Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla (2002)

When I was a kid, I was a huge fan of Godzilla movies. A Saturday afternoon spent watching Godzilla on Son of Svengoolie was pure, sugary-cereal bliss. They didn't have to specifically be Godzilla movies - I loved Gamara, too, and any Japanese TV series that involved beating up on monsters on a weekly basis: Ultraman, Spectreman, etc.

But Godzilla still held a special interest for two reasons:

a) Godzilla started out as a villain and, though he morphed into a good guy, would sometimes be villainous again. I loved - and still love - the idea of a series built around a character who could be either good or evil from one installment to the next. You never know until the movie starts playing if you'll be rooting for Godzilla, or if you're supposed to be scared of him. That moral ambiguity made these movies interesting. In some, they split the difference: Godzilla is evil, but gets wrangled into a situation in which he ultimately does something good, anyway... defending the Earth from aliens or whatnot. The upshot is: Godzilla is a personified force of nature. There's no controlling Godzilla, no bargaining with him or swaying him or killing him. You might as well ask a hurricane for help. He'll do whatever the fuck he wants, and all the long-suffering people of Japan can do is cope.

b) Godzilla fought the coolest monsters. Gamara had some real contenders... especially that shark guy who shot ninja stars out of his head. But Godzilla battled with (and against) the classics of the kaiju genre. If I had to pick a fave, it would be King Ghidorah... mostly because in DESTROY ALL MONSTERS, it took every monster on Earth, teaming up and coming at him all at once, to even have a chance against the guy. That, my friends, is evidence of serious badassery.

Yet... there's always been a special place in my heart for Mechagodzilla. He represents the end result of the question: "If Godzilla is the most awesome thing ever, how do you make Godzilla even more awesome?" And the answer is: what if you had a version of Godzilla who was also a giant robot?!

That is the core of geek thought.

The first Godzilla movie (1954) has since drawn critical attention because it's seen as a reaction to the atomic bombs dropped on Japan... idea being that Godzilla (or Gojira, which is his actual name) is the personification of those events, but in a form which is defeatable... at least in the first movie. I like this train of thought, as I firmly believe that movies are dreams made into a tangible and sharable form and - at their best - are the collective dreams of the society which creates them, the product of the zeitgeist. That's a lotta weight to put on the shoulders of a movie starring a dude in a rubber dinosaur suit, but I believe it to be real.

Most people are aware of the classic '60s Godzilla movies. But it's not as well known outside Japan and geek circles that Tojo kept making Godzilla movies, on into the '90s and oughts. I've seen a few of them over the past couple of years: FINAL WARS, GIANT MONSTERS ALL-OUT ATTACK, the one where Godzilla fights a giant rose bush, etc.

(It should be noted that the 10-year-old version of myself is still a strong enough aspect of my soul that, having been informed of its existence, it's impossible - impossible - for me to go through life without watching a movie entitled GIANT MONSTERS ALL-OUT ATTACK).

All that said, I watched GODZILLA AGAINST MECHAGODZILLA (2002).

Apart from the pro-wrestling-with-monsters fun, I've come to love the corny human stories that round out these movies. Make no mistake - they're always stiff, goofy sub-plots, and frequently weird. I don't mind... it's a course in a prix fixe meal.

In GAM, we have an evil Godzilla. As many of them do, this movie ret-cons the Godzilla backstory. In this one, Godzilla showed up in 1954 and was killed. A couple of other giant monsters have attacked Japan since then, specifically Rodan and Big Foot (?) - but no Godzilla, 'cause he's dead, remember? It's a frequent enough occurrance that Japan has a monster defense force.

Godzilla shows up to stomp the crap outta Japan. But this is a new Godzilla, who's just like the original one. You may ask: where did he come from? How is this possible? In which case, you're missing the point that it doesn't matter.

The usual tanks and planes trundle out to "fight" Godzilla, in that they shoot at him, make him mad and get their asses handed to them. The monster defense peeps roll out their "maser" gun, which is almost equally useless. Our plucky heroine is in charge of the maser. Though it won't pierce his armor, she gets the idea of shooting Godzilla in the eye. This pisses him off enough that he goes back into the ocean, but not before killing a bunch of people and making the heroine look like a failure in the eyes of the military. She gets stuck riding a desk for the next couple of years.

Meanwhile, the Japanese PM realizes that tanks, planes and masers aren't much of a defense against Godzilla... and make no mistake, he will be back. So they cook up the idea of using DNA scraped off the original (dead) Godzilla's skeleton - still lying at the bottom of Toyko Bay - and using that as the basis of a cyborg, aka Mechagodzilla.

Luckily for Japan and the movie's characters, Godzilla is nice enough to lie low during the years it takes to get the Mechagodzilla project up and running. Our plucky heroine is given a second chance in life, and offered the lead pilot position. (This version of Mechagodzilla has to be driven from inside, you see). The team even wears baseball hats with the Mechagodzilla insignia, which made me smile.

Godzilla shows back up, as he must. Alarms sound, people run around, and the Mechagodzilla team assembles in a way that was reminiscent of what I think a live-action Voltron movie would be like. The first thing Mechagodzilla does is fire a bunch of missiles at Godzilla. I don't know what good they think that's gonna do. Whether missiles are fired from artillery or a pod mounted on Mechagodzilla's shoulders, the result is the same, and that's jack shit.

But it prompts what was for me the most interesting story beat... because the missile burn Godzilla's ass enough for him to roar his fury. The roar triggers the latent memories in Mechagodzilla's Godzilla-derived DNA, and he freaks out and starts smashing up Tokyo even after Godzilla has gotten bored and wandered back into the ocean.

I found this scene directly analagous to the "dream" sequence in ROBOCOP. It's a key thematic scene in one of my favorite movies, because it says that you can wipe a man's memory and encase him in robotics, but he's still a man. Thus it is the same for Mechagodzilla. But again we get into the moral ambiguity of the series... Alex Murphy is the good guy in ROBOCOP, so we're cheering for the man under the armor and booing the nogoodnicks who put him there. In GAM, it's considered a glitch in his program, which is fixed by the lead programmer. Mechagodzilla behaves himself and is brought back online to fight Godzilla again in act three.

Which begs the question: what if, instead of freaking out, Bob Morton had just gotten that chick with the giant glasses to fix the glitch that was Alex Murphy's soul trying to break free? The programmer in GAM says that it's a fixable situation because DNA sequences are similar to binary sequences, and can thus be programmed like a computer, repaired like a bug. It would seem that GAM argues that the soul in fact can be relegated to ones and zeroes, becoming nothing but a ghost in the machine.

On the other hand, GAM makes a strong argument in the life-over-machines set-up by the mere presence of Godzilla, who is not a machine, uncontrollable and indestructible. Is he a metaphor for the human soul, the soul of Japan's zeitgeist? Or is he just a dude in a rubber suit, jumping around on a soundstage for the amusement of the ten-year-old boys of the world?

I think both. The two are not mutually exclusive. I once had the pleasure of meeing Mario Van Peebles. He said that the best cinema is when it's both a film and a movie. I wholeheartedly agree. There are films I like, and movies I like, but when you're able to hit both with equal force - as ROBOCOP does - now you're talking about chocolate and peanut butter.

On a side note: I also watched DEATHSPORT (1978), produced by the great Roger Corman . Without going too much into it... the movie takes place in the year 3000, a dystopian future in which rangers like David Carradine and Claudia Jennings protect the innocent from an evil empire, which uses death machines to round up slaves to fight in the titular gladiatorial tournaments. Like the best of Corman's movies, DEATHSPORT is super-super cheap... the "death machines" are dirt bikes spray-painted silver. There's a wonderful scene in which the evil guys are discussing their evil plans as they walk across what's obviously a college campus, including a maintenance guy conspicuously working in a manhole cover in the background. So what did they spend the production budget on...? Blowing up motorcycles. They stick David and Claudia in the deathsport, where they proceed to take on dozens of "death machines." I don't know how they blow 'em up - they're armed with big, plastic swords - but they do. The point is: if you like the idea of watching motorcycles blow up, you might wanna check this one out.