The Patreon Letter: 30 November, 2019

Hi friends, Em here finally with a new letter. If you've been listening to the podcasts you know life has been kind of difficult the last few weeks, so these letters have been difficult to produce when I'm barely keeping up with my day job and the podcasts. I really truly hope to change that, and I'm going to do my best, but THANK YOU for putting up with the many delays and missed weeks and all of that. Your support continues to mean a lot to me.

Once upon a time, before I did podcasts, I was a movie blogger with aspirations of making film criticism my career. That didn't pan out (a story for another time), but when I stopped I was in the middle of a lengthy Toho kaiju film retrospective. With the recent release of the Godzilla Showa collection that Criterion put out, and me getting it as an obscenely nice birthday present, I figured the least I could do would be to watch all of them and write about them. Because I'd covered maybe the first four or so Godzilla films when I was writing originally, I wanted to dust off the old writing and add to it and revise it to see how wrong the me of 7 years ago was when it came to doing the thing I'm still doing in this new form. So below will be selections of my original post in quotes with my modern thoughts at the end. A lot of it is summary, because these movies were much harder to get back then. I cut out most of my now very embarrassing snipes at how boring the movie was, just know I included a sentence about how boring it was basically every paragraph.

Why start with the second movie? Well, Godzilla Raids Again is no Godzilla, and watching it right after you watch one of the greatest movies of all time does it no favors. So I figured I'd start with this one and then circle back to Godzilla so my takes would be more generous than 'yeah, whatever, this ain't no Godzilla' because there's enough stuff here to be worthwhile, even if it is a far lesser film. Anyway, let's get into it!

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With Godzilla tearing up the Japanese box office Toho Studios knew they had a hit. As you might expect even today, when you get a surprise hit the first thing you expect is that they turn it right around to make another one. Fresh off of the first one, Toho ordered most of the production staff of Godzilla right back into production on a fast, cheap sequel, replacing already busy director Ishiro Honda with Motoyoshi Oda, who directed many films before and after but only has one international credit to his name: Godzilla Raids Again, a movie rushed through production to release only six months after the release of Godzilla, in the spring of 1955. That production schedule is boggling to modern sensibilities, but even knowing that shooting schedules of the time were much shorter, you’d be forgiven in thinking that Godzilla Raids Again is a cheapy also-ran rush. Is that accurate? Well, yes and no.

We start with a similar love triangle to the first film, with two men and a woman who form the central human drama. There are two pilots, Tsukioka (Hiroshi Koizumi) and Kobayashi (Minoru Chiaki), who fly scouting missions over the ocean to spot tuna for a fishing company they both work for based out of Osaka. Both men are friends with the radio operator, Hidemi (Setsuko Wakayama), the boss’ daughter and a potential love interest for the two of them. Though in reality, it’s mostly just Tsukioka who expresses any sort of interest, so the triangle is more of just a frustrated romance.

As the film opens, Kobayashi’s plane is downed due to a malfunction, landing on the coast of a nearby island. When Tsukioka lands to pick him up, the two share a campfire meal only to be interrupted by an incredible roar. They look up, only to spot looming above them—Godzilla! Since a similar creature had flattened Tokyo only months before, both men recognize the monster, but neither are prepared for what they’re about to witness. Godzilla isn’t alone, but is instead locked in combat with a new giant creature, a four-legged spike-backed dinosaur, the two of them fighting so violently it threatens to tear down the nearby cliffs themselves until both monsters, in their fury, plunge into the ocean and disappear.

Both men fly back to report in, and the Japanese government quickly identifies the new monster (through an illustrated book of dinosaurs, no less!). It is Anguirus, a derivative of the ankylosaur family of dinosaurs, made huge and awakened by the same nuclear testing that drove the original Godzilla and this new, identical creature out of whatever cave that time forgot. To verify the claim is Dr. Yamane (Takashi Shimura), a sober and defeated man after the events of the last film, now resigned to the realities of Godzilla’s destructive power. There’s just one problem: the Oxygen Destroyer died with the sacrifice of Dr. Serizawa in the first film, and nothing else that the Japanese army has will work against the beast. In one of the more chilling moments in the movie, he shows the government and our heroes footage of Godzilla’s Tokyo rampage, grainy silent film with only the sound of the running projector to underscore the devastation. 

When Godzilla threatens to come ashore on Osaka, however, it’s a plan by Hidemi that the army finally uses to try to deter the beast. Dr. Yamane puts forth the suggestion that perhaps bright lights could attract the monster, with the reasoning that the lights enrage him because they remind him of the hydrogen bomb explosion that awoke him from his slumber. So all of Osaka is forced into a blackout, the city dark and huddled in wait for salvation. When Godzilla pops out of the water in the bay, the army sets off flares leading Godzilla back into the ocean, which seems to work until a prison break taking advantage of the blackout ends with a car chase that crashes a gasoline truck into an industrial complex, setting the whole thing ablaze and drawing Godzilla back to shore. In fact, it’s enough to draw out Anguirus, too, and the two monsters proceed to fight through the middle of Osaka, destroying a large part of the city and even famously toppling Osaka Castle before Godzilla gets Anguirus by the throat and then torches the monster with his atomic fire.

This is definitely the best part of the movie, and establishes the now iconic idea of kaiju battling. And of all the bits of Godzilla Raids Again, this Osaka assault works. It’s mostly silent, a few ominous music tones underlying mostly sounds of crashing and the roars of each creature during the brief, bloody battle.

With Anguirus killed, however, all that’s left is the horror of Godzilla and the final attempt to wrap it up. The plot mostly focuses on the two pilots and their getting roped into a plan to stop Godzilla, and how upset they are to be taken away from Hidemi. 

The plan to get rid of Godzilla isn’t particularly impressive. Knowing that no human weapons can kill it, they instead lead it ashore near an icy mountain, where the air force (and our heroes) lead bombing runs to trigger an avalanche to bury Godzilla in ice. Godzilla, in his rage, swats planes out of the sky with both his hands and his atomic breath, leading to the death of Kobayashi that triggers the landslide that finally buries him. All is finally calm, a sacrifice made, and the world waits for the eventuality of Godzilla’s return. 

All in all, this movie feels a lot like an also-ran. Much of the movie is confined to sets where the last movie shot many of its scenes on location. The special effects work is as good as ever, but when the humans are crouching behind fake rocks, no amount of monster-stomping is going to sell the drama. It feels rushed and generic because it is. I think it’s telling that after this the movies don’t come out nearly as quickly, and we don’t see another reappearance of Godzilla for seven years. The movie was a critical and box office disappointment, and Toho instead focused mostly on making other original monster movies instead of sequels. 

2012 was a long time ago. The thing that strikes me most rewatching Godzilla Raids Again in 2019 is how interested it is in who gets to escape the threat of Godzilla. Whereas the disaster and recovery in the original film was relatively flat, everyone shoved into makeshift hospitals in the wreckage of cities, this movie is a disaster in progress. As with all disasters, class matters with how much you can absorb the blow, and the movie spends most of its time in the first half showing us a variety of responses.

First, we have Hidemi, who is immediately taken up to a mansion far away from Osaka in the mountains to be kept safe while all the men fight for her. None of them want to do this particularly but also nobody questions it. Of course she'll be let off the hook, her father is a wealthy man who is protecting his assets and assisting the kaiju deterrence in this film. What is his daughter if not another one of the things he's seeking to shelter from the storm?

Then you have the middle class, who all gets to abandon the city in what we think of when we think of disaster movies: intolerable and fatal traffic jams. Alongside them are the people without cars, many of them elderly people who presumably never learned to drive, who trudge along the side of the road with all their goods on their back. This in itself is absolutely a nod to wartime evacuation, but put alongside modernity is also striking in the wealth disparity. 

Another group contrasted is the upper class who hang out in nightclubs in Osaka unafraid of Godzilla until he stomps right up into town, in one scene where a singer in a packed lounge is interrupted by the building collapsing around them. These are the people who choose to ignore the threat, but they're contrasted in a series of scenes put right up next to them of convicts who are being transported to prison who escape when their vehicle gets caught in the attack. They escape only to find themselves in a city in ruins, running both from the cops who refuse to give up their chase in the face of calamity and Godzilla itself. In one of the best special effects shots not around monster battling in the movie, the fugitives find their way into a subway tunnel only for the tunnel to flood around them, a miniature superimposed over the real location that works so well at showing threats that aren't just getting stomped or atomic breathed. 

The thing that Godzilla Raids Again brings to mind re-watching it, beyond the very cool Osaka castle toppling, is that disasters are not just the attack on infrastructure by an outside force, but the reveal that the infrastructure is always only as good as it needs to be. What is protected and who gets saved are the same as society when operating normally, just more so. 

In many ways, this reminds me of my experience revisiting Grave of the Fireflies, which has a similar cynicism. Disaster uniting people together is a staple of the genre, but it's also a comforting idea in the face of grimmer realities. These movies argue that people might work to defeat an existential threat, but people do not work together to make sure everyone is cared for, whether there's a Godzilla or not. 

Beyond that, it is remarkable that Godzilla is felled so easily by some ice around him, as if he doesn't hang out in the bottom of the ocean on the regular (I know, thermal vents, whatever). I'm just saying, he has nuclear breath, which I assume generates heat of some kind. This is a nitpick, but it's funny rewatching it because in the absence of the Oxygen Destroyer there really isn't anything that can harm him and the movie does a lot of hand-waving about this plan working that undercuts the potential of a more serious track where, say, Godzilla just destroys Osaka and disappears on his own with no triumph. Just saying, it could work.

I also don't remember Godzilla being frozen in ice coming up in King Kong vs Godzilla, but I'll be curious if it does or if there's a third Godzilla hanging out somewhere in the world waiting for a chance to strike. We'll cover that when we get to it. Before that, though, I have a cinematic classic to revisit. Next time!