Godzilla: Final Wars (2004)

Original title: Gojira: Fainaru wôzu

With the 50th anniversary of the first Godzilla film fast approaching, Toho decided that some sort of celebration was in order. It meant that the trilogy started with Gojira X Mekagojira (2002) and Gojira tai Mosura tai Mekagojira: Tôkyô S.O.S. (2003) was going to be unfinished and that pretty much put paid to director Masaaki Tezuka’s involvement. To see Godzilla into retirement they turned to Ryuhei Kitamura, an unlikely choice to directed their final kaiju film. Kitamura had made a splash with the gory Yakuza vs zombies horror Versus (2000) and had the genre films Alive (2002), Aragami (2003), Azumi (2003), Sky High (2003) and Longinus (2004) to his name but it turned out that he was a huge kaiju fan and fancied a crack at a Godzilla film before it was too late. Kitamura was a fan of the 70s Godzilla films (someone has to be…) and was disappointed with the way the films had gone during the Heisei and Millennium eras. So he hit on an idea – inspired by Kaijû sôshingeki/Destroy all Monsters (1968) he decided to bring together as many of the Toho menagerie as he could muster and have them knock seven bells out of each other for a couple of hours.

Once again, the film ignores the previous sequels and takes place many years after Godzilla’s original 1954 rampage, years in which Godzilla has been peacefully hibernating in the Antarctic ice after a battle with the submarine Gotengo (from Kaitei Gunkan/Atragon (1963)). But a series of environmental disasters frees the world’s monsters at the same time that mutant superhumans start to appear, blessed with special powers (if you’re thinking of Marvel’s X-Men at this point you won’t be alone…) and soon recruited to the Earth Defense Force (EDF). An enhanced Gotengo, now commanded by Captain Douglas Gordon (former mixed martial artist and wrestler Don Frye) destroys the snake-like Manda (also from Kaitei Gunkan) but the ship is destroyed and Gordon barely escapes with his life, only to be suspended from the EDF.

On Infant Island mutant soldier Shinichi Ozaki (Masahiro Matsuoka) and UN biologist Dr Miyuki Otonashi (Rei Kikukawa) encounter the Shobijin (Masami Nagasawa and Chihiro Otsuka) and find the mummified remains of the alien cyborg Gigan, warning them that an epic battle between the forces of good and evil is imminent. The first shots are fired when Radon attacks New York City, Anguirus levels Shanghai, Zilla (the dinosaur creature from Godzilla (1998) attacks Sydney, King Seesar destroys parts of Okinawa, Kamacuras turn up in Paris, Kumonga attacks Phoenix, Ebirah attacks Tokai and even Hedorah the smog monster pitches in too though we’re not told where it’s up to no good. Quite where all these monster have been all this time is rather glossed over but no matter, they all vanish anyway when an alien spaceship turn up over Tokyo. The culprits behind the monster attacks are our old friend the Xiliens from Kaijû daisensô/Invasion of Astro Monster/Monster Zero (1965), now rocking Matrix-inspired fashions and warning that the runaway planet Gorath (from the 1962 film Gorath/Yôsei Gorasu) is on a collision course for Earth. Of course it’s all a ruse and Gorath is nothing but a hologram projected by the aliens who are actually on Earth to start harvesting humans for food. With the aliens again controlling the Earth’s monsters a desperate plan is hatched – awaken Godzilla from its hibernation and let it sort the problem out.

A wildly energetic if utterly ridiculous film Godzilla: Final Wars throws in every conceivable monster, machine, rogue planet and passing mention of just about every science fiction film that Toho ever made that Kitamura and co-writer Wataru Mimura could think of. With so much going on there’s barely any room for exposition so it’s no surprise that the story hurtles from one monster smack down to the next with barely any attempt to actually explain what’s going on. An it doesn’t really matter. It’s a crazy, eye-watering love letter to the kaiju genre that throws everything into the pot and crosses its fingers that something edible will come out. The editing is insane – stuff just happens with no rhyme nor reason – and the film has the jittery aesthetic of a computer game being played at double speed.

You certainly can’t complain that there’s not enough monster action – all those years of sitting through boring human stuff waiting for the men in rubber suits to turn up and here we are with an embarrassment of violent riches. Anyone whose seen any of Kitamura’s horror films (Versus, The Midnight Meat Train (2008), No One Lives (2012)) will know that he’s not particularly reticent when it comes to violence and he certainly doesn’t hold back here either. Tokyo is trashed like never before, body parts are ripped off and the stunt sequences from the Matrix trilogy unapologetically ransacked, giving us bullet-time sequences, bike-fu fights and plenty of martial arts mayhem. It’s exhilarating stuff that doesn’t really leave you time (or breath) to complain about how none of makes a jot of sense. It’s incoherent but so much fun. Less fun is Keith Emerson’s terrible score (Nobuhiko Morino and Daisuke Yano also contribute to the soundtrack and are rather better). Whatever his talents as one of prog rock’s preeminent keyboard players, his films scores have mainly been dreadful and such is the case here.

But when the film gets it right, it’s a riot. The excursion to New York for a bizarre scene in what Japanese film-makers think a Blaxploitation film looks like is a hoot, there’s an otherwise completely extraneous scene that exists only to show a young boy throwing a toy turtle onto a fire, another swipe at Daiei’s rival kaiju superstar Gamera and then of course there’s Zilla. The dinosaur that masqueraded as Godzilla in Roland Emmerich’s terrible 1998 film turns up here rendered in entirely dreadful and unconvincing CGI. There’s no excuse for digital effects this bad and given that Zilla is the only monster in the film represented entirely by computer animation one can only assume that the unconvincing effects were a deliberate snub to the American film. Certainly Kitamura has little fondness for the beast, having it square up to the one true Godzilla only for it to brushed aside as little more than an annoyance.

Godzilla: Final Wars straddles the line between genius and complete rubbish, an over-the-top but undeniably passionate ode to the joys of giant monsters trashing the the world’s major population centres. Don’t try to make any sense of it all – it’s impossible to take seriously and trying to make all the disparate bits of action, interpersonal relationships and alien motivations fit together is a thankless task. A huge amount of money was spent on the film (it was the most expensive Godzilla film that Toho had ever made to this point) and it’s all there on the screen to be enjoyed.

Sadly, the public proved surprisingly resistant to Final Wars‘ wayward charms and largely opted to stay away. It proved to be a massive financial disaster for Toho, failing to make back its budget on its initial release. It was not only the worst performing Godzilla film of the Millennium series but even all these years later it remains the least successful film in the entire series since Mekagojira no Gyakushu/Mekagojira no Gyakushu (1975). Its failure dissuaded Toho from making any more Godzilla films, the company announcing that the monster would be on leave for at least a decade. When it id turn up again, exactly ten years later, it was in another Hollywood production, Gareth Edwards’s Godzilla (2014).