GOJIRA / GODZILLA: May We Live Without Destruction

Gojira / Godzilla (1954) – The 1st Godzilla Film – Directed by Ishiro Honda – Starring Akira Takarada, Momoko Kochi, Akihiko Hirata, and Takashi Shimura.

If you are of a certain age and grew up in the Boston TV market, you are well aware of WLVI-TV 56′s Creature Double Feature, a back-to-back Saturday afternoon block of monster movies. Given that they ran Saturday afternoons, I was more likely to turn the antenna to pick up the Red Sox or Bruins game down the dial on Channel 38, but I still watched it enough to know who Godzilla and Mothra and Rodan were, and I always loved catching the commercials.

There was a part of me, though, that was never able to get past the Rubber Suited Monster aspect, or the less-than-stellar effects, or even the black and white. Now that I’m older, none of those things are deal breakers, and I’ve decided it’s time to educate myself and watch a bunch of Kaiju movies until I get bored with them.

There’s only one place to start this set of reviews, of course, and that’s with the first film to feature the most famous of all Kaiju monsters: GOJIRA as it was originally called, GODZILLA as it came to be known.

GOJIRA / GODZILLA is one of those movies that if you haven’t seen it, you really have no idea how good it is. Knowing the basic story of Godzilla or being partly familiar with Kaiju movies does not prepare you for how powerful this movie is when you experience it for the first time. To start with, this isn’t not a monster movie. Oh sure, there’s a monster in it and he tramples through a city and fights the military and all that, but this isn’t just some dumb B-movie that gives you a scant plot in order to get to all the stomping and screeching. GODZILLA is a serious movie, awash in national and personal guilt and serving as a warning against the dangers of nuclear testing.

Brilliantly, the movie opens at the nexus of legend and science, expertly blending in historical fears with contemporary nightmares. A fishing boat is attacked by a flash of light, and villagers on a local island start recalling stories of the legendary “Godzilla,” a sea monster in which young girls were sacrificed to in days gone by. In short order we get our first look at the 150′ tall, reptilian biped looming over the top of a hill, and all the angry villagers who went running after him with their pitchforks before they saw him, no turn and run the other way.

One witness is Archeologist Kyohei Yamane (Takashi Shimura) and as he testifies to the government about what they’re up against, he tells them that Godzilla is only here because of nuclear testing. There is great debate in the room (which oddly falls on gendered lines) about whether the government should let this information out to the public. Eventually it’s decided to let the public in on things, as if not telling the citizens would have made it better when he showed up to destroy Tokyo. There is plenty of action sequences with Godzilla romping the city and getting shot at by a huge variety of Japanese army weaponry, but it’s all touched with a sense of sadness and futility.

Godzilla’s destruction of Tokyo is not filmed with either real menace or repelled with real fervor. There’s plenty of fire breathing and buildings getting knocked down, but the images that stand out are the victims of the violence, the people who had no say in Godzilla’s creation and no part in repelling his assault. They’re just people, living their lives … lives that get interrupted when a giant reptile and the army decide to fight each other in their city. Even when Godzilla is finally repelled (or when he decides he’s had enough knocking Tokyo around and leaves), the camera focuses on the sadness of Yamane more than the cheering corwds – we hear them but we see him as the man who argued that Godzilla should be studied instead of destroyed sees that dream fall by the wayside in the shadow of all the creature’s destruction.

It’s powerful filmaking from Ishiro Honda, amplified by a truly legendary score from Akira Ikufube.

As the army and government struggle to find a way to stop Godzilla, Yamane’s daughter Emiko (Momoko Kochi) reveals to her new flame Hideto Ogata (Akira Takarada) that her old flame, Daisuke Serizawa (Akihiko Hirata), has developed a device called the Oxygen Destroyer, which, well, destroys all oxygen underwater, forcing anything living to die of asphyxiation. Serizawa does not want to use the device because he fears it falling into the hands of people who will use it as a weapon. GOJIRA makes a powerful statement about the escalation of arms, as the only weapon that can be assured to defeat the new Greatest Weapon in the Next Greatest Weapon. The quest for power leads to bombs, which gives us Godzilla, a creature that can absorb radiation. The army’s attacks on the creature are only partially successful, so they need a new weapon, which Serizawa has, but he knows if he does use the Oxygen Destroyer, everyone will want it until the Next Greatest Weapon comes along.

It’s a crippling position for Serizawa to be in – Godzilla can only be defeated if he uses the Oxygen Destroyer, but then the Oxygen Destroyer becomes, in essence, the New Godzilla, which will cause other scientists to attempt to build something even more powerful. If Serizawa could simply trust people to not use his terrible weapon, he would use it, but he knows that the governments of the world are not going to let such a weapon be used once. Serizawa is ultimately convinced to use the Oxygen Destroyer when he hears a children’s chorus singing a lament on the radio, desiring that we live without destruction.

The final action sequence is jaw-dropping brilliant, but not because of the action. Rather, it’s emotion that carries the day. Honda films Serizawa and Ogata’s deep sea dive to release the Oxygen Destroyer near Godzilla with no joy, no speed. This is a somber attack on another living creature. Instead of coming across like Luke’s canyon run on the Death Star, Honda’s camera, Ikufube’s haunting score, and the dreamlike quality of the underwater shots make this a tragic march to a funeral. There is no joy in killing the “monster.” Even Godzilla watches them with a sense of tragic inevitability. The two men deliver the Oxygen Destroyer and Serizawa stays at the bottom of the ocean to kill himself in the process. Doing this ensures that no one will ever learn of his secrets to creating the Oxygen Destroyer.

Godzilla’s death is as somber as you will ever find for the death scene of a movie’s antagonist. There is a brief round of cheering after Godzilla dies, but all of the principals are saddened and troubled by the double death of Serizawa and Godzilla, and I’m leave feeling drained at the end of the movie instead of feeling joy or relief at the death of the monster.

GOJIRA / GODZILLA is an amazing movie.

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Mark Bousquet is the author of several novels and collections, including Gunfighter Gothic, Stuffed Animals for Hire, Dreamer’s Syndrome, Harpsichord and the Wormhole Witches, and Adventures of the Five. He has also published a review collection entitled Marvel Comics on Film, which covers every cinematic and TV movie based on a superhero from the House of Ideas. A complete listing of all his work can be found at his Amazon author page.

LONE WOLF MCQUADE: How’d You Like to Bite That in the Butt, Develop Lockjaw, and Be Dragged to Death?

Lone Wolf McQuade (1983) – Directed by Steve Carver – Starring Chuck Norris, David Carradine, Robert Beltran, Barbara Carrera, Leon Isaac Kennedy, L.Q. Jones, and William Sanderson.

Even though I’m reviewing LONE WOLF MCQUADE as part of Western Month, it’s not a Western in the classical sense. Instead, MCQUADE is a contemporary Western-slash-martial arts-movie-slash-standard-’80s-action movie. Director Steve Carver soaks his film with a Western score that might as well have been taken directly from an Ennio Morricone compilation, and the end result is a mildly effective mix of genres.

I mean, look, it’s an awful movie in a traditional sense, but it’s not an awful Chuck Norris movie, and it’s the film that inspired Norris to make Walker, Texas Ranger, so we owe/”owe” it that.

I’m being honest when I say that I just don’t get the appeal of Chuck Norris. He has no personality, he’s a terrible actor, and I don’t like or care enough about martial arts movies to know if he’s really any good at the punching and kicking. He is perhaps the most unintentionally brilliant camp actor of all-time, but I don’t think 1983 audiences were going to his movie on that score, so I’ve chalked Norris’ appeal up to being something I just don’t understand.

Norris plays J.J. McQuade, a “lone wolf” Texas Ranger who doesn’t want to partner up with anyone – including his new partner, the Texas State Trooper Kayo Ramos (Robert Beltran). We know McQuade is a real American hero because when he attends a fancy event and they tell him they don’t have any domestic beer, he passes on the Heineken and Dos Equis. Had the Most Interesting Man in the World emerged at that moment to kick his ass, we might have had something.

But he doesn’t.

We know McQuade is a bad ass because he drives a dirty Dodge truck that, for some unspoken reason, is a super truck. It’s got some crazy boost system that allows him to rocket down the highway. He gets buried inside the truck deep in the movie and after he pours beer on himself to wake himself up after getting the crap kicked out of him, drives the truck out of the ditch.

Where, let me repeat, he was buried. Under dirt. God F*cking Bless America.

We also know he’s a bad-ass because he lives in a crummy, ramshackle house outside of the city with a wolf.

Yep. With a wolf.

You also know he’s a bad ass because he shows up to a retirement ceremony all dirty from his latest bust and proceeds to take a nap. And hiss boss hates him because McQuade doesn’t fit his idea of what a Ranger “should look like,” and we know from every cop movie ever made that if your boss hates you, you are totally awesome.

The film doesn’t just want McQuade to be an All-American Bad Ass, however; it wants McQuade to have feelings. He loves his daughter (they even share an awkward lip-to-lip kiss), and she loves him, proving he’s a good dad. Even though he’s divorced from his wife, they’re still friendly, proving he’s a good divorcee. He takes his daughter horseback riding, where he ogles Barbara Carrera, and then he just leaves with the new hottie, apparently abandoning his daughter at the track, which proves he can be a bad dad, but an understandable man. When the bad guys kill his wolf, McQuade is so overcome with grief that he pounds his fist into the dirt, then picks the dead dog up.

The bad guy is David Carradine. He has a name (it’s Rawley) but names aren’t really important in a film like this because you spend the whole movie waiting for Norris and Carradine to fight. Carradine is wonderfully awful as the would be kingpin who’s also really good at martial arts. He also has a personalized license plate that reads, I sh*t you not, “CARATE.” He’s making it with his ex-partner’s widow, Lola (Barbara Carrera), who’s the movie’s eye candy and leads to the best line of the movie. McQuade’s best pal in the Rangers is the just-retired Dakota (L.Q. Jones), and they’re watching Lola ride a horse. Dakota asks McQuade: “How’d you like to bite that in the butt, develop lockjaw, and be dragged to your death?”

McQuade apparently thinks this sounds like fun because he grins. I think it sounds awful. (What if she’s a farter? Do you really want to die with your mouth clamped onto someone’s ass cheeks?) Lola and McQuade end up spending time together, but when McQuade comes home to find Lola cleaning up his sh*thole house, and then discovers she threw away his beer and replaced it with vegetables, McQuade flips his lid. “You’re killing yourself!” she wails after he tells her, “If I wanted my house clean, I’d get a maid!”

Right, because a maid would be better than Barbara Carrera.

And let’s be honest. I might not understand the appeal of Chuck Norris, but he walks around with his shirt off quite a bit and he doesn’t look like a guy letting himself go. If he’s living on a diet of cheap beer and kicking bad guys teeth in, then I’d say it’s working.

McQuade’s daughter ends up getting kidnapped and that leads to a big fight and it looks like Norris is appropriately taking this as the most important thing EVAH. In contrast, Carradine looks like he’s ready to hang out and smoke lots of weed; he’s just got to take care of this punk b*tch first.

They build up to a big fight scene and it’s really pretty average, but then, I don’t know much about martial arts so who knows if it’s actually good. It looks slow and clumsy to me, and Carradine looks silly wearing his yellow sweater and Norris looks silly in his bandanna and vest. His daughter gets shot in the leg, which inspires him to go kick ass, and then Carradine backhands her and that inspires McQuade to overcome his injuries to kick even more ass.

McQuade learns to team up with the FBI and state police, and they learn to let him kick ass.

Everybody wins. Except for maybe the audience.

MORTAL KOMBAT: A Handful of People in a Leaky Boat are Gonna Save the World

Mortal Kombat (1995) – Directed by Paul W.S. Anderson – Starring Robin Shou, Linden Ashby, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, Bridgette Wilson, Christopher Lambert, and Talisa Soto.

I’m not really into martial arts movies. The ballet and physical awesomeness of watching two combatants dance with kicks and punches is mostly lost on me. Don’t get me wrong – if a martial arts movie has a good story and characters I can like it just fine, but my eyes glaze over when we start getting all that copious punching and kicking and grunting. It’s just Not My Thing. But hey, I like watching cars race around an oval for a few hours, so I’m not trying to make it like I’m better than you or anything. I just want you to know where I come from with these movies.

Martial Arts Movies: Less My Thing than NASCAR, More My Thing than Golf.

It follows that my interest in MORTAL KOMBAT is more because of its sci-fi leanings and because it was based on what was, at one time, the coolest video game in the history of history. The plot is familiar enough to martial arts’ fans: There’s a super secret martial arts tournament. A group of possible combatants become temporary allies and move their way through the tournament, facing off against bad guys. The fate of the world is at stake.

Despite some bad acting and silly dialogue, the film is eminently watchable. Director Paul W.S. Anderson (The “W.S.” stands for “Not the Guy who Directed Boogie Nights“) does a great job with pacing, keeping everything flowing fast and quick, giving you just enough talking to provide the context for the fighting. If you know the video games there’s a constant stream of things to keep you interested: you can spend the whole film going, “Ooh, there’s Jax! And Raiden! Sub-Zero just froze that guy!” If you’re not knowledgeable about the games, there’s still cool thing after cool thing happening to keep you from getting bored.

There’s not a whole lot of character development, of course, but Anderson manages to make the simple characters effective by limiting what they need to do: Johnny Cage is either gonna be Hollywood, hit on a woman, decry that he doesn’t get any respect, or kick someone. Liu Kang is going to say this is silly, talk about avenging his dead brother, make doe eyes at Kitana, or kick someone. Sonya Blade is going to sneer, sneer, or kick someone.

Anderson does a great job of just keeping things moving, spinning you from character to character quick enough to build momentum, and then when you get to the fights they’re visually pretty cool. I have no idea if the martial arts is top notch, but I know that Sub-Zero freezing some dude and then breaking him into tiny chunks is awesome. I know that seeing a snake-like harpoon shoot out of Scorpion’s palm is awesome. I know Goro kicking butt with his four arms is … well, okay, it’s cheezy as hell but it fits with the whole Outworld theme.

The backgrounds help the film, too, because Anderson keeps rotating you through different settings so nothing ever gets too boring – at the very least, you keep seeing cool looking new stuff pop up to background all the punching and kicking.

What hurts the film is that all of the cool characters from the video game are the bad guys, and the film takes some of the lamest characters as the good guys. This isn’t the fault of the film as much as it is the conventions of the game. Anderson couldn’t very well make Sub-Zero and Scorpion the good guys because he’d be inverting the game and leaving no cool bad guys. But really, who ever played Johnny Cage? Or Sonya? Or even Liu Kang? We always wanted to be Sub-Zero, Scorpion, or my favorite, Baraka, who’s not even in the movie. Kitana was the most kick-ass female character in the game, but here she’s this trapped Princess who never really does anything except help the heroes on the sly.

The only good guy character people ever wanted to play was Raiden, and here they turn him into the Gandalf figure, with Christopher Lambert departing wisdom and advice and popping in whenever the movie needs someone to advance the plot.

Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa is the real star of the film as the evil sorcerer Shang Tsung. He delivers all his lines like he’s taking them completely seriously and that gravitas helps you feel like there’s actually something at stake.

MORTAL KOMBAT works because the filmmakers concentrate on making a simple story enjoyable instead of trying to turn it into something it’s not.