted as something rises up to counter it: like fighting a hulking crab monster.
Ah yes, Destoroyah. While not a patch on the rebooted, original line up of monsters such as King Ghidorah and MechaGodzilla, he’s certainly a noticable step up from the crystal shoulder implants of SpaceGodzilla and proves to be mean and tricky enough to be a legitimate threat even if Godzilla wasn’t dying. First seen split into countless smaller parts and launching an Aliens style attack on a hapless SWAT team, he later engages recombines to larger sizes in order to engage in epic, life-or-death battles with both Godzilla and his boy. It’s this mix of ground-level nastiness and towering threat that makes Destoroyah so imposing – well, that and he looks like the Kaiju incarnation of the freaking devil with oversized horns, a scarlet complexion and massive bat wings all adding to his diabolical appearance. Oh, and he’s fucking huge, too! In fact, how the hell the suit performer wasn’t crushed alive by the sheer weight of trying to wear the suit I’ll never know…
As Godzilla Vs. Destoroyah goes all out to emphatically make this the Godzilla show (it certainly feels like he has more screen time than he usually gets), it means that the human characters are reduced to ciphers that regurgitate facts, theories or constantly referencing Godzilla’s apocalyptic temperature for the benefit of the audience, but there are a few nice touches that keep you casually engaged with the puny humans with the first being the cast being bothered by those messed up mini-Destoroyahs. However, in a nice touch, the original film is referenced plenty of times due to the connection with both Dr. Yamane and the original Oxygen Destroyer and we get a call back to the Super X seen previously in both Return Of Godzilla and Godzilla Vs. Biollante; but the most noticeable aspect is that, after five appearances, Megumi Odaka’s Miki Saegusa finally gets to take centre stage as she brings her hands at the plight of Godzilla Junior.
When the end finally comes and Toho makes good on their advertising (don’t panic, it’s not technically a spoiler as Toho’s entire ad campaign for the movie was outright boasting about it), it’s a surprisingly poignant and moving end considering it’s a dude in a glowing lizard suit. This is thanks in a large part to the incredible musical contributions of Akira Ifukibe who produced all of Godzilla’s most notic5 scores since the character’s inception in 1954 and this would be his last score of a Godzilla movie he produced before his death 11 years later. A multiple farewell, then.
And so the Heisei series comes to an end and distinguishes itself as, if not the best, then certainly the most consistent section of Godzilla’s impressive career of aggressive city relocation. The immediate future? A devastatingly disappointing American remake and Toho’s notoriously spotty Millennium series: but for now, the King is dead. Long live the God.
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