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The Appropriate Tune - "Bio Wars" by Koichi Sugiyama
Now this is truly a blast from the past. We haven’t seen hide nor hair from the King of the Monsters since Godzilla vs. Destoroyah, the sixth ever writeup on this blog. Despite making it a priority to cover foreign films, despite the direction of this blog being geared towards genre films (especially horror and science-fiction), despite the fact that I’ve been a fan of the thing since I was a child, the last time the big green lizard’s name appeared on this section of the internet was almost a decade ago. It’s not like we had a good excuse either, I mean if Monkeybone or Cool World of all movies could get an entry then Big G definitely should have been four or five films deep at this point. Yet every year when the list was compiled Godzilla was, like so many others, a bridesmaid but never the bride.
Well this year I’ve decided to use the Global Top Ten to take care of some films that have been on my watch queue. We’ve already seen one, Once Upon a Time in the West, and now it’s time to return to Japan and see how they filter important social and political issues through the lens of people in rubber suits smashing miniature models of Tokyo. The only proper way to do it, really.
Released in 1989, Godzilla vs. Biollante was written and directed by Kazuki Omori, story by Shinichiro Kobayashi, and produced by Shogo Tomiyama and Tomoyuki Tanaka through Toho, the grand central station of kaiju pictures. After falling into a volcano in the ending of the previous film, Japan has been freed from the menace known as Godilla, the atomic lizard has left behind something other than destroyed homes and families: his DNA in the form of sin cells. So useful are these cells that other nations are trying to get their hands on them, including the country of Saradia, an oil-producing country in the middle east that is totally not a stand-in for any other country. That’s bad news for botanist and geneticist Professor Shiragami, as it’s not five minutes after Saradia acquires those G-cells that someone bombs the research lab they were in, killing his daughter in the process.
Five years later and it looks like Godzilla is getting ready to leave his lava bath, so Japan has cooked up a way to kill him off for good: Anti Nuclear Energy Bacteria, a biological weapon designed to to consume radiation, derived from those G-cells. Of course the existence of such a weapon is an even bigger gamechanger than the G-cells, and so you have espionage agents and spies gunning for that secret formula. Also Shiragami, who was put on the ANEB project, decided to take the G-cells and combine them with plant cells for whatever reason, he’s a fucking moron I guess, and obviously that ends up creating a giant monster named Biollante. Now normally when two giant monsters are in the same general area they just leave each other alone and don’t interact, but I think this just might be the exception.
Let’s start with the good: the special effects. Not much has changed from the Showa to the Heisei era films on a technical level, it’s still people in suits walking around miniature cities with little smoke bombs going off every now and then, but what has changed is the presentation. Godzilla is no longer the goofy joke he was in the 70s but a brutish engine of destruction, and Biollante wouldn’t look out of place in a John Carpenter film, in fact I’d say it looks better than the creatures in In the Mouth of Madness. The miniature cities have similarly increased in size and complexity, Godzilla appearing almost dwarfed by these giant skyscrapers, which explode and crumble with exquisite precision. There’s a surreality to it for sure, the lighting on those skyscrapers almost emphasize how much they’re not actual buildings, but to me films like Godzilla vs. Biollante and Godzilla vs. Destoroyah was when kaiju movies finally looked like kaiju movies rather than Rifftrax fodder. A bit like how some people say that superhero films weren’t good until the MCU started, if I cared about Marvel.
Unfortunately just about everything else in Godzilla vs. Biollante isn’t as good. There’s a good premise of governments and corporations trying to exploit Godzilla for their own ends, some ‘you thought of whether you could rather than if you should’ before Ian Malcolm put it out there for taste, but that premise is reduced to a simple ‘find the McGuffin’ thread with people trying to steal/recover the bacteria, and the whole anti-genetic engineering message kinda goes out the window when both things created through meddling with nature ultimately saved the day in the end. Then there’s this angle involving psychics, because psychics exist I guess, and one teenage girl apparently can project the same level of power as Godzilla, which begs the question of why we need bioweapons when a bunch of 9th graders could take care of it in five minutes. Also ghosts exist and inhabit plants? Apparently the Godzilla filmography takes place in the Undertale universe. It’s an aggressively muddled movie.
That’s not a foreign concept when it comes to Godzilla movies, so you then have to look at the action layout. It’s a cold hard truth of the kaiju subgenre that despite it being predicated on giant monsters destroying stuff or fighting each other, most of the film will be dedicated to things that are not kaiju related, so keeping the audience engaged with the human aspect of the film is key. Godzilla vs. Destoroyah managed to do that decently well with it’s faux Aliens, but Godilla vs. Biollante is the polar opposite. I could not bring myself to care about any of these characters, besides the idiot who says a witty one-liner to Godzilla after shooting him with a rocket and is immediately crushed to death, and because most of the film is built around waiting for Godzilla to do something and then sending other people to do it, the film can’t figure out a way to make them interesting either. I can’t even remember any of their names besides Shiragami, Kuroshima the Ian Malcolm wannabe and Asuka the forgettable female lead. Even Shiragami barely exists in this film, the character who should be the most emotionally nuanced in the film given his backstory and him literally being responsible for creating a giant monster, and it doesn’t help that the actor is more wooden than Pinnocchio’s taint. It’s hard to believe that a movie with giant monsters, super science and psychics could be so damn dull, but Godzilla vs. Biollante will make you a believer.
Even calling it Godzilla vs. Biollante seems like a touch of false advertising. Yes the two monsters do meet each other, but the total amount of time that the two kaiju are on screen together is probably less time than it would take to eat a Happy Meal, and their fight is less active than your average episode of Power Rangers. In fact Godzilla spends the majority of the movie, when he actually shows up, fighting with the JSDF and their state of the art ship that looks like a bloated horseshoe crab, and those fights are actually way more dynamic than the one with the giant monster plant. Biollante, despite being second-billed, doesn't really do all that much, and honestly could have been completely written out of the story and barely anything would change.
I also can’t let this write-up go without giving a big middle finger to the score. While you do get the iconic theme whenever Godzilla is on screen, most of the time you get this Sousa-like booming orchestral stuff which sort of makes sense in the scenes with the horseshoe crab ship but is totally dissonant with the other scenes. A giant nuclear monster just ran through a major metropolitan area, tearing it to the ground and killing hundreds if not thousands of people, it probably shouldn’t sound like the ending of Star Wars.
Ultimately I just don’t see myself giving Godzilla vs. Biollante. I’m as big a fan of the atomic lizard as anyone, and it’s nice to see him again after all this time, but the film surrounding him is a mess, and not in a funny way like the Showa movies. If you want to see some badass Gojira action, the best bet in this blog’s opinion is still Godzilla vs. Destoroyah. There’s still plenty of Godzilla movies to choose from though, and hopefully it won’t take almost a decade for us to see another one.
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