The Return of Godzilla

Japan has completely changed in the nine years that Godzilla has spent dormant. The sprawling concrete space of late 1960s Tokyo is gone, replaced by a vertical growth of glass and steel. A new civic prison has sprung up to trap and frustrate the migrating behemoth. The Return of Godzilla is a reset button, of sorts, for the series, explicitly taking the titular monster back to his radioactive roots. Broadly, this is a remake of the 1954 film with Godzilla cast as a drifting natural disaster.

Not only is Return a continuity restart designed to unravel all those pesky defender of humanity strands, but the actual characteristics of Godzilla are defaulted too. Where later entries made the King of Monsters an elemental deity plucked from polytheistic pantheon, Return reintroduces the idea that Godzilla is a mutant who draws its strength directly from nuclear power. This monster cascades over the landscape, stalking Japanese power plants like a babysitter slasher. Godzilla has awoken from his slumber with a healthy appetite. After a Russian nuclear submarine is chewed-up, the world's superpowers are quickly at the Japanese PM's throat, demanding that they be allowed to bomb this creature, and Japan, out of existence. Naturally, the domestic solution is much more elegant, built on scientific ingenuity and maybe even empathy with this rampaging daikaiju.

Koji Hashimoto's sole Godzilla entry is pitched somewhere between Jaws and Threads, a square-framed apocalypse that is happy to discuss both the micro and macro fallout of a fission-powered God. As well as the usual budding romance between a couple of largely forgettable humans, a significant amount of time is spent with politicians attempting to make sense out of the situation. Initially Godzilla's re-emergence earns a D-Notice, the bureaucrats afraid that the news might spook the stock market and pop Japan's economic bubble. Time is also taken to talk about Nihon's place in the nuclear hierarchy. With Russia and America desperate to fire satellite missiles at their major cities, not to mention a history of actually having been atomically bombed themselves, the Japanese cabinet concludes that their country is seen as no more than a testing ground for the experimental weaponry of their superpowered neighbours. It's an off-hand remark, but speaks to a wider, global, perspective on the culture of fear that ensnared two former allies following the Second World War.

Unfortunately, Return marks the final series credit for the fantastically talented Teruyoshi Nakano. Graduating to a full special effects director credit with 1971's Godzilla vs Hedorah, Nakano injected the then-ailing franchise with a sense of genuine horror. After Sadamasa Arikawa squandered Eiji Tsuburaya's genre defining creations, Nakano came to the rescue with scenes and monsters that stressed genuine cataclysm. His special effects action was trapped in a gloomy world clogged with thick, oozing smoke. Fights between Nakano's juggernauts were likewise tinged with pain and even desperation. Return is no exception. As Godzilla stomps through a scratch built Tokyo, the wreckage piles up until the landscape begins to resembles news footage of an actual catastrophe. If buildings are not burnt down to their steel bones, they sag wearily, burping out plumes of soot. People, particularly military personnel, suffer and die as Godzilla stumbles around searching for his next fissile feast.

Despite Nakano firing on all cylinders, Return fluffs it in a few other areas. Yasuko Sawaguchi isn't given a great deal to do other than look cute as the film's passive heroine Naoko. This reductionism particularly strange in a series that has always insisted on making female characters key components in the various collectives. The appearance of a trillion yen flying saucer is also a peculiar development, from a conceptual rather than practical effect perspective. The craft's impossibly fantastical design is a strange choice in a film largely positioned as a 1980s update of a documentary-style nuclear parable. Still, the Super X aircraft has some nice detailing to it - in order to cope with an enemy that operates as a living, breathing atomic reactor, the Super X is armed with cadmium bullets that are able to galvanise neutron decay within Godzilla, slowing the king kaiju's advance.

Return of Godzilla's problems then mostly arise from an internal tension regarding its relationship to the wider series. Is the film a sequel or a reboot? The more outlandish elements, typical to the kaiju films of the late 60s and early 70s, sit awkwardly alongside the incredible ordinariness of scenes that depict the National Diet pontificating their place in the world. Return is very much like the Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan eras of the James Bond franchise in that sense. Both Return and those 007 films attempt to take their material much more seriously but are hamstrung in their efforts by an inability to fully disconnect from their sillier recent past. There is a sense of uniqueness in Hashimoto's film though, even when viewed in light of the Godzilla sequels that would soon follow. When the monster is eventually beaten, his defeat is marked not with celebration but with a silent, teary, respect. Despite the horrors he has visited on them, the Japanese cabinet cannot find it in themselves to fully hate Godzilla. The passing of this gigantic, nearly invincible creature actually inspires a kind of mourning. This slight tweak of expectation is typical of Hashimoto's film. A scene threatening to descend into hoary Hollywood cliché is given new life simply by being from a different national perspective.