The Return of Godzilla

The Return of Godzilla is a fresh start. It ignores every sequel that came after the 1954 original and behaves as though the monster has been asleep for thirty years and Japan has spent that time getting on with things. Koji Hashimoto directs from Hideichi Nagahara’s script, with the story credited to Tomoyuki Tanaka, and the tone is set in the first minute: no wrestling, no children, no music you could hum. This is a disaster picture with a Cabinet in it, and it runs 103 minutes without once cracking a smile.

The opening is the best stretch. Kazutami Hara shoots the drifting trawler in wet greens and near-black, with a torch beam the only thing moving, and Hashimoto takes his time getting Goro Maki (Ken Tanaka) below deck. What he finds there is not the monster but something smaller that has come off it, and the shrivelled faces of the crew. We were more unsettled than we had bargained for from a PG film about a man in a rubber suit; the shot of a dead sailor lit from beneath stayed with us longer than any of the later explosions. Yoshitami Kuroiwa cuts the sequence slowly and lets the silence do the work.

Then the film goes indoors, and to our surprise it stays interesting. Keiju Kobayashi plays Prime Minister Seiki Mitamura as a tired, decent man who has not slept, and the long scenes in which he refuses both superpowers the right to use a nuclear weapon on his coast have a real charge. Eitarō Ozawa, Taketoshi Naito, Nobuo Kaneko and Mizuho Suzuki fill the table as ministers who each want a different thing, and Nagahara gives them proper arguments rather than speeches. The film treats a monster as a diplomatic incident, and for twenty minutes that is a good idea well handled.

The trouble is everyone under the age of fifty. Tanaka’s reporter is handsome and has nothing to do once he has found the survivor. Yasuko Sawaguchi, as the sister Naoko, is given a scene of anger at being lied to and then a scene of being rescued, and not much between. Shin Takuma spends most of the film in a hospital bed. Yōsuke Natsuki fares better as Professor Hayashida, a man with a theory about birds and a private grief, but the romance between Maki and Naoko is so faint that we forgot it was happening. We were bored by it, and then we noticed we were checking the clock for the monster, which a Godzilla film should never let you do.

The monster, when he comes, is worth the wait. The suit is credited under costume design to Kenji Kawasaki, Tomoki Kobayashi and Nobuyuki Yasumaru, and it is the most expressive Godzilla in years: a big, sorrowful head with eyes that seem to be looking for something, and a heavy, unhurried walk. Mutsumi Toyoshima, Akira Sakuragi and Yasuyuki Inoue build a Tokyo of tall glass towers for him to lean on, and Hara shoots the city at night in searchlight white so the joins between model and man mostly stay hidden. Mostly. There are shots where the neck bends the wrong way and the buildings look like the kits they are. Reijirō Koroku’s score is a slow, mournful brass march, closer to a requiem than an adventure theme, and it is the thing that most clearly tells you what the film wants to be.

Against the 1954 original, which was made by people who had lived through the bombing and looked like it, this is a film about procedure rather than grief. Against the 1970s entries it is a relief: nobody is thrown by the tail, and the monster is frightening again. There is also a shorter version made for the West with new American scenes added, released as Godzilla 1985, and it is not the film reviewed here; the Japanese cut is longer, quieter and better.

Worth an evening if the idea of a monster film that spends half its time in committee appeals to you, as it did to us. If you want the fight, skip the first hour, which would be a shame, because the first hour is where the good film is hiding.