Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah

Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah  (Gojira vs. Kingu Gidora) (1991)

Runtime: 101 minutes (that's the version put out by Sony, where there's no end credits!)

Directed by: Kazuki Ohmori

Starring: Kosuke Toyohara, Anna Nakagawa, Megumi Odaka, Katsuhiko Sasaki, Akiji Kobayashi

From: Toho

There isn't much here for me to say so below is my Letterboxd review for this movie:

Yesterday would have been the 114th birthday of Eiji Tsuburaya; if you don't know the name, he was the creator of Ultraman, was one of the creators of Godzilla, and did the special effects for all the early Toho kaiji movies. Thus, I figured it would be appropriate for me to watch this last night, a movie I had not seen before but got on Blu recently. All I heard was that it involved time travel and it had quite the daffy plot. The reason why the classic monsters like Ghidorah and Mothra returned in the 90's is because the previous movie (Godzilla vs. Biollante) disappointed at the box office. They kept the same director/writer but they demanded a familiar foe from the past so in came the three headed dragon here.

That plot is: it's actually set in 1992, even though it came out in '91. A time travel space ship from 2204 arrives and tells the people of Japan that Godzilla will wipe out the country in the future so they need to go back to World War II and get rid of the Big G when he was just a dinosaur on an island (really) and they need the help of some 90's people... only their help isn't really needed and that's a big issue with the movie; I'll explain why in a moment but note that things don't go as expected for the 90's people and King Ghidorah is also involved.

I realize that while time travel movies allow for a lot of creativity, most of them also give you a headache if you think of various aspects in a logical matter, and how some things don't make sense. Well, the story problems go far beyond that. The movie just makes zero sense at all from beginning to end. It's not because it's overly complex; it's convoluted, but in a bad way, as it's poor storytelling, where they even go against some of the standard rules for time travel and changing things in the past... personally I prefer Biollante as while it's also a convoluted wacky silly movie-with American actors that have few if any other credits-at least most things there seemed to make sense and everything came together by the time the end credits rolled. This just made me mad with all the logic holes it had and how many things seemed to happen only because the script said so.

It's unfortunate as the practical effects were all nice... although due to the high quality of Blu-ray “the wires are now visible”. There's also a cyborg character and that's a source of much wackiness-you have to see the way he runs. The general idea of the story-as odd as it is-seems fine to me and if done in a different way could have been pretty original and fun. Instead, this was just a confused mess. Others seem to like this more than I did, though.

I do have to mention, though... LOL for the way they referenced one of the most famous directors of all time. I won't spoil it but to mention the truth, his dad did serve in World War II but not in that branch of the military and it was not in the Pacific region where he was by an island with a dinosaur.