A Touch of Mechagodzilla

Beginnings and endings of eras aren’t always obvious. When it was made in 1975, Terror of Mechagodzilla (ala Terror of Godzilla), the 15th outing for the redoubtable King of the Monsters, wasn’t intended to be the last Godzilla movie for nine years. But that’s what happened.

Coincidentally, Terror brought back Godzilla’s creator, Ishiro Honda, for what would be his last solo feature film. Definitely an end-point, then, and a meaningful landmark. But the film also does some new things, many of them deriving from the ideas of screenwriter Yukiko Takayama, the first woman to write a Godzilla screenplay solo. Notably, the human characters get more to do, with a touch of romance and some nods to tragedy.

The story opens with an Interpol submarine looking for the wreckage of Mechagodzilla, the robot kaiju destroyed at the end of the last movie. Instead the sub’s attacked by another monster, soon revealed as a creature called Titanosaurus. We learn that it’s controlled by sinister extraterrestrial agents, working with genius marine biologist Shinzo Mafune (Akihiko Hirata) who’s developed the technology to control Titanosaurus.

The aliens previously saved the life of Mafune’s beautiful daughter Katsura (Tomoko Ai), rebuilding her as a cyborg. When Interpol agents Akira Ichinose (Katsuhiko Sasaki) and Jiro Murakoshi (Katsumasa Uchida) enter the picture, trying to track down answers about the mysterious giant monster, Katsura’s caught between them and her father. Meanwhile the aliens from Black Hole Planet 3 rebuild Mechagodzilla. Can even Godzilla himself stand up to the forces aligning against the Earth?

It’s fun, with some nice imagery from Honda—bright colors pop, exterior shots give a sense of scope to the world, Mechagodzilla’s shown being rebuilt with massive scaffolding around him that sells the scale of the monster. Even the mid-1970s fashions are interesting to look at: the sideburns on the heroes, the aviator sunglasses on the villains, the lovely Pontiac Firebird driven by the Interpol cops.

The story’s efficient, sticking to the now-established formula of aliens manipulating kaiju. It’s unusual in being a more direct sequel to the previous film than is typical for a Godzilla movie, but everything you need to know is established in a credit sequence using clips from the previous entry in the series. Titanosaurus is unfortunately not the most vivid of monsters; the original plan, scrapped for budget reasons, would’ve had two dinosaurs combining to form Titanosaurus. Instead, he’s generic, used mainly to bring Mafune and his daughter into the story.

It works because the characters in this movie are slightly more developed than in at least the past dozen Godzilla films. There’s a sense of Mafune’s love for his daughter, and her for him, that creates an emotional spine as she’s also drawn to Ichinose of Interpol. The relationships affect the plot, which is rare for this series.

Honda apparently appreciated what Takayama brought to the film, and has said that a "woman's perspective was especially fresh” for kaiju films. Takayama, a student at a scriptwriting school whose outline won a story contest held by Toho, would go on to a healthy career as a writer and director in films and TV; for her, the central idea of her story was the cyborg daughter who still had emotions. That character feeds into a vestigial but notable tragic romance, an emotional terrain that had been, perhaps unsurprisingly, largely unexplored by kaiju movies since King Kong.

Its execution here isn’t too sophisticated, a plot element with emotional beats as big and unsubtle as the monsters that dominate the film. But it works, and the friendship of the two male Interpol agents comes alive as well. Some of that is actors who know how to handle this material, and some of it’s Honda’s directing, but the character ideas are explicit in the script in a way that’s a little different for Godzilla movies.

Whether this is a woman’s perspective or simply Takayama’s individual talent, it’s successful. Still, a movie called Terror of Mechagodzilla will never be mistaken for a character-based drama. If the characters get to have feelings, those feelings never slow down the actions. The bad guys still chew scenery and laugh diabolically.

The dialogue has some great straight-faced moments. The aliens look out over Tokyo and judge it “just like the brains of those Earthlings, polluted and chaotic.” Later they promise that “We will cure this planet of the disease of human pollution.” It’s difficult to describe the weird effect of the straight-faced delivery of lines like “Their hatred will become one, unleashing an orgy of violence.” Or the observation that Mechagodzilla requires living brain tissue “of superior quality.”

There’s a campiness here, but also hypnotic surrealism. Godzilla ends up the most grounded element of the film. There’s always been an element of cartoons to these movies, but in this one the lines are especially rich in over-the-top pulpiness. Nothing is unstated. Everything’s front and center.

It’s fun to watch, but didn’t do well at the box office in its original release. Monster films were on the outs by the mid-1970s. New directions for the franchise were considered, but didn’t take off; a co-production with an American company fell through. There’d be a Godzilla-sized absence in Japanese theaters for almost a decade. This film became the marker of the end of its era. If Godzilla doesn’t go out on a high note, he at least leaves on his own terms, finding a new and distinct kind of off-kilter weirdness before departing the humans and cyborgs and aliens to wade, one last time, out into the sea.