Making a sequel to a movie like Gojira can’t be easy. Sure, it was sci-fi movie, and sci-fi and sequels go together like Netflix and wasted lives. But Gojira was the rare science fiction movie that told a story so completely and with such gravity that making a sequel to it would be like making a sequel to Schindler’s List or Citizen Kane. What more is there to say?
However, they obviously made many, many movies starring the big green monster, usually fighting some other equally destructive kaiju. The first of these sequels, Godzilla Raids Again was pumped out in less than 6 months to capitalize of the success of the first film. It’s the first to feature another monster for Godzilla to fight: the gigantic ankylosaurs Anguirus.
For this review, I watched the American version of Godzilla Raids Again, released in 1959. This is the first time we’ve seen the famous dubbed dialogue so often associated with Godzilla movies, and boy do they ever use it. Our narrator and hero, Shoichi Tsukioka, talks over almost every minute of the film. For some reason, someone decided that no matter how obvious the action, no matter how minute the detail , everything needed to be spelled out by the narration. And not only does the narration drone over every scene, it sounds like some 1950s comedian’s racist “me so solly” routine.
Complaining about science in a movie about giant mutated dinosaurs destroying Osaka may be stupid, but when a movie seems as based on a complete lack of understanding of science and outdated, disproven facts as this one is, I can’t help but grate my teeth a little. Dr. Yamane returns at the beginning of the film to discuss the discovery of Godzilla fighting Anguirus on an island off the coast of Japan near Osaka. He first describes the ankylosaurus as having brains in multiple parts of its body, something once believed about the stegosaurus…in 1912.
He then shows a film strip on the age of dinosaurs, which is perhaps one of the worst things ever committed to celluloid. Like something out of a middle school panorama, dinosaur puppets are shown doing things like swimming in lava pits. We see two brontosauruses fighting. We’re even told they breathed fire. While Gojira may not have been based on anything resembling real science, Godzilla Raids Again seems to hate science actively.
I’ll spare you an explanation of the plot, which is more or less the same as Gojira but with more monsters and less gravity, but I’ll share with you one of the more hilariously bad examples of how the film was slapped together. When the Japanese begins to search for Godzilla (for some reason called Gigantus), a graphic obviously left over from a piece of World War II propaganda is shown:
Everything Gojira did right, Godzilla Raids Again did horribly, horribly wrong. When a moment of real pain and sadness is earned, it’s immediately followed by laughter and merriment. What makes it seem so inappropriate is that it is the complete opposite of what the first movie is. Gojira is a film about consequences; Godzilla Raids Again is a movie without them.
