Usually the human drama which hooks us into the giant monster stuff is just sort of there. In this case, I was a little more invested. The first half hour of this movie is... well, what is it? As I was watching, I was going to call it a corporate thriller/mystery involving a down-on-his-luck manga artist working for a guy building a children's theme park about giant monsters. He quickly gets wrapped up in the shady business of the park behind closed doors, teams up with some other folks, and investigates. So I was going to say it was an intriguing sort of mystery plot. Then I talked about the movie with a pal and the phrase "Japanese Scooby-Doo gang" came up, and it's an absolute perfect fit for the tone of this investigation. What the investigation turns up is simultaneously batshit gonzo and horrifying. The folks behind the park are actually alien cockroaches wearing dead human beings like outfits, plotting to take over the world by unleashing giant monsters.
Before we talk about the monsters, let's frame the theme of the movie here. These cockroach aliens are doing this because they're the last survivors of a planet which choked itself to death via pollution and nuclear waste and all the other shit humanity itself's been doing to planet Earth. They're working to create a world of peace. For them. By killing all of us with giant monsters and stopping us from polluting the place. That's sort of an environmental message, I guess. Right. So, with the title, you'd expect Godzilla to throw down with a Gigan. That happens, eventually. This movie's actually a tag team match. Godzilla and a monster called Anguirus have teamed up in this movie, and they live on Monster Island with all the other monsters. (Don't look at me, I don't know what the fuck either.) They also talk to each other. In warbling record scratches. While speech bubbles appear next to them. Like a manga. (Cause the main human character's a manga artist, get it?) The aliens send down two monsters from space to wreck the Earth. One's the titular Gigan, a cool-lookin thing with sickle hands and a buzzsaw in its tummy. The other is fucking King Ghidorah.
Yo, holy shit. King Ghidorah. That's an iconic giant monster. Interesting to see that one show up. This movie becomes a big spectacle of Ghidorah and Gigan smashing the everloving shit out of Tokyo. It actually goes on a bit too long for me without anything to break it up like the other two monsters showing up. The initial visceral thrill of shit blowing up got a bit much. Once they do fight, shit gets wild. It even gets a bit bloody with Gigan's buzzsaws drawing blood. Somehow or another the key to the aliens' plan is destroying Godzilla. I forgot to mention their base is a Godzilla-shaped tower. It's also got a laser cannon. You see this tower in the first few minutes and it's a Chekov's Gun. Godzilla has to smash that fucking thing by the end. Well, in the end it's the humans sending up a bunch of dynamite through the elevator which blows off the head of the tower and stops it from fucking Godzilla up with lasers. Then Ghidorah hurls Godzilla into the thing and Godzilla smashes it from there. Close enough. There's more of a throwdown and tag teaming that goes down, and that's the movie. I liked it. It put a big dumb smile on my face. Sometimes that's enough, you know? One more big kaiju battle left, and these two are iconic. We've even covered them both before. Godzilla and Mothra. What a match.
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