And here we are at the second full Godzilla movie, and me realising why I haven’t before attempted to watch and review so many of these movies in a particular space of time. So many of them work to a very familiar pattern, and the affection for them stems from knowing what you are going to get.
Godzilla is back, of course, but this time they’re not alone. A giant creature, Anguirus, is also on the prowl, which sets the scene for an eventual fight between the two gigantic beasties. But even if the fight leads to the end of one monster, one will still need to be dealt with by some puny humans.
Takeo Murata returns as a main writer, joined this time by Shigeaka Hidaka, apparently adapting a novel, “The Volcano Monsters”, into something that serves as a very important second star vehicle for a character who would become the most famous, and celebrated, kaiju in cinema. The human side of things isn’t quite as involving as it was in the first film, but there is a good enough blend of melodrama and stomping action.
Director Motoyoshi Oda knows what is needed, and delivers. There’s already a slightly lighter tone to the unfolding events, but the threat remains impressively rendered, in terms of destruction and the knock-on effect it has on the people who find their everyday routines completely disrupted, to say the least.
The cast includes Hiroshi Koizumi and Minoru Chiaki, as a pair of pilots who prove integral to the efforts undertaken to defeat Godzilla, and Setsuko Wakayama, as a young woman named Hidemi who feels like a covalent bond between those two. But everyone coming to this already knows who the real star is.
Not as good as the original movie, and very few of them are, but an excellent development of the franchise, interestingly showing the monster madness impacting lives and livelihoods in equal measure (something that would develop in interesting ways throughout subsequent decades).
If this review seems much shorter, and even less substantial, than usual, it probably is. As much as I am looking forward to fully exploring the Godzilla filmography (at long last), it would be easy to summarize most of them with the same few sentences. I will keep trying my best though, for what that is worth.
7/10
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Anguirus didn't seem to stick around long after this. It seems like one of those lesser boxing matches where the champion beats up on some relative unknown. Like pretty much any boxing match now vs the classics like Ali-Frazier or Ali-Foreman and so on.
ReplyDeleteAgreed :)
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