Speaking of Mothra and King Ghidorah…
I said this back in my post about the first of these movies (who can remember what happened two years ago, though?), but the Rebirth of Mothra trilogy was clearly Toho trying to keep their kaiju business alive after the “retirement” of Godzilla in anticipation of the big Hollywood reboot—thankfully, their second most famous giant monster was still on hand. Rebirth of Mothra III released six months after that big Hollywood Godzilla reboot, and by the next year, Toho was back making Godzilla movies like that deal never happened. Mothra ended up just keeping the seat warm.
Capping off this moth-eaten threesome, ROMIII brings back two things from the first movie: director Okihiro Yoneda, and, of course, King Ghidorah. As an interesting transition point, assistant director Masaaki Tezuka and special effects director Kenju Suzuki would immediately begin working on the Millennium era Godzilla movies (the former directing vs. Megaguiras, Against Mechagodzilla, and Tokyo SOS) after this movie. This is, in essence, the true end of the Heisei era of Toho monster movies that began in 1984 (although as any actual person familiar with Japan would tell you, the Heisei era was still going on until 2019, but Godzilla does not follow such useless things as actual historical reality), and while the Millennium era did carry over most of the tokusatsu traditions, there is still a certain kind of spiky texture and weight to the monster action in movies like this that gradually vanished as subsequent Toho stomp-em-ups more fully integrated digital effects to assist the guys in the suits. Which is not to say that this movie doesn’t use CGI—oh lordy, does it ever not not use CGI—but it feels more of a piece with the kaiju films of the previous fourteen years, with a dogged insistence on keeping things practical where it can. The tone of these Mothra movies is different from their Godzilla predecessors, but the look of them is very much the same.
III does make some changes to the tone compared to the first two Rebirth of Mothra films—while still aiming for child-like fantasy compared to Godzilla‘s edgy sci-fi, this one eschews all the human-level slapstick comedy and goofy chases that burned up some screen time previously. With the lack of overt humour and the omnipresent peril directed entirely at children, it may even come off as downright dour compared to the other two movies, even though it’s still too colourful and full of goofy kid logic to really be taken that seriously. It has more of a fairy tale vibe, maybe, up to and including a fairy tale’s just-go-for-it narrative logic and lack of explicit explanation.
Our two fairy heroes Lora and Moll are once again clashing with their trouble-making sister Belvera (all three wearing some very stylish, elaborate duds this time) and her now increasingly cybernetic dragon steed, fighting over some tiny magic medallions that plug into one of three swords they all suddenly have, with Belvera running off and warning them about the coming of “The king of terror” (which may be a reference to a prophecy of Nostradamus, not surprising given this is the studio that made a movie called Prophecies of Nostradamus.) Said king of terror shows up promptly in the form of a meteor shower over Japan, with one rock crashing into a mountainside and spreading a crude oil that the fairies say is over 130 million years old—and from this space rock emerges a familiar face, or more accurately three of them: it’s King Ghidorah, everybody! And I mean the original, regally golden King Ghidorah, not his craggy cousin Desghidorah who showed up in the first Rebirth of Mothra. First order of business for the triple-header is to fly over Japan and abduct thousands of children, depositing them in a fleshy dome made of living wormy tendrils and containing an ashen, acid-spewing wasteland.
Maybe hearkening back to his portrayal in 1964’s Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster, ol’ KG is portrayed as a sentient extinction event, having once come to Earth to ice the dinosaurs, and now back to do the same to the current dominant form of animal life. While we do get to see him slice the top off of some of the Tokyo skyline, the main target of his evil are, as mentioned, the kids he keeps in his organic horror dome. What’s his game? The fairies never really get around to explaining it. Considering who the target demographic for this movie was, you could probably argue it’s just the screenwriters trying to put children at the forefront of the story. I have other working interpretations as well: considering that there is no stated ecological message in this movie, another major change from the first two, one could possibly place this in a similar vein by saying that much like the consequences of our abuse of the environment, the monster is primarily a threat to the next generation. Ghidorah’s connection to the image of bubbling crude (also bringing in the dinosaur connection that will become even more important later) is just about the only other hint of something, though, so either the movie is actually going for subtlety, or I am totally reading something into it that’s not there.
When Lora is put under Ghidorah’s control and is then trapped in the dome, Moll is forced to get the help of yet another affectless child (who never cracks a smile throughout the movie—what a weird decision!) as well as Mothra Leo, now fuzzier and ganglier than ever. The main kid, Shota, is an odd one—the eldest of three children, he is apparently so sensitive to conflict and negative emotions in other kids that he prefers staying home from school, making lunches for his very nice workaday parents (his truck-driving dad is played by a former professional wrestler) and hanging out by himself in a cave. His crippling empathetic anxiety (which Moll says means he is just a good person at heart) does not do much to stymie him from helping the fairy and Mothra, and rescuing his two younger siblings.
If our main child hero’s journey is mostly flat, the more interesting story belongs to Belvera, who after two movies spent egging on apocalyptic hellbeasts has finally found one whose objectives and methods are too much for her. In some places it seems like the screenplay is trying to draw a connection between her and Shota (at one point, he says “older siblings have it rough”)—she is meant takes a lesson from his loving family (and specifically his caring relationship with his two younger siblings), although the two of them don’t really interact that much. Even so, she’s the one who figures out that working together (“even when we disagree”, she says, as if her world-wrecking misanthropy in the previous movies was just a minor quibble) is the path forward, which is the kind of humanistic message these movies have always pushed, even back to the days of Ishiro Honda.
Mothra shows up to engage Ghidorah in some aerial laser dogfighting—like the previous movies, Mothra’s design means that most of the fighting is done on wires (with some fun new tricks, such as having it fly backwards and carry around its much larger opponent), although you do get some more up-close-and-personal thrashing as well—but the three-headed monster proves to be essentially invincible and ends up stomping the bug both figuratively and literally. The obvious solution to this predicament is, of course, to have Mothra travel back in time 130 million years to fight a younger and less developed Ghidorah in the time of the dinosaurs, which Moll sacrifices herself through song to facilitate. We follow the parallel tracks of Mothra in the prehistoric past and the humans and fairies helping from across time, the blue sky valleys of Mt. Fuji contrasted with volcanically tinted jungles. That the few dinosaurs that show up are obviously rubber puppets just a few years after Jurassic Park (and the designs of the tyrannosaurus and triceratops are clearly inspired by it) is audacious, to say the least, standing out about as much as the textureless PS1 cutscene-caliber CGI used in the time travel sequence in particular. At one point, after Mothra has severed part of teen Ghidorah’s tail, a t-Rex and triceratops watch the chunk bury itself and then give each other a worried look—maybe the special effects team wanted to play up the silliness of it all.
The time travel logic here is not exactly airtight—Mothra beating on the dirt-brown younger version of Ghidorah (which is played as a little gawkier and clumsier in its movements by the suit actor—by the way, both versions share an actor, who would later go on to play Godzilla in all the Millennium movies) directly hurts the current one, and when he successfully drops prehistoric Ghidorah into a volcano, the current one is seemingly erased from history…but Belvera points out that it seems like history didn’t actually change. Needless to say, this is probably closer to a child’s arbitrary understanding of time travel. Just to complicate matters further, almost as soon as King Ghidorah disappears, a second one appears, having regenerated from the severed tail, and immediately goes back to what it was doing. Stuck in the past, Mothra is aided by his larval ancestors (you can tell they’re prehistoric because they look rockier), who encase him in a cocoon that allows him to emerge in the modern day clad in metallic armour like a crystal-winged bullet, and we get one more battle where our insect hero tears right through his opponent. It’s a lot of fantastical events happening one after another, giving the finale an escalating sense of imagination.
(For whatever reason, the dub version refers to Mothra as “she”, as if it’s the same as the original—but all other sources indicate that Mothra Leo is male, emphasizing the idea that there will be no more Mothras after this one. It adds a bit of tragic weight to his role in the trilogy.)
It’s a fairly straightforward bit of kaiju fancy, and while Rebirth of Mothra III ditches some of the kids movie elements, it is still very clearly aimed at a younger set who can appreciate dinosaur puppets. It’s also still a very different feeling from the overcomplicated plot justifications and grim disaster imagery of the Godzilla films, focusing more on pristine scenery (with a few smashed buildings on the side) and colourful music video interludes. There’s an appreciable whimsy here that comes out of both the tone of the story and the special effects, and it’s something distinctive compared to both the kaiju movies that preceded it, and especially the ones that came after it.
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