The Mechagodzilla duology represents the end of Toho’s twenty year run of classic (and not-so-classic) monster movies, with a new one almost every year since the original Godzilla. Despite attempts to keep the series going, costs of production and declining box office (Terror of Mechagodzilla remains the least-attended movie in the series, theatrically) put the King of the Monsters on ice for a decade, when he could be revived in a rawer, meaner form with more modern SFX. Despite having the dubious honours of being in the last two entries of the Showa years, which deviated further and further from the seriousness of Godzilla ’54 with every entry, Mechagodzilla remains one of the more popular of the Big G’s opponents, I think for pretty obvious reasons—it looks like it was pulled directly from the collective imagination of every ten-year-old on the planet, with its endless supply of weapons and a sinister sneer frozen on its mechanical face. I definitely got the appeal when I was a kid who saw Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla on VHS, with many moments from that movie etching themselves into my memory. Nowadays, having a far greater understanding of their context within the history of kaiju films (and having just read Ed Godziszewski, Steve Ryfle, and Yuuko Honda-Yun’s Ishiro Honda: A Life in Film), these two movies don’t just represent the end of their era, but also of the directorial styles of the Godzilla series’ two most important directors: Ishiro Honda, the original and the one who directed most of Toho’s best-known special effects films, and Jun Fukuda, who became prominent during the series’ turn to more lighthearted fare aimed at kids in the late sixties and early seventies. Despite using many of the same elements, they end up producing movies that feel very different.
Fukuda, had worked with Honda on Rodan and mostly directed more grounded genre fare (like spy action movies and comedies) before being given Ebirah, Horror of the Deep/Godzilla vs. The Sea Monster and Son of Godzilla, becoming the go-to director for the series in the seventies following Honda’s “retirement” after Space Amoeba, directing Godzilla vs. Gigan, Godzilla vs. Megalon, and then Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla. None of those movies are anyone’s favourites, really, but it’s hard to say if that’s because of Fukuda’s direction itself, or if he was just always handed the weaker material. Although budgetary restraints were still a thing by the time of vs. Mechagodzilla, it at least doesn’t resort to stock footage use in order to pad out its running time—no, it has other ways of doing that. Co-written by Fukuda and Hiroyasu Yamaura (who also wrote episodes of Ultra Q and Ultraseven), this one takes out some of the more overt kid-oriented material from Fukuda’s previous movies, but still produced something aiming more for juvenile thrills that anything particularly meaningful.
There’s a lot of business to get through in the early parts of the movie, with an ancient prophecy and an alien invasion to establish, alongside a much too large group of characters to follow. In what may be the most confusing creative decision I’ve seen in any of these movies, we essentially follow two identical sets of characters through the plot—one courageous archaeologist, a barely-there female sidekick, and an older scientist (one of them played by Akihiko Hirata, Godzilla’s Dr. Serizawa playing yet another scientist in this series, and we’ll be getting back to him soon.) At some point, they are assisted by a sharpshooting Interpol agent, who would seemingly be a singular figure—except, near the end, when a second sharpshooting Interpol agent shows up. What is going on here? Couldn’t they have found some way to streamline this cast?
Anyway, the prophecy foretold by the descendants of a royal Japanese family is of a terrible monster that will come to wreck Japan, which is something that has already happened several times before, but this was evidently a very specific case of it. At first, it appears that monster is Godzilla himself, whostarts blowing stuff up for no reason—but nobody apparently notices that Godzilla’s roar is now completely different, and it’s only when G is confronted by his spiky friend Anguiras and violently breaks its jaw that our heroes begin to suspect that this is not the real Godzilla. Considering that this was well into the era of Godzilla-as-hero (whose suit design has a pug-nosed cuteness to it), these scenes with the “evil” Godzilla doppelganger seem like prime material to indulge in a return to the vicious early version of the monster, but they only do so much with it. Soon, Godzilla shows up to battle Godzilla, revealing Mechagodzilla in the process, who then makes quick work of the original (seriously, the battle is over in a minute or less), but is damaged in the process, and has to sit out for a good chunk of the movie that bears its name.
Mechangodzilla has been deployed by the silver-clad Black Hole Aliens, whose leader is probably the most entertaining character in the movie—you just don’t see enough cigar-chomping, wine-drinking alien masterminds in movies. The aliens send agents after some of our three hundred main characters in order to steal a statue of a lion-dog (a common image across Japan and the rest of Asia) that is said to be able to summon a guardian monster. The movie attempts to surprise you by having two stalkers go after them, only to reveal one to be the Interpol agent and the other (the one with the facial hair, which continues to be a dead giveaway) to be the alien, whose real face is shown to be a green ape-like thing, clearly a “homage” to Planet of the Apes. I guess it’s a neat visual to have the aliens be “disguised” like their creation, and at least one of them wears a belt buckle with an ape’s face on it, which is so dumb that I can’t help but love it.
So much of the middle of the movie involves chases, infiltrating the aliens’ hideout, and shootouts, things I’m sure Fukuda was bringing in from his other movies, but also make the pacing feels very off—the monster stuff is spread pretty far apart. The movie picks up in the climax, where the guardian monster, the furry King Caesar, is summoned with a two-minute long song while Mechagodzilla marches towards him (which is the kind of absurdity I appreciate, alongside the imaginative squaring off of the sci-fi elements against something more mystical), and then teams up with Godzilla to get their collective butts kicked until Godzilla demonstrates his newfound magnetic powers (which he gained by letting himself get struck by lightning multiple times…okay?) and rips the robot’s head off. Mechagodzilla’s adaptability makes the fight enjoyable (lots of head spinning and, shooting missiles from his toes), and there’s some decent suit acting from Godzilla and King Caesar— Fukuda and SFX director Teruyoshi Nakano do provide some interesting visuals across the movie, with the moody lighting choices in both the early power plant battle between Godzilla and Mechagodzilla and the scene where Godzilla becomes a lightning rod. These scenes are also clearly aiming to up the blood, with Godzilla especially getting skewered and cut (with geyser-like spurts of red), that really seem to be trying to pander to the juvenile crowd like Gamera did. Nothing in this is terribly consistent, though, and the monster scenes often feel weightless, if still fun enough for the kaiju aficionados.
Terror of Mechagodzilla followed a year later, and marked the directorial return of Ishiro Honda to the series, and his last go at a monster movie (when he returned to filmmaking in the eighties, it was to assist his friend Akira Kurosowa in making critically-acclaimed movies like Ran.) Interestingly, the script for this movie was the result of a contest (as Godzilla vs. Biollante would be over a decade later), and I think is the only movie in the series written by a woman, Yukiko Takayama—it seems between her and Honda, there’s a lot more interest in the human element in it compared to the slam-bang action mode of its predecessor. Thankfully, this one has just one younger scientist (a marine biologist this time) and one Interpol agent, but they’re not the main human focus of the movie—instead, most of the drama comes from the secondary antagonists. You see, the once-respected Dr. Mifune (once again played Akihiko Hirata) was ostracized from the scientific community after he claimed to have discovered a living dinosaur (with several photos of him ranting and being thrown out of a lab, which is kinda funny), although you’d think they’d be more disturbed by his ethically dubious project of mind controlling animals, and while he was thought dead, he is actually working with the surviving Black Hole aliens, alongside his daughter Katsura. Using his animal control invention, he orders around that dinosaur he discovered, called Titanosaurus (whose cackling roar is one of the most distinct, and possibly irritating, of all the Toho kaiju), and is helping them improve on Mechagodzilla. As we learn, this team-up happened not just because Mifune wants revenge on the people who rejected him, but also because Katsura had been fatally injured during one of his experiments, and the aliens saved her life by turning her into a cyborg. Things get complicated when the marine biologist meets Katsura at her big, abandoned-looking home and they start hitting it off despite her initial coldness.
Honda’s affinity for human tragedy in these movies is played up in Dr. Mifune and Katsura, the latter especially. Later in the movie, Katsura (who appears in different fashionable clothing in every scene) has begun to rebel against both her father and the aliens, asking him if what he really wanted was to create another destructive monster (comparing it to Ghidorah, Rodan, and…Manda? That’s the one you go with? Okay then.) She is then “reprogrammed” to become more compliant, which leads to her second “death” and a second chance for the aliens to make her more useful to them (in a weird surgery scene that contains, gasp, light nudity!) by turning her into the living remote control for Mechagodzilla. Due to his own quest for vengeance (not just for being disgraced, but for the death of his wife, which happened after he already lost everything else), Mifune inadvertently sacrifices his own daughter’s humanity, and becomes more despondent—even with that effective idea, Hirata plays him more as a broad mad scientist character, slightly muting those sympathetic qualities. More compelling is Katsura herself, who has an inner struggle between her familial loyalty and her sense of independence after meeting someone new (which is potent especially because she’s a woman being manipulated by the men in her life), and later between her robotic nature and her humanity (much like the aliens in vs. Mechagodzilla, she parallels Mechagodzilla itself.) That does, in fact, lead to a self-sacrificing end for her, as we also saw in Space Amoeba. Honda clearly thought these sorts of dramas still had a place in these movies, no matter how much depth they’re allowed to have when they have to share space with special effects.
Terror alleviates the pacing issues of the previous movie with monster scenes spaced more evenly throughout the movie, eliminates some of the sillier elements (such as Godzilla learning how magnets work, and the green ape aliens—when one of the aliens has his face removed this time, it reveals a human face covered in lesions, maybe another nod from Honda to radiation scarring), and gives the Black Hole aliens a more definitive plan—they apparently want to redevelop Tokyo, Delta City style, and take control of the planet away from “polluting” humans (something that is only brought up, but never developed.) While the monster scenes are still ultimately on the goofier end of the spectrum (considering just how many times a monster is kicked back five hundred feet, and the scene where Mechagodzilla and Titanosaurus bury Godzilla in a shallow grave), they still end feeling a bit more impactful—partly because some of it actually takes place in urban locations, with those patented scenes of scurrying civilians, and partly because Akira Ifukube’s back doing the music, giving it his trademark ominous touch. Despite that, both movies have a similar conception of Godzilla himself, where he shows up where he is needed (i.e. When another giant monster is stomping around) and is treated as part of the landscape, although you actually get his most heroic appearance in Honda’s movie, when he appears and saves two kids from Titanosaurus.
Whether they knew it or not, the last shot of Terror, an ultra-wide view of Godzilla cruising through the ocean with desaturated colours (bringing to mind Honda’s original forays into the kaiju genre) became the last shot of the Showa era, and in its simple beauty, was a fitting send-off. At the very least, you know that the director who started the whole thing got to be the one to end it. While Mechagodzilla itself has become the main thing carried over from these two movies, a creation that has been resurrected again and again in every era of Godzilla (up to today…whoops, is that a spoiler for Godzilla vs. Kong? I guess if you aren’t paying attention to merchandise leaks like I do), they both also represent the last movies in both Fukuda’s action-focused mode and Honda’s pathos-focused mode. These two are, in microcosm, what Godzilla had been.
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