Godzilla vs. Mothra (1992)

Ever since the late 1960s Toho has had it in their heads that Godzilla films were for kids.  Sure, there is something about a giant monster stomping through a city that is going to get a kid excited, but Ishirô Honda's original film was a dire anti-war analogy, not a movie about kaiju bringing peace and happiness to the world.  Although Godzilla was once again the villain in the Heisei Era it didn't keep Toho from trying to again dumb down the series to appeal to children.  In this case, through their marketing research, they also tried to appeal to women, who make up a majority of the movie audience in Japan, by polling them and finding out that their favorite monster was Mothra. 

When an asteroid hits Earth near the Philippines it not only wakes up Godzilla (Kenpachirô Satsuma) but also exposes a giant egg on Infant Island, near Indonesia.  A corporation called Marutomo, led by CEO Takeshi Tomokane (Makoto Ôtake), has been working on developing the island and the deforestation helped expose the egg.  The CEO wants to put it on display, so Masako Tezuka (Satomi Kobayashi) and Kenji Andoh (Takehiro Murata) are sent to Thailand to offer shady treasure hunter Takuya Fujita (Tetsuya Bessho), Masako's ex-husband, a chance at freedom by helping them retrieve it. 

While they find the egg they also find the Cosmos (Keiko Imamura, Sayaka Osawa), two diminutive human-like creatures that are the last of the race that originally inhabited the island thousands of years before.  The egg belongs to a creature called Mothra who came to humanity's defense in the past when the Earth created a creature called Battra ('Hurricane Ryu' Hariken) to destroy humanity for harming the environment.  Battra was also awakened by the asteroid strike and, when Mothra's egg hatches on the way back to Japan, it attracts Mothra's dark cousin as well as Godzilla, resulting in a battle at sea.  Tomokane, though he lost the egg, intends to use the Cosmos for monetary gain and, feeling betrayed, they summon Mothra to Japan, leading to a three-way battle in Yokohama once Mothra and Battra achieve their final forms. 

In order to appeal to kids there is an annoying child in this, and no one does annoying children better (or worse) than Japan.  Named Midori (Shiori Yonezawa), she is the daughter of Masako and Takuya, and does pretty much nothing but make viewers grit their teeth every time she is on the screen.  There is also the problem of laying the environmental message on thick, which reminds me of why it took so long for climate change to be taken seriously.  When pushed too hard it feels like propaganda that has been demanded by an outside source rather than having any true intention of tackling a real problem.

Those issues aside, the good news is that despite the humans being annoying - this includes Indiana Jones wannabe Takuya - they are merely there to comment on the action.  Too often kaiju films forget there are monsters and spend most of the time concentrating on the human drama, be it family situations or international spy rings.  In this case the focus is on the monsters, and a good portion of Godzilla vs. Mothra is monsters fighting or destroying things.  Director Takao Okawara was not too happy about this and, for the next movie, decided to give the humans much more to do, but it was nice to just be able to sit back and watch monsters duke it out.

As for the kaiju, Godzilla is once again the odd man out though he is first-billed.  The reason is that the story was written for just Mothra and Battra, but was adapted to include Godzilla when Toho decided the next movie needed to get more women in the theater.  Mothra, even 30 years later, looks like someone made a cute bug out of grandma's extra carpet clippings, and in adult form is as ridiculous as she was in prior films.  The larval form looks about the same as the '60s version, except the effects crew finally figured out how to film it so the machine spraying the webbing isn't so obvious.  Battra is better, with glowing eyes and looking almost machine-like in its larval form and much more convincing in his final form than Mothra. He has some interesting powers that are used to great effect. 

I find this entry to be more entertaining than Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah, both because it doesn't feel like it's rehashing an old plot despite some references to Mothra vs. Godzilla and, though it has some moments like the opening Raiders of the Lost Ark homage, I don't feel like I'm cringing as much.  It also doesn't have the emotional heft of some of the scenes from the previous film either, but it doesn't need them.  It just needs the monsters fighting, and this is one of the few that delivers. 

Godzilla vs. Mothra (1992)

Time: 100 minutes

Starring: Tetsuyo Bessho, Satomi Kobayashi, Takehiro Murata, Keiko Imamura, Sayaka Osawa, Kenpachirô Satsuma, 'Hurricane Ryu' Hariken

Director: Takao Okawara