Monster and Kaiju Movie Thoughts and Impressions

#18: Godzilla vs Biollante

I've always liked the monster, evenwhen I was unaware of the Heisei movies and getting TrendmastersGodzilla toys made me think they were adding some strange fanfictionmaterial to the series for some reason, I did like the monster.Though in hindsight the legs are an odd choice... Heh, here I washoping to learn something about reviewing by trying these things, butsometimes I just find it hard to talk about much, definitely notheading towards a media reviewer gig.

Overall impressions I feel like thismovie jumps around a lot, and there doesn't seem to be a lot ofreason to care about much. Erika is barely on screen before dying andthere's a little bit of time where they claim her spirit is attachedto the Godzilla-plant hybrid creature but that literally lasts all ofone scene before they say that spirit is gone and it's just a violentmonster. Who knows if that's true, there is a point where expositionclaims that Super X-2 can return Godzilla's fire with thousands oftimes the force and the skeptical character who doubts the claimseems to win out there as the mirror melts before Godzilla suffersserious harm.

The particular copy I have hassubtitles that make a lot of dubious choices in how to word things,but I don't really want to factor that in too much. It's a bit ofinadvertent humor not unlike older dubs talking about 'Godziller' andsuch.

Weirdly the movie has a fairly decenthuman villain with the mercenary who's from totally not Saudi Arabia.Saradia isn't it? They didn't try very hard to hide that one. Well,it's not like New Kirk City was super subtle either. The fact he'sjust outright vaporized by one of the devices meant to be usedagainst Godzilla – not even kill him, just raise his bodytemperature enough for the bacteria to work – is kind of funny,also not a bad way of emphasizing how ridiculously hard it is to hurtGodzilla. That's probably not on purpose though, probably justcheaper to mesh two shots with an effect than blow up a ballisticsdummy or something.

I kind of want to gripe about the bodytemperature thing, I don't think

something that large with a nuclearbased metabolism is going to strictly count as cold blooded butgriping about the science of a Godzilla movie is just reallyridiculous. Plausibility isn't a factor so I shouldn't let it irk me.

The fight scenes are definitely themost brutal yet at this point in the Godzilla movies, honestly I findit hard not to just pity Biollante in the first encounter where sheseems pretty close to defenseless against Godzilla and just keepsgetting blasted apart. As someone who's always been fond of the rowdytag team style fights in vs Gigan and vs Megalon, I'm not the biggestfan of this development. I'm not crying about it either though, andit does make for a more impactful scene in its way.

I think I must have missed somethingabout the second encounter though, I'm not sure why Biollante showsup to fight Godzilla again unless she's just upset about the lasttime... you know, given that one of the theories that vsSpaceGodzilla gives is that part of Biollante became SpaceGodzilla,it could just be a really deep-seated grudge there. The final form ofBiollante is quite the prop, but I can see why they wanted to enhancethe battle with stop motion shots. It's still quite brutal but not asone-sided, the monsters seem to reduce each other to glass cannons inthis exchange. Then Godzilla takes a nap from the nuclear bacteria,gets better, and Biollante dips by turning into a cloud of spores orsomething. The lack of resolution is weird.

I see why this is a movie I haven'trewatched since the first time, but Biollante sure deserves a chanceoutside of comics and video games. Genetic engineering is taking offand that does give some people some anxieties about the future thatwill create, I'm sure some clever screenwriter could do somethingwith a creature like Biollante.