THE RETURN OF GODZILLA (1984)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*

Often I've chosen to use American titles for dubbed Japanese movies, but in this case, I decided to go with the Japanese version over "Godzilla 1985." My rationale is that the year the movie came out, in whatever venue, is unimportant next to the fact that after almost ten years, the Godzilla franchise returned. The movie itself wasn't the greatest second act, but it led to many better performances for "the Big G."

Though later movies would contradict RETURN's main idea, the script here dispenses with the involved continuity that had grown up around Godzilla since his first appearance. RETURN posits that although the 1954 movie remained canon, the colossal dino survived being hit with the Oxygen Destroyer but lay low for the next thirty years before rising again to plague humankind. There's no rationale akin to the concept of Godzilla being able to regenerate, a la GODZILLA MINUS ONE, and the unexplained survival eventuates in one of the best lines for the American edition: Raymond Burr solemnly intoning, "They never found a body." (Well, no, Perry, because the oxygen-weapon was supposed to disintegrate the fell beast.)

Godzilla's actual rampages, done on a restrictive budget, are the least consequential aspect of RETURN. Again sorta-kinda anticipating MINUS ONE, Godzilla becomes the center of international tensions as he stalks around Tokyo, only once feeding off the radiation of a nuclear plant. The great powers favor using nuclear weapons against the menace, but Japan, representing the voice of bad experience with such innovations, somehow blocks any such action. I don't believe anyone in the American dub wonders if the atom-mutated titan might actually benefit from nuclear radiation, given that he's shown absorbing such power earlier. And when a Russian sub does shoot a nuclear missile into Japan-- accidentally in the Japanese edition, purposefully in the American one-- the fallout revives the Big G from his encounter with Japanese technology.

Though Godzilla follows the 1954 template in that he encounters no other monsters, his one combative challenge is with a flying fortress, the Super X, that would have fit right in with anything in the sequels. Godzilla is brought down for a time by the super-ship's main weapon, but in the end the monster is truly defeated by a scientist's biological observations. The scientist observes that, true to his bestial nature, Godzilla responds to signals from wildlife-- in this case, birds-- because of some distant biological entrainment. The scientists end up duplicating the signals and luring Godzilla into the volcanic recesses of Mount Mihara. This temporary "death" lasted until 1989's GODZILLA VS. BIOLANTE, which returned the colossus to his pattern of battling similarly sized goliaths.

None of the characters are memorable or worth discussing, except Burr's journalist Martin, brought in by the Americans as a consultant on Godzilla. Though he remains in America and thus loses some of the immediacy he possessed in his 1954 incarnation, Martin brings enormous gravitas to the English-language edition, and by some accounts his participation may have swayed the American studio from "camping up" RETURN. This was fortuitous since the Japanese script, as translated into English, took pains to portray Godzilla as a being as tragic a victim of the nuclear holocaust as the original victims of the Bomb. I don't recall that any G-films before or after RETURN pursued this interpretation of the monster. For better or worse, most G-films preferred to tout Godzilla as the ultimate badass-- so RETURN's main significance is that of a transition point between Old and New.