GHIDORAH, THE THREE-HEADED MONSTER (1965)
Directed by: Ishiro Honda
Written by: Shinichi Sekizawa
Starring: Yosuke Natsuki, Yuriko Hoshi, Hiroshi Koizumi, Haruo Nakajima, Shoichi Hirose, Masaki Shinohara with Emi Itô and Yûmi Itô
Synopsis: When a meteor with King Ghidorah crashes to Earth, Godzilla, Mothra, and Rodan must team up to fight him.
YES! This is when stuff starts to get real. Part of me really enjoys the more serious tone of the original movie, but then part of me really just wants to see Japanese dudes in rubber suits fighting. I'm happy to say that GHIDORAH, THE THREE HEADED MONSTERS (San Daikaijū: Chikyū Saidai no Kessen aka THREE GIANT MONSTERS: GREATEST DECISIVE BATTLE ON EARTH) delivers. As I mentioned in the first post of this series, a huge reason for me choosing to get into the Godzilla series is due to the my homeys at Preorder 66, specifically, Ichabod and JackSack, talked at great length of the monsters that were part of the series. While we had Mothra in the last film, and now we have two new monsters being added to the roster, King Ghidora and Rodan.
After I wrote my last review, I found out that Mothra was an original monster with her own movie before being crossed over into the Godzilla world. So just like Mothra, Rodan originally had his own movie and ends up becoming a mainstay in this universe. One could say that Mothra, Rodan, and Godzilla were the first multi-movie crossover group like the Avengers. This is also the first time that we see Godzilla being thought of as a hero, or antihero, of sorts, which from what I understand is something that occurs later on in the series.
Picking up where MOTHRA VS. GODZILLA left off, one of the main characters of this movie are the Shobijin twins from Infant Island. It turns out that they've becoming sort of celebrities after the events of the last film, giving us lot of great exposition of what has happened and being instrumental in summoning Mothra to help out with the big bad guy, King Ghidorah.
The main events of the movie occur whenever Earth starts experiencing some extraordinary meteors. There's one that is huge and has strange magnetic properties. Then, there's a huge meteor shower that blows up the plane in which Princess Selina is on board. She hears a mysterious voice that tells her to jump out of the plane, which she does. Everyone presumes she is dead until someone that mysteriously looks like her is going around Japan spreading doomsday prophecies and saying she's from Jupiter. She goes on to say that the meteor that crashed would unveil Rodan and then King Ghidorah, who has destroyed all of Jupiter's civilization and is an unstoppable monster. Meanwhile, the police detective that was supposed to watch out for the princess tries to discover what is going on with the princess and goes on to find that her uncle is trying to have her assassinated.
The human story itself was pretty compelling in regards of all of the mystery surrounding the princess and Jupiter. I thought that that there were definitely some parts, especially the assassination plot of the princess, that could have been cut. It just seemed like the screenwriters wanted to add urgency to the plot such as having the main human characters being chased by the assassins in the climactic scene, and that urgency and conflict could have been done a different way.
On a sociological level, I was really interested in just how well integrated the monsters seemed to be in everyday society. Mothra and the Shobijin seem to be celebrities while the other monsters just are named and talked about so casually. One can only imagine that this was a response to the response of the now-commonplace threat of nuclear weapons all over the world. One of my favorite scene is when Mothra is trying to reason with Godzilla and Rodan andtrying to persuade them to fight against Ghidrah. We figure out what they're saying thanks to the Shobijin twins. Apparently, Godzilla and Rodan don't want to fight to save the Earth because they think humans hate them, and they cause too much trouble. It's not until Mothra gets her tail handed to her by Ghidorah that the others agree to fight.
But let's get real, the highlight of the movie is King Ghidorah himself. He was a complete badass in my opinion. He destroyed all of Jupiter and has three heads! Plus, my favorite thing is that each of his heads has a different pitch when each head is shooting one of its signature energy attacks. I don't know why it find this so amusing, but I do. I love the fact that he already had a reputation and had destroyed an entire planet.
Within the context of the series, this is such a better background than just Angilas or King Kong. Given the fight sequence, you can actually tell that Godzilla is actually struggling against him and that he really needs help to defeat Ghidorah. Not only that, but the four-way fight between the monsters is one of the coolest thing that I've seen in the series so far. What this film does the best is having of the best balances of a human story and a being a cool monster movie.
DESTROYED JAPANESE CASTLE COUNTER: 5
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