Not Coming to a Theater Near You

The inevitable quickie followup to Godzilla had big shoes to fill; dispensing with Ishirō Honda’s remarkably nuanced sense of injustice, director Motoyoshi Oda handily respawns Godzilla on a remote island near Osaka. Battling the armor-plated quadruped monster Angurius, he is discovered by a couple of pilots who work for a nearby cannery. They alert their superiors; the still-traumatized paleontologist Dr. Kyohei Yamane (Takashi Shimura) cameos with the bitter assessment that “Killing Godzilla is hopeless.” The two beasts thrash their way towards the city, which undergoes a panicked shutdown scored to the strings of a nightclub band mid-serenade. Godzilla Raids Again is hamstrung, maybe, by the majesty of its predecessor, but never quite gives way to the out-and-out camp of its successors.

Unlike Honda, Oda has a keen eye for mingling monster footage with newsreel-esque aerial photography, granting spontaneity and landscape to the monsters’ always-unwelcome appearances. Godzilla’s first deathmatch gives special effects supervisor Eiji Tsubaraya (who would later create Ultraman) ample opportunity to move fast - including overcranking the camera for monster closeups - and break things; the film’s signature moment is when Angurius topples over onto a colossal pagoda. But what really solidifies the sequel’s status is the gee-whiz cadre of pilots who, of course, used to fly missions together in the Pacific. If Godzilla was a film noir, then the omnipresent sentimentality of Godzilla Raids Again - brought on a feeling of imminent apocalypse - erases any doubt that this is a war picture.

By Steve Macfarlane   ©2013 NotComing.com