Original title: Gojira tai Kingu Gidora
Having decided to stick with established foes after Gojira vs. Biorante/Godzilla vs Biollante (1989), Toho started making Godzilla films with old enemies being re-imagined for the Heisei era. Gojira vs. Kingu Gidorâ/Godzilla vs King Ghidorah brings back the much-loved eponymous three-headed alien dragon and pops him straight into one of the most bizarre and endlessly inventive – if not a little confusing – narratives the Godzilla films had ever seen, a wild time travel drama that manages to rewrite the origin stories for both Ghidorah and Godzilla.
In 1992, a UFO appears over Japan that is later revealed to be a time machine bringing four visitors from the year 2204. They come with a warning that Godzilla will one day reduce Japan to a toxic, radioactive wasteland and that humanity must find a way to stop him before that can happen. Writer and Godzilla expert Terasawa (Kosoyuke Toyohara) concludes that Godzilla is in fact a dinosaur that helped save a group of Japanese soldiers on Lagos Island in 1944 from advancing American forces and was subsequently mutated into Godzilla by nuclear testing in 1954. Terasawa, the psychic Miki Saegusa (Megumi Odaka) and Professor Mazaki (Katsuhiko Sasaki) accompany the time travellers to 1944, planning to prevent the dinosaur from becoming irradiated and therefore prevent it from ever becoming Godzilla.
But it turns out that the visitors – known as Futurians – are actually planning to prevent Japan’s rise in their time to be most powerful nation on Earth, a rise helped in no small part by the country having been protected by Godzilla. Their cyborg, M-11 (Robert Scott Field), teleports the dinosaur to the Bering Straits where it won’t be affected by the tests and secretly leave behind three Dorats, tiny winged creatures from their own time which are then mutated into Ghidorah. When the time travellers return to 1992, they are able to control the monster and of course there’s no Godzilla any more to stop it from destroying Japan.
Feeling bad about what her people have done, time traveller Emmy Kano (Anna Nakagawa) reprograms M-11 to help her tale control of Ghidorah while businessman Yasuaki Shindo (Yoshio Tsuchiya) – who was one of the soldiers saved by the dinosaur in 1944 – plans to create a new Godzilla by using a nuclear submarine to irradiate the dinosaur in the Bering Straits. But Miki sense the real Godzilla – it seems it was already mutating before the nuclear tests and has continued to thrive in this new timeline despite the Futurians’ efforts. It fights Ghidorah, destroying its middle head before going on to attack Toyko. Emmy travels to the future with M-11 and returns with the cyborg Mecha-King Ghidorah which also fights Godzilla.
Got all that? Godzilla vs King Ghidorah is without doubt the most needlessly complex Godzilla film of them all, a fact enjoyed by some though it’s all bit too confused and confusing for its own good. Coincidences abound, the new Ghidorah origin story is ludicrous and contradicts everything that we thought we knew about the monster (it was an alien in all previous films) and it doesn’t even stop to think for one second about the many time paradoxes that the film sets up (if the Futurians get their way and change the past, surely they wouldn’t exist in the future?). You could never accuse it of being dull, there’s simply too much going on for that, but it is very, very muddled.
It’s also very silly. There’s a groan-inducing joke about one of the American soldiers being named Major Spielberg and the sight of M-11 (a very obvious Terminator 2 clone) running at high speed, poor Field moving his arms about in a vaguely running motion while being towed around on an off-camera trolley is just too hilarious for words. Elsewhere there’s much that just doesn’t make any sense – why does destroying a computer make King Ghidorah such a terrible fighter? – and the Futurians’ plot just doesn’t make any sense at all.
To its credit, the fighting monster scenes are, once again, extremely well done, particularly Godzilla taking on the cyborg Mecha-King Ghidorah, but it’s not enough to make up for the ridiculous plot. We’ve seen great monster brawls before and by now we had the right to expect something a bit more. The events of this film are largely ignored and forgotten about by the time of the next film, Gojira vs. Mosura/Godzilla vs. Mothra (1992). Curiously, it stirred up more controversy than was usual for a Godzilla film, a representative of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association berating Kazuki Omori on the television show Entertainment Tonight, accusing the film of being in “very poor taste” and harmful to American-Japanese relations.
The EOFFTV Review 