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This is one of those movies in which people keep saying "That's a great idea!" about the worst ideas you've ever heard. Then they act on them. I like it. This picture's funnier than any 3 dozen Seth Rogen projects. Well, so is SHOAH.
Gojira movies have been cannibalizing their own origin-stories since the 60s, but this one goes further. What can you say about a culture willing to rape its own sacred cultural icons for a quick buck? This travesty presents a WW2 suicide brigade on "the last of the Marshall Islands" presenting arms to a dinosaur who chased the US Marines away. Then the Japanese inexplicably decide not to fight to the last man, and instead abandon the territory annexed on their behalf by this giant lizard. They retreat to the mainland, where one of them becomes a business tycoon.
Then it gets complicated.
Blonde men from the future, irritable over not yet curing male pattern baldness, come back in time in a sort of flying saucer to ask a failed writer and a celebrity psychic for their help in eliminating Godzilla before he destroys Japan. The "help" is questionable, as all these 1992 citizens do is go back to 1944 to watch some closed-circuit TV, but, hey, they shot the script. You would think that by the 90s the Japanese would know better than to trust people in spaceships. Fortunately for Nippon, the white guys - you can tell they're American because they say "nucyaler" - erred by bringing back in time the one Japanese girl left in the future. In a touching display of ancestor worship, she outs their duplicity after donning a flying suit made from ductwork taped to a Sailor Moon backpack. Turns out these time-traveling, fashion-disabled Caucasians are just jealous of Japan's impending economic imperialist takeover of the known world (in the 22d century Japan's going to buy Africa, which sounds more like a liability than an asset). These blondes in padded chintz suits with nonfunctioning straps and redundant zippers want to replace Godzilla with King Ghidorah, who will destroy all of Japan except Tokyo. A strange choice, but Toho's been known to go out of its way not to have to build that Tokyo skyline set again.
Sure enough, we are given the alternate spectacle of Fukuoka ("my garden city") and some other heretofore unscathed-by-rubber-monster metropolitan areas being laid waste by a flying gold metalflake 1/3 of a hydra. In a surprise revelation, we are informed that King Ghidorah was created from some hand puppets left too long in the microwave. Godzilla also does his share of demolition as the movie winds down. Wait - didn't the spaceship blondes already destroy Godzilla? Yeah, they killed him in the third reel. But nobody expected that the Japanese of 1992 had a secret submarine filled with nuclear missiles - "Ha ha, don't worry. We don't keep it in Japanese waters" - with which to jumpstart a new Godzilla from the bones of an old dinosaur. Only they don't have to, because a leaky old nuclear shipwreck has already made Godzilla whole again. Oh, and Godzilla finally gets to Tokyo, reuniting with his old army buddy in a heartwarming moment of tearful recognition. They look into each other's eyes, and Godzilla nods as if to say, "Gotta do it, man." The tycoon nods in understanding. Then Godzilla blows him up.
I should also mention here that, in order to prevent Godzilla's revamped angry self from fulfilling his destiny and destroying Japan, the Japanese girl from the future goes BACK to the future to ask for help from - yes - a balding white man. Probably because he pities her as the sole Asian character from the 23d century, he agrees to build a Mecha-Ghidora and send it back to the 1990s, so that together, these two giant monsters can, uh, fulfill Godzilla's destiny and destroy Japan. In a wonderful nod to those notoriously self-willed whipping heads, the girl piloting Mecha-Ghidora has trouble controlling the joystick.
This Godzilla suit design owes much to the Sumo - his thighs are flabby enough to double for Rush Limbaugh's, and his belly and chest are thick and ponderous. But there's more exploding masonry in this picture than in most of his adventures, which makes up for a lot. Also features a man with a passing resemblance to Robert Patrick playing a killer robot. Yes, in the future even the robots will have bald spots. Plus Megumi Odaka, reprising her role as Micki, the only Japanese girl ever born with ears larger than her Disney namesake and an acting style even bigger than that. It's not her fault: many Japanese directors seem to feel that a seventy-foot screen isn't quite large enough to display the emotion of a human face. I did some acting for Japanese television, and I can tell you, they push you to go for it. They apparently urge their writers in the same way. Thank God.


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