Stupid Burnt Lizard

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The kaiju monster film has evolved significantly, as my post on Godzilla Minus One may indicate.  Monster boomers grew up with Saturday afternoon kaiju, although we never heard that word.  (Or at least I didn’t.)  Godzilla was the most famous, but some people trace the origins of the idea to King Kong.  The kaiju, or “strange beast,” genre features outsized monsters that, when they come in contact with civilization, wreak havoc.  Many are primarily symbols of atomic fear, and after watching Godzilla again, I settled down one uncomfortably hot summer afternoon to watch Monster from a Prehistoric Planet, a wildly misleading title for a movie also called Gappa, which is more accurate but less eye-catching.  A gappa is a “triphibian beast” that does equally well on land, water, or in the air.  I do have to wonder if Michael Crichton saw this film before coming up with the idea for Jurassic Park.

A wealthy publisher wants to open a tropical island resort in Japan.  (You see?)  He wants to fill it with exotic animals, and among those in the model are dinosaurs.  His expedition to collect specimens leads a Japanese crew to discover a newly hatched gappa, which they take back to Japan.  (The publisher, concerned that their find has been exaggerated, utters the title of this post.)  Meanwhile, back on Obelisk Island, the gappa parents return and aren’t pleased to find their baby gone.  They head to Japan to stomp around, Godzilla style.  It takes the sole survivor from Obelisk Island, a young boy, to figure out that the parents really only want their baby back.  The publisher, scientist, and journalist (all male) don’t want to give it up.  The female lead, also a journalist, convinces them that they must.  Japan is saved.

Kaiju have more recently become somewhat believable, and even a bit scary.  The monsters themselves seem to be metaphors.  It’s no accident that these early movies, such as Gappa, expend much of their screen time on explosions.  From the artificial volcano on Obelisk Island to the model tanks and missiles, to the plumes rising as the gappa lead to destruction, things are always blowing up.  The Japanese think at first that “Gappa” is a god, but the local boy who survives is emphatic that “Gappa” is “no god.”  Yet the locals are careful not to raise their wrath.  These movies aren’t great in any traditional sense, but they are imbued with reminders of war—no god—and the lasting damage it causes.  And the wealthy can lead to the destruction of many cities for the sake of making money off of a stupid burnt lizard.

Plus One

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When one of your oldest friends suggests a movie, it’s a good idea to watch it.  I began watching Godzilla movies when I was quite young but I stopped after seeing the 1998 Roland Emmerich version.  A friend from high school told me I should see Godzilla Minus One, and I took that advice seriously, if slowly.  It certainly raises the bar on kaiju movies.  An epic film of over two hours, it isn’t just a monster destroying towns—it may not be a standard horror movie but it is an exceptional Godzilla film.  Following the story of Kōichi Shikishima, a kamikaze pilot who couldn’t bring himself to suicide, it introduces the kaiju in the last days of World War Two.  There is a lot of political sensitivity in the movie.  Godzilla—by far the scariest I’ve seen—kills off the Japanese crew on a Pacific island.  Shikishima survives and returns home to find his family dead from bombing in Tokyo.  He is shamed by his neighbor for failing in his kamikaze duty.

Shikishima assists Noriko Ōishi, also without family, in raising an orphaned infant.  Meanwhile, Godzilla starts reappearing.  The problem is, tensions between the Soviet Union and United States means that outside help isn’t available.  Japan had been forced to disarm its military due to the war, and therefore it has to rely on civilians to organize and try to stop the monster.  They devise a plan to try to sink the monster far enough into an ocean trench to crush it, and barring that, raise it rapidly to the surface so the depressurization will be fatal.  Meanwhile, Shikishima, who believes Ōishi died in a Godzilla attack, discovers an experimental new plane that he then has made into a kamikaze-style fighter.  The plan is to fly it into Godzilla’s mouth, killing the monster.

As a movie this succeeds in making the human story poignant enough that the kaiju threat becomes a way of tying together the fragments of a life shattered by war.  Indeed, the condemnation of war is one the elements that makes the film exceptional.  Godzilla is, of course, radioactive, but the movie doesn’t make that a cudgel.  No, it explores how human foibles—beyond war, the national posturing—prevents humans from helping one another in time of need.  And how war itself destroys life among the survivors.  Like all Godzilla movies (and there are many), it leaves many holes in the story, but it has the feeling of a real movie.  I agree with my friend that it’s well worth seeing.

Pacific Rim

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Pacific_Rim_FilmPoster

Pacific Rim is a movie that once again brings monsters and religion together in the cinema. Since I’m generally late seeing movies, I won’t worry too much about spoilers here, but in case you’re even later than me here’s the gist of it: giant monsters from outer space (properly an interplanetary portal) are emerging from the Pacific Ocean to take over the earth. These radioactive, dinosaur-like aliens are called Kaiju. Although they can be taken down with conventional weapons, the most effective fighting tool is the Jaeger, a colossal robot piloted by two humans acting as the two hemispheres of the brain. These humans must “drift”—share their brains—in order to control these massive machines in unison. Lots of action and destruction, of course, ensue. We later find out that dinosaurs were an earlier invasion of these same aliens, but that our environmental degradation has made the atmosphere much better for them, and this time they’re back for good.

The resistance is led by a mysterious marshal named Stacker Pentecost. Pentecost, of course, is the festival celebrating either the giving of the Torah (Jewish) or the giving of the Holy Spirit (Christian). In either case, it is a holiday celebrating God’s plan for humanity. As Pentecost leads his beleaguered and shrinking army of jaegers against the Kaiju, scientists Geiszler and Gottlieb disagree about how to conquer the beasts. Gottlieb swears, “Numbers are as close as we get to the handwriting of God,” while advocating the predictive elements based on the statistics of the attacks. Science and religion have come to an uneasy truce here. As Geiszler seeks a Kaiju brain to drift, he observes some of the masses in Tokyo praying to the fallen beasts. A blackmarket dealer in Kaiju remains explains that they believe the Kaiju have been sent by God. Pentecost unwittingly concurs when he declares it is time to end the apocalypse.

Pacific Rim, like most Guillermo del Toro films, is a complex movie. There is also more than a sprinkling of H. P. Lovecraft here. The worship of the Kaiju keyed me in to the fact that these were the old gods, come to earth, under the sea, from space. As the first category 5 Kaiju swims past the camera, I couldn’t help but think of Cthulhu. Although Kaiju is Japanese for “monster,” it even sounds like his sacred name. We fear that which is larger, stronger, and unknown to us. When that fear becomes reverence we are on the brink of worship, and our monsters have become our deities.