The Smog Monster Rises

One of the tricks to keeping a film franchise profitable over an increasing number of installments is balancing new thrills against the tried and true. Usually the powers-that-be will plump for consistency, sticking with what audiences know and want. But sometimes new creators are brought in, and the zeitgeist brings about a shift in tone.

Thus 1971’s Godzilla vs. Hedorah (sometimes known as Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster in the United States), the 11th Godzilla movie. Ishiro Honda, Godzilla’s creator, was occupied with directing for television; a young filmmaker named Yoshimitsu Banno took over as director. This would be Banno’s first feature, and he’d have a budget significantly less than previous films in the series. Honda would watch a rough cut of the film, provide advice, and serve as an intermediary between Banno and producer Tomoyuki Tanaka, but Banno brought a number of new ideas to the making of the movie.

Writer Kaoru Mabuchi (who collaborated with Banno on the script) and effects director Teruyoshi Nakano return from the previous film, All Monsters Attack, but while in some ways this movie’s a return to standard form for Godzilla it’s unique. Like many countries in the 1960s and 70s, Japan had a cinematic New Wave, and some of the weirdness of that era makes it into this film.

You wouldn't know it from a plot description. When fishing dries up off the coast of Japan, Professor Toru Yanno (Akira Yamauchi) and his son Ken (Hiroyuki Kawase) investigate and discover a monster they name Hedorah (played in a suit by Kenpachiro Satsuma). The acidic Hedorah, who scars half of Yanno’s face, feeds off of pollution. On an incursion inland he comes face-to-face with Godzilla (the indefatigable Haruo Nakazjima, in his 11th appearance in the Godzilla suit), who’s seen in dreams and visions by Ken. Godzilla defeats Hedorah, but the creature evolves and returns.

The humans determine that Hedorah flew to Earth on a meteorite from “a dark world of death” in a faraway nebula. Yanno and his allies try to rally humanity to stop polluting, hoping to dry out Hedorah. It doesn’t work. A group of youths hold a party on Mount Fuji to raise spirits while life remains; Hedorah attacks; Godzilla emerges for an extended final battle.

The movie swings in tone, goofy one moment and dark the next. People die on-camera, and Hedorah’s victims are dissolved to skeletons. There’s more emotional consequence to the big monster battles than any Godzilla movie since the first one, which creates the impression that the filmmakers are earnest about the anti-pollution theme. And yet it’s clearly a 1970s Godzilla movie, with men in monster suits flailing at each other, a lack of personality to the human characters, and a plot built on Godzilla wandering by whenever it’s most convenient.

It’s true that the kaiju battle scenes are darker, and suitably smoke-filled; Hedorah’s need for pollution is a boon to cinematographer Yoichi Manoda. And the designs of the different Hedorahs are effectively weird, unreal in a cheap monster-movie way, but engaging.

What’s most memorable about this movie are the moments of non-kaiju weirdness in it, shots not like anything seen in the Godzilla series to date. There’s an extended scene in a dance club with acid rock playing and a beautiful singer in face paint. There are clips of cheap animation. There are lingering abstract shots of chemical pollutants seen through a microscope, like a slick Jackson Pollock painting. There are moments late in the film with multiplying TV screens against a black backdrop, building to a polyphonic cacophony of voices. And there’s a hippie dance party on Mount Fuji.

But this isn’t a movie that succeeds in making a coherent thematic point about pollution or anything else. That’s partly because the writing’s simplistic and the metaphor falls apart if you squint even a little—isn’t it letting humanity off the hook to have an extraterrestrial kaiju representing the threat of man-made pollution? And if Hedorah embodies pollution, what does Godzilla symbolize? I suppose you could see the movie as an extended allegory for nuclear power eliminating coal-and-oil burning power plants, but the simpler truth is that pollution isn’t the kind of opponent that can be solved by having Godzilla squash it.

The film does work on a simpler level, as a movie that gives the king of the monsters a credibly tough opponent. There’s a baseline level of craft that doesn’t let down an audience that’s shown up to watch giant monsters in hand-to-hand combat. There’s nothing much beyond the fighting and the disaster, though, no other genre at work here other than a minimal nod to science fiction in Hedorah’s extraterrestrial origin.

Still, in the end the mixture of solid craft with surreal moments does carry the film, even if the surface story’s superficial. At one point two characters see the kaiju preparing for battle and one says “Godzilla! Let’s get closer.” This is a silly line, but it doesn’t stand out. As usual in a Godzilla movie, everything’s straight-faced, with no irony or sign that the characters have any interiority. And that’s fine; you don’t necessarily want irony or interiority in a movie about giant monsters at war. Kaiju attacks do concentrate the mind wonderfully.