The War of the Gargantuas

Like the majority of Toho's monster movie sequels, The War of the Gargantuas isn't content to simply pick through its predecessor Frankenstein Conquers the World for narrative grist. Instead Gargantuas magnifies and expands certain ideas from that film while overwriting and rejecting others. Writer-director Ishiro Honda and co-writer Takeshi Kimura reconfigure their previous work, abandoning a Nazi super-science backstory, that might otherwise muddle the thematic aims of their latest iteration, to stage a monumental clash between nature and nurture.

Gargantuas concerns two hirsute titans, Gaira and Sanda, the former a savage green people-eater, the latter his dignified, morally mature parent. Gaira, played with manic glee by Showa era Godzilla actor Haruo Nakajima, is squat and animalistic, the unloved result of his parent spilling some of his invincible, fissile flesh into the ocean. This hellish, fish-eat-fish environment has produced a creature whose idea of recreation is to bound about quaking Japanese airports, gobbling up as many women as he can lay his hands on. His (eventual) rival Sanda is the opposite. Raised in captivity by Kumi Mizuno and Russ Tamblyn's chummy scientists, Sanda has grown into a noble loner, content to roam snowy mountains like an atomic age Yeti.

Special effects director Eiji Tsuburaya uses Japan's well-funded Self-Defence Force as the centrepiece in a series of scale confrontations between the giants and clatters of increasingly spectacular tanks. These forest-shredding military manoeuvres also introduce the Maser Cannons, a satellite-tipped artillery designed to blast monsters with a stream of lightning that scours and burns their flesh. These fantastical batteries are essentially War of the Gargantuas' third monster and are therefore photographed with the same loving care. The Maser technology, and indeed even the exact film footage featuring these weapons, was recycled repeatedly throughout Toho's 1970s Children's Festival output, bolstering Godzilla's then-money poor effects work.

Honda and Tsuburaya's biggest coup though is the simmering interpersonal tensions they weave between Gaira and Yu Sekida's Sanda. Although mute and essentially, biologically, the same being, the two have evolved into completely different beasts. Sanda breaks his leg trying to save the scientist who mollycoddled him; Gaira treats people like squirming delicacies. This ideological clash marks the beginning of their falling out, facilitating the film's most perfect moment. After rescuing his goblin offspring from Japan's futuristic lasers, Sanda discovers the child chowing down on some teenage ramblers. As the abashed parent raises an uprooted tree trunk to clobber the bad thoughts out of the youngster's head, a blistered, defeated-looking Gaira gazes up at his horrified father, completely unable to parse the horror creaking into Sanda's latex features.

Frankenstein Conquers the World

Frankenstein Conquers the World roars to life with a prologue set during the last days of the Second World War. This brief, exposition orientated sequence offers director Ishiro Honda and special effects director Eiji Tsuburaya the opportunity to present that globe-spanning conflict as a series of intricately detailed, scratch-built dioramas. The European theatre is glimpsed as a static stretch of chewed up earth, stained grey and clouded with sparks and explosions. An absurd wunderwaffe laboratory, the cradle of Dr Frankenstein's unkillable heart, is depicted as a fantastical, swirling snow globe. Most impressive of all though is Honda and Tsuburaya's portrayal of the Hiroshima bombing.

Honda and Tsuburaya avoid the typical, some might say triumphant, sight of a mushroom cloud to focus instead on a human scaled destruction. Blazing atomic fire cascades down onto squashed, pathetic miniatures. Flames as tall as skyscrapers utterly overwhelm the fragile, wooden city. The effect is total. In terms of pure imagery, that's as good as the film gets. After this barnstorming opener, Frankenstein Conquers relaxes almost completely, exchanging expertly curated models for dull lab work. We catapult forward into the 1960s where Nazi Germany's miracle organ has since grown into a lurching primitive who has been captured then displayed like a Junior Kong. While Koji Furuhata's Frankenstein may have the same towering forehead as Boris Karloff's monster his dull, mottled skin and warped features evoke the regressive gaze of radioactive mutation.

While not in the same league as the calcified horrors of Toho's later, frequently truncated Prophecies of Nostradamus, Honda's monster is a uniquely disturbing take on the transformative powers of the atomic age. Conceptually he's the explicitly Caucasian product of Nazi super science, a curdled Ubermensch rendered as a sloping, diseased child. His brutish looks and grasping obsession with Kumi Mizuno's Dr Sueko Togami can't help but recall the engorged, cannibalistic threat of the Western powers, as depicted in Japanese wartime propaganda. Frankenstein may be foreign and misunderstood but he is also, ultimately, an innocent. The blame for the people gobbling that has rural Japan in uproar lies with the film's B-creature, an indigenous, tunneling lizard with the face of a slow-witted Pug dog.

Baragon is basically an aside, glimpsed in bracketed blips apparently shuffled into the feature at random. Both monster's small-for-the-genre size and Furuhata's light, make-up focused costuming change how the film's (infrequent) fight scenes are structured too. The overcranked histrionics of the Godzilla series are replaced with a spry, scrappy combat focused around the rough-and-tumble interactions between a human actor and his bulging, suited up opponent. This exciting, disorganised approach to Kaiju grappling, as well as Frankenstein's racist, occult science background, stand out in a film mostly content to meander around Nick Adams' perplexing domestic set-up.

GOJIRA X MACARONI

Steven Sloss makes excellent use of impassive men firing rifles and the soupy injury effects in Jun Fukuda's Godzilla films, crafting a nifty, time travelling conflict between the King of Monsters and two Macaroni megastars. Godzilla as a big game target is a pretty great concept too. It fits in nicely between the moneyed plutocrat who thinks he has a close, personal relationship with a God of Destruction in Godzilla vs King Ghidorah and Godzilla 2000's boring storm chasers.

Scrivello's short also delivers on Toho's habit of abortive, would-be crossovers. Hoping to repeat the success of the studio's King Kong match-up, Shinichi Sekizawa proposed a Batman vs Godzilla project in the mid-60s. Details are scarce regarding Sekizawa's treatment but in my mind's eye Adam West and Burt Ward have been blasted with a growth ray and are high-fiving the Big G over King Ghidorah's cooling corpse.

MUTO

A couple of weeks from release and it's still hard to get a handle on what kind of Godzilla film Gareth Edwards has made. Western trailers have barely mentioned any enemy beasts and kept the sense of threat focused on the titular kaiju. Those ads have had a elliptical, apocalyptic quality that suggests a 60th anniversary reinterpretation of Ishiro Honda's 1954 original.

This Chinese trailer takes a completely different tact, revelling in confrontations with a concrete coloured monster that either mutates into various forms, or has a string of similar looking pals. Couple that with a few gasps of dialogue that seem to organise Godzilla into a celestial protector role and you have something closer to the Heisei cycle meets Yoshimitsu Banno's Godzilla vs Hedorah. Perhaps Pacific Rim is to blame for the mixed messages? Guillermo del Toro's mech-pilot punch up tanked in America but found an audience in China, raking in enough money to make a sequel a real possibility.

Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack

Not since 1954's Godzilla has The King of Monsters been such an irredeemable force of annihilation. Gamera: Guardian of the Universe director Shusuke Kaneko's sole contribution to the Godzilla series is an apocalyptic royal rumble tinged with world-shredding terror. People don't simply flee from this devil beast, they limp away to dark hospital corners to shiver and convulse at the sheer horror of his existence. Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack doesn't just contextualise Godzilla as an irradiated dinosaur, it presents the monster monarch as a physical manifestation of misery, powered by the tormented souls of the Pacific War dead. His enemies are a trio of Showa beasts, working together as the guardian spirits of Japan. That's Japan as a natural, physical space rather than a country. The landmarks and people that have sprung up all over the archipelago are of supreme irrelevance to these kaiju.

GMK features redesigns for all the major players by fellow Gamera alumni Makoto Kamiya. Undercard scrapper Baragon, inherited from Ishiro Honda's Frankenstein Conquers the World, is leaner and meaner, while Mothra is changed from a glittery butterfly into a cross between a camouflaged jet fighter and a wasp. Her personality is likewise adjusted. The passive peacekeeper becomes an aggressive irritant armed with an abdomen that can fire explosive flechette. Ghidorah is granted multiple physical forms, ranging from a stout, ground attack lug to a celestial gun platform. Godzilla himself is given the biggest overhaul. The coral spined slasher from the last two films is gone, replaced by a more obviously reptilian beast. In deference to his irradiated origins, this Godzilla also looks pained and swollen.

This Godzilla's chest appears smaller than usual, accentuating his neck and bloated undercarriage. His milky white eyes suggest both disease and a seething, satanic power. He's clever too. There's not an attack staged he doesn't anticipate, then counter. Disregarding the light continuity of the two previous eras, the Millennium series has instead riffed on the situations and themes of Ishiro Honda's original Godzilla, with each one approaching the idea of a definitive sequel differently. GMK is the most literate yet. Shusuke Kaneko plays with the prehistoric mysticism lightly stressed in the 1954 film, whilst also accounting for the Utopian spirit of the instalments that followed. Kaneko's command of the material is such that he is able to move seamlessly from scenes of absolute carnage to runtime swamping wrestling sequences without missing a beat.

Terror of Mechagodzilla / The Terror of Godzilla

Ishiro Honda's final film follows on directly from the Black Hole alien threat of Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla, layering in the story of a disgraced scientist and his clairvoyant daughter Katsura. The duo are prompted by the dastardly Simians to take telepathic control of a timid kaiju named Titanosaurus, who resembles an amphibious dragon. The beast is then forced to act as an interim threat to Japan while Mechagodzilla is brought back up to spec. Unfortunately, the first hour of Terror of Mechagodzilla is marred by the kind of hesitation typically seen in Jun Fukuda's films. The human scenes, usually Honda's strongest suit, are harmed by indecision. It seems the filmmakers can't quite decide if they want their film to be a spy thriller or a romantic drama.

Maddeningly we get both, giving the film a stop-start quality. We careen back and forth between scale submarines dodging behemoths and long scenes of two beautiful young things avoiding eye contact. Still, this meandering courtship does allow for one genuinely wonderful moment - an injured Katsura attempting to casually hide her true, robotic nature from the man who has just rescued her from psychic slavery by slipping her hand over her exposed mechanism. Thankfully, Terror shifts up about twelve gears for its finale. While Interpol agents are struggling to put together a sonic death ray, Titanosaurus and Mechagodzilla absolutely level the city of Yokosuka.

The destruction isn't the kind of orgiastic tantrum seen in the last few films; instead it's a slow, measured demolition. As ever, Honda dwells on the aftermath of such devastation, filling the screen with twisted steel and gutted buildings. This is one of the more striking differences between Honda and Jun Fukuda. In Fukuda's films, you get a sense that he delights in the stomping, or simply understands that the audience might. Honda on the other hand always gives these scenes a tragic, human weight. He won't allow any dissonance to develop. In Honda's world death rays always produce ruins. People, particularly children, are likewise always in the cross-fire.

For his last Showa series appearance Godzilla is revealed as a semi-corporeal guardian spirit that can be summoned into our realm by dying adolescents. This Godzilla is a dog-faced brawler, capable of soaking up extreme punishment in the pursuit of cosmic justice. The Big G boxes clever, taking on each enemy in the singular, getting close, then using their own body against them in a series of vicious attacks. Interestingly, when it comes down to it, he is not much of a merciful God either. When Titanosaurus' mind-control link is suspended the King of Monsters has absolutely no problem battering, and perhaps even killing, the hapless creature. He's less a conquering sportsman here, more a physical embodiment of karmic punishment. This is the strength of Terror of Mechagodzilla, it takes the foibles of the 1970s Godzilla films - most notably the tag-team opponents, alien intervention, and youth driven drama - and twists them just enough to arrive somewhere admirable.

Godzilla vs Megalon

Stock footage overload! After thirty minutes of reasonably diverting espionage, Godzilla vs Megalon goes bananas, cuing up the armed response footage used to welcome a rampaging Gigan in the previous film. It wasn't even new then. This will be (at least) the third time we've seen the massing techno-tanks on loan from Destroy All Monsters. I've lost count. War of the Gargantuas' maser batteries get another showing too, last seen putting the boot in on friendly kaiju Anguirus in Godzilla vs Gigan. It's one thing to feel like you're seeing similar beats replayed, but quite another to be literally watching the exact same piece of footage being replayed over and over.

This salvage operation hits a new low during a jet fighter attack on an out-of-control Megalon - the creature swings his distinctive drill fists at the buzzing aircraft but connects, in close-up, with Gigan's curved scythe hands. It's a shame as Megalon is Jun Fukuda's most consistent work since Son of Godzilla. The central conceit of a young boy, his two Dads (the very best of friends, no doubt) and their pet robot at war with subterranean Swedish breeze blocks is at least novel. Fukuda also stages one or two amusing car stunts between all the collages. It's as if the director has had a big fizzy drink and remembered that people often look exciting when filmed in motion and from strange angles. Megalon is in no way competent, but certainly a step up from the anti-adventure seen in the Gigan entry.

Godzilla vs Gigan / Godzilla on Monster Island

Godzilla vs Gigan would've been significantly more exciting if I hadn't spent the last couple of weeks marathoning my way through the Big G's adventures. Without a fresh knowledge of the other films in the series I might not have noticed the sheer volume of recycled footage used to prop up a slight entry primarily concerned with the plight of an unemployable mangaka. Godzilla vs Gigan is a chimeric mess, full of mismatched footage and ideas on loan from better films. There isn't even much consistency between the repurposed shots and Jun Fukuda's newly crafted footage.

When King Ghidorah and Gigan arrive at the 45 minute mark to put an alien peace plan into motion - that's harmony through eradication rather than something wishy-washy like an infinite clean energy resource - the film starts cutting wildly between two completely distinct flavours of apocalypse. The King Ghidorah scenes, lifted from Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster, are set during the day and centre on the concrete shattering demolition typical of the Ishiro Honda and Eiji Tsuburaya instalments. Although spectacular, the destruction has a detached, horrifying weight to it, born as it is from a hovering monster that can spit lightning at will. This disconnection essential for a directorial team who never celebrated the annihilation they depicted.

Gigan's inserts are completely different, perhaps symptomatic of a creature that can't touch anything without slashing at it. The cyborg knife-bot hurls itself around an industrial sea front, hacking away at buildings while framed by flames and inky, polluted smoke. Despite the fact that these concurrent sequences are shown to take place at completely different times of day, a generous soul might contextualise this disparity as Fukuda matching the violence to each character's personality. Like his 1970s stablemate Hedorah, Gigan is an aggressive techno-nightmare intent on harm. His nighttime tantrum certainly helps to sell the unrestrained, childish glee the monster feels levelling cities, but it ends up giving the film a garbled voice. Gigan's cruelty mixes poorly with the horror of Honda's images.

Ostensibly designed to babysit children, Fukuda still can't resist trying to one-up the harsher spots Yoshimitsu Banno and Teruyoshi Nakano introduced in the previous film - Gigan's attacks on Godzilla and Anguirus feature the kind of arterial blood spurts usually associated with samurai fight flicks. Alarming, but ultimately perfunctory, these attention grabbers are just another inconsistency in a film that can't settle on a distinct tone. Godzilla vs Gigan isn't out-and-out terrible, the introduction of a kaiju that looks like a cross between a chicken and a chainsaw held my attention, however it is exactly the kind of the film people describe when sneering at tokusatsu cinema. It's cheap, artistically primitive, and grinds to a halt anytime a human being is forced in front of the camera.

Pacific Rim

Guillermo del Toro is a tinkerer, a writer-director obsessed with how things work on an impulse level. His body of work is a kind of rolling genre thesis, with del Toro approaching each film as a well worn conceit, breaking it down to see what he can add and subtract without the whole losing shape. Cronos gave vampires shame, Blade II offered a leather jacket ubermensch a string of equals, while the Hellboy films grounded group superheroics in the disaffected camaraderie of a circus troupe.

Pacific Rim takes a slightly different formal tact. Instead of character inflections, del Toro and Travis Beacham provide monster movies with the kind of socio-political context and permanence usually seen in the war films of the 1950s and 60s. Films less concerned with an overarching ideological thesis and more about moment-to-moment effects on the individual. Politically and economically the world of Pacific Rim is crippled. The world's leaders have given up engaging with the Kaiju invasion, preferring to hide behind massive concrete walls. As far as employment goes the only legal game in town seems to be heavy industry, to be paid in microwave meals. The sole people making money are a criminal class that sweep in and strip mine monsters the second they fall. Mankind is locked into an extinction war and running on dregs.

Of course, this isn't the totality of the Pacific Rim experience. The majority of the film is a quarterback narrative sprinkled with city levelling fisticuffs, but the total war idea informs the film's heft and movement. Pacific Rim is just a little bit more desperate than your average alien invasion film. Its characters that little bit more likely to die without fanfare. Humanity has spent years getting hammered and, aside from the indomitable Idris Elba and his ace Jaeger pilots, getting comfortable with the idea of defeat. Pacific Rim is then Godzilla by way of Battle of Britain. Ishiro Honda's patented kaiju eiga mission movie grounded in blitz think and finite resources. Del Toro might be holding back - fights peak at a delirious mid-point and the Kaiju could do with wilder colour palettes and more individual voices - but Pacific Rim is a blockbuster that proceeds from one specific, cultivated idea rather than a thousand clashing trailer images.

All Monsters Attack / Godzilla's Revenge

Conceptually, All Monsters Attack is unique. Instead of being a typical in-universe Godzilla film, it's set in our world and focuses on the series' audience. It's a Children's Film Foundation version of social realism, focusing on the plight of lonely, latchkey children. Considering Ishiro Honda's taste for grounding his work in issues stripped from the headlines, I wonder how much of the film represents his own particular tastes? Destroy All Monsters, ended with a note of finality, so it's tempting to see this film as a stepping stone for the director. Perhaps he'd had enough of giant monsters?

All Monsters Attack works best in its early passages, detailing the environment young Ichiro is forced to grow up in. This Tokyo is completely unlike the space-age metropolis seen in other sci-fi slanted Honda films, it's dense with machinery and completely polluted. Ichiro's world is basic and functional, strewn with derelict buildings and people. His parents love him, but their blue collar jobs demand they spend all their time away from him. When not running from local hoodlums, Ichiro spends his days plonked in front of a home made computer dreaming of Godzilla and Monster Island.

This is where the film come unstuck - the kaiju footage is primarily recycled sequences from the two rubbish Jun Fukuda sequels. Entire battles are played out in full, boring detail, laced with lame cut-aways of Ichiro and a human sized Minilla cheering the super parent on. The only new, suit action addition to the film is Gabara, an ugly reptilian cat monster that represents the hardships Ichiro must endure. Experimental, but hopelessly padded, All Monsters Attack is notable for having one of the least patronising messages I've ever seen in a kid's film: self reliance and an unshakable personal identity is more important than simply being 'good'.

Destroy All Monsters

Ishiro Honda returns to the Godzilla fold with Destroy All Monsters, a wonderfully plastic pulp adventure in the vein of Invasion of Astro-Monster. It is the year 1999, mankind enjoys daily rocket missions to the Moon, safe in the knowledge that Earth's monsters have been confined to an archipelago named Monsterland. When communications with the island's control centre are suddenly severed, intergalactic badass Captain Katsuo Yamabe (Akira Kubo) is sent to investigate. He soon discovers that Monsterland's science team has been brainwashed and the kaiju are now under alien control.Unlike the sustained mash the title would seem to suggest, Destroy All Monsters revolves around Captain Yamabe's efforts to put a hurt on the silicon-based punks who have designs on Earth.

Yamabe is all action. He jets about the cosmos in the Moonlight SY-3, a chromed space rocket that'd make the Thunderbirds jealous. Similarly, when he discovers his girlfriend has been mind zapped by the covetous aliens he immediately attacks her in front of a crowd of UN delegates, tearing a pair of hypnotic metal studs out of her ears. This no-nonsense approach to storytelling is everywhere in the film. Contrary to the previous two Jun Fukuda films, these creatures are not simply capering merchandise. Honda, it seems, prefers to continue presenting them as amoral Old Gods, blind to humanity's suffering. In the all-action finale Godzilla and pals don't turn against the alien Kilaaks to make amends for their unbridled destruction of Earth's cities. They do it because mankind has simply managed to seize control of the alien devices that had been directing them. Honda clearly doesn't see the Big G as the pop culture hero that Toho were trying to push. The King of Monsters will always be the living embodiment of atomic indifference to him.

Invasion of Astro-Monster / Monster Zero

Invasion of Astro-Monster is barely even a Godzilla film. Produced in the middle of an electrifying run of science-fiction stompers by Ishiro Honda, Astro-Monster instead revolves around the duplicitous residents of Planet X. In year of the future 196X, the World Space Agency sends a Tintin rocket off to explore one of Jupiter's newly discovered satellites. On the arrival the super rugged astronauts are rescued from a rampaging King Ghidorah by an underground society of faintly mechanical pixies. Desperate to rid themselves of the golden space dragon, the Xians offer humanity a cure for cancer if they'll loan them Godzilla and Rodan, Earth's mightiest monsters.

Unlike the trepidatious Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster, Astro-Monster imagines a near future ruled by Japan. Although the space mission is fronted by an organisation called The World Space Agency, the delegates convened to discuss and make decisions on the operation are entirely Japanese. When the time comes to debate whether or not Planet X can be trusted, it is a kimono clad lady representing the world's housewives who has the casting vote. Looks like Japan is a benevolent overlord then. They even allow an American to tag along on the space mission for old times' sake.

Astro-Monster is also unusual in that the human story is much more engaging than the monster element. Typically for this series anything after the sixty minute mark is an agitated count down to the Big G's climatic appearance. Here, he barely matters. The humans are able to see off the Xians by amplifying an ornate rape alarm constructed by the boyfriend of the lead astronaut's sister. The ear piercing screech proving fatal to Xians, much like Indian Love Call's effect on the red planet punks from Mars Attacks!. Godzilla and Rodan are only really necessary to chase off King Ghidorah, a task they're not even particularly successful with.

Astro-Monster features production design indebted to the cavernous, concrete palaces of Ken Adam's SPECTRE lairs. The Xians favour architectural brutality and European colonial pomp, a kind of corrupt opposite to the functional, industrialist landscapes glimpsed in this modern Japan. Perhaps the Xians are intended to represent a different post-war path for the country? Planet X is governed by terse, Godlike computer signals, and self-expression is punishable by death. Their misogynistic stance on women also stands in stark contrast to the constitutional deference of this film's hero Japan.

So far, the Godzilla series has seemed to be about a country's national identity struggling and transforming after a seismic, nuclear blow to their confidence. The first two films were about the immediate aftershock, King Kong vs Godzilla and Mothra vs Godzilla talked about an emerging cultural shifts - does Japan look to America or its own past for guidance? Ghidorah proposed Japan as a median, calming influence on Russia and America. Astro-Monster sees the country charting a hopeful, inclusionist future by defining who they are not.

Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster

Buried somewhere in a film primarily concerned with an amnesic Princess, who believes she's a psychic space alien, is an alarmist Cold War parable about the rise of Red China. The gentle, diplomatic Mothra stands in for Japan, the formerly all-powerful insect stuck in her larvae form after the events in the previous film. Mothra is beseeched by the Infant Island pixies to broker peace between Godzilla and another Toho house monster, a supersonic prehistoric bird named Rodan. The pair are currently thrashing around the Japanese countryside playing the most violent game of heads and volleys in history. The battling superpowers are told they must put aside their differences if they are to stand a chance against the majestic golden giant, King Ghidorah.

Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster represents another distinct shift in Godzilla's screen identity. Over the course of the series he's evolved from destruction made flesh to a cornered animal. In this film he becomes a hero, rushing to Mothra's aid when it becomes clear the little caterpillar doesn't stand a chance against the latest threat to Earth. To ease this rebranding, Godzilla has spent most of the film far away from civilisation, capering and cracking rocks over a chummy opponent's head. The radioactive reptile is still destructive but it's a safer kind of demolition. By way of contrast, the arrival of space hydra Ghidorah is marked by intense, prefecture leveling violence. The dragon spits his yellow lightning at everything in sight, reveling in the carnage and shrieking in a high, electronic voice. When Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster was released in 1964, The People's Republic of China had recently become the fifth nuclear power. Given Japan's appalling mistreatment of that country only a few decades earlier, it's easy to see why they might fear an imminent nuclear apocalypse.

Mothra vs Godzilla / Godzilla vs the Thing

Easily the best Godzilla film since the original, Mothra vs Godzilla manages to weave in a human story that isn't just horrified reaction shots or aimless dithering. Following a typhoon, a gigantic egg is washed ashore and seized by greedy theme park industrialists. Tiny delegates from the mysterious Infant Island arrive to warn everybody that the egg belongs to their deity, a semi-immortal being named Mothra. Obviously, the ruthless capitalists piss themselves laughing and attempt to imprison the pixies.

Their cause is taken up by a gang of right-on journalists who journey to the God monster to plead for help with the rampaging Godzilla, who has since arrived with the intention of chowing down on the massive egg. Mothra herself is completely wonderful, a pop art insect with diamond eyes and canvas wings decorated with autumnal camouflage. Her furriness and lack of overt weaponry lend her battles with Godzilla a sense of despondency. She has to fight like hell just to match an exceptionally angry creature who has spent most of the film bumbling around stubbing his toe on historical landmarks.

King Kong vs Godzilla

Seven years after he was buried under ice, Godzilla returns to stomp all over the Japanese economic miracle. After a couple of reels of scene-setting that includes awful, shoe polish make-up, Kong getting stoned on magical berry juice and an unexpectedly clumsy American nuclear submarine, King Kong vs Godzilla finally has the titular duo meet up in a valley strewn with train debris. Godzilla has already spent several minutes trashing anything he can put his feet on, but the sight of King Kong gives him pause. The Big G is spellbound. He recognises an equal, perhaps even a mate. When a helicopter strays too close to the monsters Godzilla blasts it with his radioactive breath, instantly incinerating it. Kong misinterprets this apparently romantic overture as an act of aggression. How does he respond? He starts hurling fucking boulders at the heartbroken reptile.

Godzilla

Rather than focus on a few determined players struggling through a monster attack, Godzilla rather appropriately takes a God's eye view of events. The film unfolds in step with a society's reaction to being suddenly attacked by an unstoppable force of nature. At first the creature is contextualised by primitive fisherman as a monstrous spirit that must be appeased with human sacrifice. Given that by this point he's already chewed through umpteen shipping vessels and dozens of sailors, that idea is quickly dropped. Next the Japanese government decides to erect a gigantic electrified perimeter fence to deter the prehistoric invader, this only ends up pissing Godzilla off.

Finally the jet powered might of the Japanese Self-Defense Force is let loose to deal with the monster. This does eventually drive him back to the ocean depths, but there's very little indication he's been hurt - he may well just be bored for all we know. In his début feature Godzilla represents the sheer indomitability of disasters both nuclear and natural. When soldiers line up to blast a Vickers gun at the beast there's a sense that they might as well be hurling fireworks at a tornado. Although never explicitly stated, it seems Godzilla is a territorial beast seeking revenge for his disrupted underwater environment. His attacks more warnings to leave him alone than outright satanic malevolence. At the film's conclusion the creature is even photographed sympathetically as it lies on the ocean floor; Godzilla looking on sadly as two tiny divers scramble around him with humanity's latest world ending weapon.