Godzilla: Final Wars (2004)

Posted on by Paul Wilhelm-Aronofsky

Fifty years. FIFTY YEARS! Five DECADES worth of Godzilla cinema. It seems so long, but in the context of human civilization, it’s a blink of an eye. Technology during this particular time was rapidly developing, leading to a boom in digital effects. A far cry from the boxy wireframes of the Dire Straits’ Money For Nothin’, CGI had recently been pushed to its limits and used to spectacular effect in major film franchises like The Matrix, The Lord of the Rings, and Harry Potter. So where does that leave Godzilla? For fifty years and seven actors, the King of the Monsters has been portrayed by a guy in a suit. RIP, Kenpachiro Satsuma who recently passed away. Some films have toyed with these new tools, but nothing as pervasive as their Hollywood counterparts. 2004’s Godzilla: Final Wars embraced this debate over digital and practical effects in microcosm, stealing a lot from the Wachowski’s Matrix films in the process.

Godzilla: Tokyo S.O.S. had the poorest box-office haul ever, but there was no way Toho was going to let the 50th anniversary of Godzilla fall by the wayside. The Millennium era hadn’t hit the mark with new audiences, except for a niche few like myself. The franchise was languishing, and numbers drive production. This isn’t the first time Godzilla stared down the barrel of obscurity, and producer Shogo Tomiyama recognized that reality. Toho would produce one last, big, swing-for-the-fences film to mark Godzilla’s anniversary, before going dormant as they had done after Terror of Mechagodzilla and Godzilla vs. Destoroyah, waiting for the next generation to take up the mantle. Enter Ryuhei Kitamura, a young filmmaker bucking the trend of safe, formulaic, cookie-cutter productions that conservative studio execs were going for, but were no longer delivering.

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Godzilla: Tokyo S.O.S. (2003)

Posted on by Paul Wilhelm-Aronofsky

Well, it’s springtime, there’s a still a chill in the air though not as harsh as we’ve felt these past months. The softening of the climate is making way for budding bushes and flowers, birds are returning, bees and bears alike awakening from hibernation, life is coming back into the world. In 1997, a new life in particular was brought to the world, a new kind of life. With the birth of Dolly the sheep, bioengineering produced the first mammalian clone. She lived for six years, not very long all things considered, but long enough to be impressed with the technology. The intervening years saw advancements, and as Dolly shuffled off this mortal coil, Banteng #1 gifted us with her presence. She was one of two who were born in 2003, the first endangered species clones to survive more than a few days. Banteng #1 lived a healthy life for 7 years. The purpose of cloning endangered animals isn’t necessarily to replace them via that method alone. Species become threatened when their habitat is disrupted, and that needs to be addressed first and foremost. What cloning can do, is help the species along its way, bide some time, and perhaps in the future add genetic resistance and biodiversity when their numbers have dwindled to the point where rebuilding the population would only produce offspring from a small set of ancestors. The question remains: do we have a right to tamper in God’s domain? Dear readers, you should know by now that when themes of death and rebirth come a knockin’, Our Lady of Mercy, the Massive Mighty Mother of Gaia, Patron Saint of Aerial Ass Whoopin’s, the benevolent Mothra herself will not be far behind.

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Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla (2002)

Posted on by Paul Wilhelm-Aronofsky

Well, folks, we’re back! I had to take a hiatus to plan a wedding, start a new job, and help run a curling club. One season ends, just in time for another to begin: baseball! Back in 1993, the Yomiuri Giants drafted a kid right out of out of high school. How good was this kid? Well, he originally batted right-handed, but was so good that his brother insisted he start batting left-handed or he’d stop playing with him altogether. So what did this kid do? Only learn how to bat left-handed and become one of the best left-handed hitters in both Japanese and US baseball, winning the Nippon Professional Baseball MVP in 2000, and the MLB MVP of the New York Yankees World Series winning team in 2009. That kid? None other than Hideki “Godzilla” Matsui himself. 2002 saw not only Matsui signing with the Yankees, but also some major advancements in neural engineering. Scientists were able to implant electrodes into a rat’s brain, and by stimulating the left and right whisker sensors, then hitting the pleasure-reward center, were able to control the rat via remote. This allows rescuers to send rats into collapsed rubble, searching for survivors and navigating tight spaces that humans or robots can’t access. It also laid the groundwork for other technologies, restoring brain function and muscle control, inhibiting the urges of addiction, and fighting dementia. This is all well and good, but what are the ethics behind this? Short-lived lab rats are one thing, but what about larger animals? Humans? Could this be applied to create a living weapon? And what happens when the technology inevitably fails on that weapon? These are the questions that 2002’s Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla raises in the first of two entries in Toho’s “Kiryu Saga.”

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Godzilla, Mothra, and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack (2001)

Posted on by Paul Wilhelm-Aronofsky

Since its inception in 1954, the Godzilla has been varying degrees of an allegory about the horrors of war. Ishirō Honda wanted the world to see the massive devastation, illness, and civilian impact of the atomic bombs, and warn the human race against continuing down such a destructive path. While it’s completely fair to call out the U.S. for this war crime and and accelerating the threat to end all life on the planet, most movies completely ignore Japan’s role in the events that lead up to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Despite what Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah may have you believe, allying with the Nazis and committing atrocities on the Korean peninsula is not something to wax nostalgic about. In addition to killing military personnel and civilians alike in the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Imperial Japanese Army abducted thousands of women forcing them into sexual slavery across southeast Asia. The Japanese government long denied the existence of these “comfort women” and “comfort stations,” but an apology was eventually issued in 1993. That, however spurred a backlash among right-wing nationalists in Japan, notably former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe who would later sign an agreement to donate money to the victims in South Korea, but insist that they stop using the term “sex slaves” and remove the memorial statue from its location in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul. Essentially this was international hush money. This nationalist movement also led to increasing calls to abolish or reinterpret Article 9 of Japan’s constitution which essentially waives the country’s right to declare war. The wording comes in two parts, first renouncing the threat of force to settle disputes, and second that land, sea, and air forces shall never be maintained. Some view the JSDF itself as unconstitutional based on that wording, but Japan’s supreme court determined the country does have a right to maintain forces to defend itself. Still, the country continues to push the envelope, ruling it has the right to assist allies in foreign conflicts, starting with the War in Iraq. In 2014, Article 9 was officially “reinterpreted” to allow this, but bypassed the constitutional procedure to do so. It’s along this path of ramped up nationalism and militarism eschewing the Japanese constitution that 2001’s Godzilla, Mothra, and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack gives us a unique interpretation of Honda’s anti-war legacy.

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Godzilla vs. Megaguirus (2000)

Posted on by Paul Wilhelm-Aronofsky

Fusion! The crown jewel of nuclear technology, yet perpetually out of reach. So far. Current nuclear power plants harness power using nuclear fission, but the process produces radiation and radioactive waste. But there is another process, fusion, that involves creating plasma to run turbines to generate electricity. Unfortunately you need to develop a stable environment that contains plasma at temperatures of millions of degrees, and to do that, you need to consume more electricity than can currently be generated. However, fusion reactors would produce less nuclear waste, and could be substantially safer to operate. Plasma is also used in gasification plants to dispose of municipal waste. Essentially electrically powered plasma torches heat the waste to such high temperatures that they mostly gasify and the solid slag waste can be used in building materials. These plants produce power at a net negative, but have the bonus of cleanly getting rid of our garbage in the process. Think of it less as a viable way to generate power, and more of a disposal system that gives back a portion of the energy it uses. At the heart of all this is plasma, the fourth state of matter where gases are ionized, and that’s the basis behind half of the fictional technology in this bonkers entry in the Millennium Era. What’s the other half you ask? A Black Hole Gun!

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Godzilla 2000: Millennium (1999)

Posted on by Paul Wilhelm-Aronofsky

How crazy is it that in 2017, a former special agent and Pentagon employee leaked evidence that the US Military had on UFOs and the investigations into them, to very little fanfare? It barely made headlines, and was just churned through the 24 hour news cycle and forgotten, pending further investigation. Where did our fascinations with UFOs go? You can find alien trends in popular culture at various points, from War of the Worlds (the book, 1898) to War of the Worlds (the radio broadcast, 1938) to War of the Worlds (the movies, 1953, 2005). For anyone older than 25, UFOs were a major part of life, permeating our entertainment in nearly every genre, and even if you didn’t believe in little green men from far off galaxies barnstorming the skies and probing rednecks, you were guaranteed to at least know someone who did. Part of the reason this major story didn’t make many waves was because of the outrage overload from 2016-2020. It’s easy to get lost in a sea of news when twice a day you had a story coming out of the White House that was the most ludicrous thing you’d ever heard. But another part, especially in an age of people wary of fake news, is there really isn’t any evidence to say “Yes, those were aliens.” The Pentagon report doesn’t rule out the possibility, but stresses that there is no solid evidence for extraterrestrial technology. It really takes the wind out of the sails, but UFOs are, by very definition, “unidentified.” Another reason I’d posit, is that UFOs in pop culture tend to represent the unknown and the other. With the advent of the internet, we became a much more connected world. Many stopped seeing others from foreign nations and far-off lands as the “other” or “them;” strange, curious beings beyond reach or understanding. Especially if you lived in a small town, and never travelled abroad, you may never have met or conversed with someone from China, Ghana, Austraila, or Peru. It could seem like various cultures were far more different than they were similar. The internet changed all that. You could connect with anyone, and suddenly had access to local news from around the country, or the world, complete with updates and retractions, and the ability to cross check references. The 90s seemed to be the last hurrah of the weird, cryptid, UFO, crystal energy, astrology, ghost, possession, spontaneous combustion, type of fun conspiratorial fascination. Which is not to say conspiracy theories disappeared, just that they’re a lot more sad, disappointing, (relatively) grounded, and politically motivated. Image and video resolutions also became much clearer, making it harder to fake “evidence,” and you had more people collaborating digitally to find the truth and debunk hoaxes. It was much easier to believe there were more things in heaven and earth before we started documenting every little occurrence for all to see on the internet. But what a time to be alive! 1996 gave us both Independence Day, and Mars Attacks! In 1997, we got the adaptation of Carl Sagan’s Contact with Jodie Foster, alongside Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones’ unforgettable Men In Black. Not to mention David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson’s seminal run of the X-Files. It was a decade of change, the dawn of the global information age, those who grew up around that time experienced the transition from cassette tapes to CDs to mP3s in a whirlwind of advancement, with film evolving on a similar track. This is the environment in the year 1999 with the Y2K bug looming on the horizon, eve of a new millennium, that Godzilla 2000 sprang to life.

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Godzilla (1998)

Posted on by Paul Wilhelm-Aronofsky

Long before Oppenheimer became Death, the destroyer of worlds, an incredible woman made groundbreaking discoveries in radiation in the late 1800s. Marie Curie, born Marie Skłodowska in Poland, was disallowed from enrolling in the University of Warsaw because she was a woman, so instead went to a secret underground school called the Flying University, established to offer education to young Poles and say “F U” to the Prussian and Russian Empires that split control of the country. Pursuing more opportunities and formal education, Marie moved to France and enrolled in the University of Paris where she met her future husband Pierre Curie. The two built on Henri Becquerel’s research that Uranium was able to effect photographic film just by being near it, and the three collectively won the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics after Pierre insisted they share credit with Marie after the Nobel committee left her out of the nomination. The two scienced the hell out of the 1900s and had a brilliant daughter Irène who collaborated with them. Meeting and marrying one of Marie’s lab assistants, Jean Frédéric Joliot, they both changed their surnames to Joliot-Curie and continued to study nuclear physics. Frédéric is notable for not only pioneering work on nuclear chain reactions, but also resisting the German invasion during World War II. The dude smuggled his research out of the country to keep it from falling into Nazi hands, gave up nothing under intense interrogation, joined the Communist Party and local resistance, and fought to kick the Nazis out of France. Where the Manhattan Project was focused on building a nuclear bomb, Joliot-Curie’s research was focused on developing a source of energy to fuel the war efforts. To this end, post-war Joliet-Curie was appointed the first commissioner of atomic energy, but was dismissed due to France’s growing anti-communist leanings and Frédéric’s vow to never work on building atomic weapons. His successor was much more open to the idea of working with the military, and by the mid 60s they started testing nuclear weapons in French Polynesia. Despite assurances to native people in nearby islands that France would conduct the tests responsibly, residents of Tahiti were still blasted with 500 times the allowed radiation dosage and suffered a wave of widespread cancer. The government continued to deny that testing caused any negative effects well into the mid 90s when testing resumed under President Jacques Chirac, which is probably why 1998’s box office bomb points fingers at France while completely ignoring the United States’ own sordid nuclear track record. That’s right, for this entry I re-watched Roland Emmerich’s Godzilla so you don’t have to.

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Godzilla vs. Destoroyah (1995)

Posted on by Paul Wilhelm-Aronofsky

Well folks, we’re up to the end of the Heisei era, and what a time to get there. 1995’s Godzilla vs. Destoroyah was billed as the death of Godzilla, putting an endcap on the iconic series. Everyone involved (and any comics fans) knew that this would likely not be the case, but they were closing up shop and filming the final chapter of the current run. In a series of poetic homages to the original Godzilla, Destoroyah revives the core themes that have made the franchise so impactful and successful to this day. Godzilla is dying, after having taken on a massive amount of radiation, and is approaching meltdown. The existential threat looms large: the clock is ticking, and if we don’t do something, it could mean the end of life on planet Earth. A timely lesson, considering the events of the past week (as of writing this, March 3 2022). With Vladimir Putin straight up invading the sovereign nation of Ukraine, the rest of the world is faced with some of the most difficult global security decisions since WW2. Any direct intervention could push Putin into launching a nuclear first strike, as he’s threatened to do, which is limiting the United States and Europe to offering financial, medical, and military supply aid rather than committing troops. While it’s extremely unlikely that this could happen, do you want to call that bluff? Only time will tell, as events are still unfolding. To make matters worse, everyone considers themselves to be an armchair expert on every current topic thanks to the internet, which leads to a bunch of dweebs on Twitter saying a nuclear war wouldn’t “actually be that bad.” I’m not claiming to be an expert, but can lay out a few points as far as I understand them. The folks saying this are making a pile of assumptions: one is that there was a study on recent wildfires showing that ash was rising far higher into the atmosphere than was previously modeled, indicating the dangers of a nuclear winter could be worse than originally expected. However, another study indicated that this was probably not the case, so the science is undecided there. The next is that targeting and delivery systems have become far more advanced allowing for more “precision” to annihilate a target. In the height of the cold war, it was assumed that many warheads would be aimed at a single target, and it’s more likely that only a few would be need in the modern age, reducing the total amount fired, and therefore limiting the dangers of a nuclear winter. This seems to be a uhhh, very generous assumption given that defense systems have also become more advanced. Not something I’d like to gamble on. It also ignores some key concepts of nuclear war. While the nuclear winter may be more localized and not immediately plunge the world into a life-ending apocalyptic disaster, the massive swaths of land that would be effected would destroy food production effecting billions. The radioactive fallout would drift and corrupt everything in the surrounding area, civilization and wildlife alike. Even if you were outside the blast zone, there’s a sizable radiation zone where you would need immediate medical attention – and not be able to get it. Infrastructure would collapse, and first responders would not be able to risk exposure leaving millions to die slow agonizing deaths over the coming days and weeks. Being more connected by digital technology than ever before means communications systems going down, including banking systems, would plunge entire economies into chaos. Does this mean you should you keep a large stack of cash under a mattress? Probably not, even with heightened tensions, the threat of a house fire is still far more likely. Last but not least: the immense human cost. Yes, humanity itself may be likely to survive a “small” nuclear war, but initiating it, or even retaliating with nuclear weapons, would turn you into the biggest mass murderers in modern history in the blink of an eye. Not just those effected in the blasts and immediate aftermath, but the cancers and sickness that would effect surrounding regions and waterways for decades. We see the effects rippling throughout generations in Godzilla vs. Destoroyah. The farther we get from the living memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the more you see people downplaying these risks, or bringing up old justifications, and that’s a depressing and terrifying thought.

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Godzilla vs SpaceGodzilla (1994)

Posted on by Paul Wilhelm-Aronofsky

The birth of hip hop can be traced back to the 1970s in the Bronx, New York, New York, America. DJ Kool Herc pioneered a turntable technique of isolating and repeating musical breaks. The genre started small, only available at block parties, house parties, and schoolyards. Young people would bring out a boombox and start rhyming, improvising intricate poetry on the fly. By the 80s, the genre became popularized enough to sell records from greats like Kurtis Blow, Grandmaster Flash, Doug E. Fresh, and way more than I can list here. In retrospect it shouldn’t be surprising, but a prevailing casual racist belief among older white people was that it was music for uneducated thugs who didn’t have the best grasp on the English language. It’s an absolutely insane take considering the craftsmanship and grasp of rhythm, cadence, and structure required to spit fire, be it freestyle or pre written. The backlash against “ebonics” or African American English would come to a head in 1996 with Oakland School Board’s resolution to recognize the legitimacy of Ebonics and incorporate that into teaching standard English in the classrooms. As you can imagine, white people lost their friggin minds over this without understanding the actual resolution or its impact on education. Meanwhile, overseas, Japan was picking up on this new musical style, but fans felt that hip hop was more suited to the English Language than Japanese. Japanese generally ends in a small set of auxiliary verbs, as opposed to more common verbs and nouns found in English, lending to a wider variety of rhymes and cadence. But, just as AAE didn’t adhere to the steadfast rules of standard English, rappers in Japan began to bend the grammatical structure to fit into the traditional hip hop flow. This wave of new creative artists gave rise to acts like Buddha Brand, and King Giddra who embraced hip hop’s origin of promoting voices of the oppressed and voiceless. While Japan had an understandably different political climate, these bands would rail against homogeneity and cultural imperialism. What does all this have to do with Godzilla? Well, scoring legend Akira Ifukube was approached for the job of composing for Toho’s latest venture, Godzilla vs. SpaceGodzilla. While he didn’t have as much of a conniption fit as American elders, he did take a look at the project and said “When I read the script for Godzilla vs. SpaceGodzilla, it reminded me of teenage idol films. In addition, the movie was going to have rap music in it. So, I thought, ‘Well, this is not my world, so I better not score this one.'” While there is only one rap song in Godzilla vs. SpaceGodzilla, this move is consistent with Ifukube’s decisions in the past. He declined to write for the original Mothra in ’61 because he didn’t think his style would be a good enough fit to do the the twin singers who played the Shobijin justice. He also stayed away from some earlier Heisei era films because he wanted to avoid the pop synth motifs they were looking for. The man just knows how to step aside and let someone else take the reins for a while.

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Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II (1993)

Posted on by Paul Wilhelm-Aronofsky

By the early 90s there were two huge crazes running rampant through the minds of the world’s youth. The 80s brought a resurgence of robot obsessions with Transformers and Gundam, but equally if not more enticing was the concept of DINOSAURS. Growing up in the 80s and 90s, I had caught dino fever from an early age. My parents graciously got every Rupert Oliver dinosaur book which detailed the environment and diet of different species, and told a story for each one that made learning engaging. I had a set of about 100 cards with realistic dinosaur illustrations and impossibly small text packed full of information on each one. These are a few of the things that taught me how to read. Movies and TV shows tapped into this interest with Land Before Time, Dino-Riders, and even Barney and Friends. But those were all small potatoes compared to what was to come in 1993. A legendary director would use skillful practical effects to spin a tale of genetic engineering gone wrong. That’s right, 1993 was the year Roger Corman’s Carnosaur came out! Just kidding; while Corman’s low-budget schlocky horror flick did release a few weeks prior, Spielberg’s Jurassic Park mesmerized audiences with some of the best effects ever seen and changed film forever. While Jurassic Park is inarguably a better movie, arguably one of the best films ever made, I still have a soft spot for Carnosaur. It is not good, but it is way off the deep end, the effects are fun, and for an 11 year old kid was excitingly violent and gory. And for anyone who appreciates practical effects on a low budget, Roger Corman was one of the best. It’s worth watching his films if for nothing else than to appreciate how far he could stretch a dollar, and how many greats were graduates from the “Roger Corman Film School.” Not an official organization, but Corman was an independent pioneer who worked with and influenced Francis Ford Coppola, James Cameron, Jack Nicholson, Ron Howard, Martin Scorcese, Joe Dante and many others. Joining Spielberg and Corman in the ’93 dinosaur rampage through the silver screen was returning director Takao Okawara in Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II.

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