So I'm gonna watch the Godzilla movies

Not quite what I was expecting, being more familiar with the cheesy Godzilla vs Random Monster theme. It's like, a serious film and Godzilla isn't main character. He's basically the atomic bomb personified, not 10 years after it actually happened.

The credit sequence was actually a bit creepy. It's just title cards with big booming footsteps and roaring in the background, but for some reason it was creepy. You all know the Godzilla roar, it's the one that sounds like a car being torn in half. It starts on a ship in the sea near Japan somewhere, but then there's a blinding light, and it sinks. They send a rescue boat, but... it, just, bursts into flames while sailing along. Presumably Godzilla did it. >_> Stuff like this keeps happening, and on a stormy night some poor coastal village is messed up, but everyone's suspicious about what's going on. But don't worry, because as usual, some old geezer knows what's going on. He knows it's Godzilla, because apparently in the old days he used to come up all the time and they'd sacrifice girls to him and stuff.

But the government sends a team out to investigate what's going on, and they discover giant footprints in the village, and lots of radiation. But then, boom, boom, footsteps! Who is it? It's only Godzilla!



After that brief encounter, the scientists decide that Godzilla had been living in the deep ocean previously, but has been disturbed and made radioactive by the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. They also seem to think that dinosaurs existed 2 million years ago. The story gets out, and people seem pretty damn calm about it for some reason. They're just like "Oh, they discovered a 150 foot tall radioactive dinosaur. I suppose we'll have to go into the shelters if it comes here.", "Shelters again? That blows." But they start to take it more seriously when Godzilla upsets a cruise ship.

Suppose I might as well talk about the human characters. There's this couple, and the girl's father is a zoologist wants to study Godzilla rather than kill him. The boyfriend thinks they should kill Godzilla. And the girl has a friend who's also a scientist, but he's all mysterious and working on some secret project. That's basically it. The government wants to kill Godzilla too, but the zoologist is all "Nuclear fallout didn't kill him. What the hell are you gonna do?". In the meantime Godzilla fucks up a town, tearing bridges down and causing train wrecks.

So the military come up with a plan. A giant electric fence along the coast to fry him. Does it work? Does it fuck. Godzilla just ploughs into it, gets pissed off by it, and then freezes it with his ice breath. Yeah, he has ice breath. Thoroughly annoyed by that, he rips the shit of out Tokyo, breathing fire all over the place and destroying pretty much everything. Yeah, he breaths fire too. Eventually planes come in and start firing missiles at him, and while NOT ONE of them actually hits him, it does drive him back to the see. The following scenes might as well take place after the atomic bombs were dropped. Tokyo looks like hell, loads of ill and injured people in bomb shelters, kids being tested for radiation poisoning, the lot.

Meanwhile, turns out the mysterious scientist had been working on a device that destroys all the oxygen and liquidises any living tissue in a body of water. He's trying to make into something good so he doesn't want to let anyone know about it yet because they'll want to make it into a weapon. After wrestling with the dilemma of using a giant death device to stop another one, he decides to go through with it. But he burns all his notes so no one can copy him, and sacrifices himself so no one can force him to make another one.

And that's it. Godzilla's completely dissolved and dead and gone. But wait, what's that Mr. Zoologist? "I can't believe Godzilla was the last of his species. If we keep testing atomic devices, it could cause more Godzillas to emerge across the world." Oh right, gotcha. Anti-nuclear message and sequel get-out clause all in one.

Well then, a year after the actually quite good first film, there this... pretty crap sequel. With the first Godzilla dead, this time it's just a brand new Godzilla, but he's not alone. Some pilot crash lands on an island where he sees Godzilla fighting another giant monster, which is identified as a mutated Angilasaurus. Apparently it just didn't go extinct with the rest of the dinosaurs and was mutated by the hydrogen bomb and now all it does is fight Godzilla.

So after a very brief showing at the start of the film, people get down to planning what to next, and they come up the idea of dropping flares out at sea to distract Godzilla (oh yeah, lights make him angry, which was randomly thrown into the first film without any explanation). When Godzilla approaches the mainland, they do this, and it works. He just wanders back out to see. But it doesn't matter anyway because some criminals start a fire and he comes back.

And who's with him? It's Angilas! He just follows Godzilla around at starts fights by the look of things. So then comes the only good bit of the film, the two monsters duke it out in Osaka, like so:



Then after quite a long fight and fun fight where they tear down a lot of shit, Godzilla kills and burns Angilas and then wanders off. Well... huh? It's half way through the film and Angilas is dead. What now? What happens now is that for about half an hour the characters just get on with their lives before Godzilla shows up. He walks into a canyon somewhere and they bomb the mountains to bury him and blah blah boring shitty end. He's under a lot of rock and everyone's just fine with that. But I'm assuming he lived since there's 28 more fucking films about him.

This film was not very good.