Ryuhei Kitamura’s send-off for Godzilla is loud, crowded and often good-humoured, and it spends most of its 125 minutes on men in leather coats kicking each other while the monster of the title waits under the ice. Fun in bursts; tiring as a whole.
Godzilla: Final Wars was made for the fiftieth anniversary of the 1954 film, sold with the tagline “Farewell, Godzilla”, and built as a farewell party. Ryuhei Kitamura and his co-writers Wataru Mimura and Isao Kiriyama invite every monster they can find, a flying warship with a drill for a nose, a race of aliens from Planet X, and a corps of superhuman soldiers who fight in slow motion and sunglasses. As a parade it is a good time in bursts. As a film it is exhausting, and its odd decision is to make Godzilla a supporting player in his own retirement.
The opening is the best of it. Yukiharu Seshimo’s Gotengo, a grey submarine that flies, drills into Antarctic ice while Godzilla thrashes about below it, and for ten minutes the film is exactly what it promises: big, silly and sure of itself. We sat up. Then the story moves to the present, monsters appear over cities all round the world, and Takumi Furuya shoots the attacks in flat overcast daylight that makes Rodan’s shadow over Manhattan look heavier than it should. The world tour is quick and generous, and it is the last time for an hour that the film seems interested in its own monsters.
What it is interested in is Ôzaki. Masahiro Matsuoka plays him with a frown and a long coat, and Kitamura gives him fights that anyone who saw The Matrix will recognise: the wire-assisted kicks, the leap frozen in mid-air, the fistfight in a corridor of glass. Kane Kosugi’s Kazama gets a motorbike chase through a car park. Shuichi Kakesu cuts these into short, sharp bursts, which keeps them from sagging, and also means every fight has the same shape, a rush, a freeze, a landing, over and over. Somewhere in the second hour we noticed that we had stopped watching and were waiting, and that what we were waiting for was a reptile, not a person.
The humans who work are the ones who know what film they are in. Don Frye, a mixed martial artist rather than an actor, plays Captain Gordon as a slab of moustache and cigar who shouts at aliens and is right to. Akira Takarada, who was in the original 1954 film, is the UN Secretary General, and Kumi Mizuno, another veteran of the 1960s Godzillas, commands the defence force; both are used for a nod to the past and little more, which is a shame, because they are the two people on screen with any gravity. Kazuki Kitamura’s controller of Planet X starts as a smiling diplomat and ends up shrieking, and he is enjoyable in both modes.
The music tells you where the film’s heart is. Keith Emerson, of Emerson, Lake & Palmer, supplies a synthesiser score that pulses under the mutant fights and dates them instantly. Akira Ifukube’s march, the one every Godzilla film has leant on since 1954, is held back until Godzilla himself is let out, and when it finally arrives it did something to us that two hours of kicking had not: we were, for a moment, properly glad to see him. Whether that is the film’s doing or Ifukube’s is a fair question.
When the monster fights come, they are brief. The suit is lean and fast, and Kitamura stages each bout as a knockout in three or four moves, one opponent after another, so that the film’s long guest list is dealt with the way a bouncer clears a queue. There is a joke at the expense of the 1998 American remake that we will not describe except to say it lasts about as long as it deserves. We laughed, and then wished the joke had been given a scene rather than a shrug.
Destroy All Monsters did the everything-at-once idea in 1968 with more creatures in the same frame and no interest in the people. The 1954 film had one monster and a country in mourning. Final Wars has neither the crowd nor the grief; it has a martial-arts film with monsters attached, and the attachment is loose.
For the devoted it is worth an evening, at home, with company and a willingness to talk through the humans. Everyone else should know that it runs 125 minutes and that perhaps forty of them are the film on the poster.
