Review Godzilla vs. Gigan film review by Durp004
Written By Durp004 on 2015-02-17 19:40:23
As a Child I used to absolutely loved this movie. Easily the best of the series. As I've aged my opinion of this movie has changed, I went through a phase of thinking it was much worse and think I've finally leveled out at putting it middle of the pack. It's not a bad Godzilla movie but it's not great. That being said when I think of the Showa era this movie is one of the first to pop into my head.
Story wise it's not to complicated. An artist named Gendo gets hired to work for this Children's Land theme park( I think it's a theme park but when they describe it it has everything from space observatories to libraries so not really sure), and runs into a girl named Machiko who has a tape she stole because she believes the people in charge of Children's Land have done something with her brother. As the story progresses we find out not only do they have her brother but they are also aliens coming from a dying planet and have come to take over the earth. With the tapes they can control not only Gigan but also King Ghidorah. Thankfully Godzilla and Anguirus show up have a huge royal rumble while our group of plucky heroes stop the aliens; Godzilla and Anguirus triumph and we watch them swim away into the sunrise as the movie ends.
Yep pretty much the basic Showa storyline of the late 60s and 70s. There are so many things to talk about this movie. Godzilla's hero role he's been getting through the last movies carries through here. He actively comes to save the day with his faithful sidekick Anguirus when the bad guys start destroying things. I feel the need to address that the assumption of Anguirus being Godzilla's best friend really comes from this movie. Even though at this point both Mothra and Rodan have helped him before(Rodan 2 times, Mothra 1 unless you count Destroy All Monsters whch I don't since that was every earth monster teamed up) people seem to remember this movie and it's fight more when thinking of Godzilla's allies.Anyway back on topic this movie also brings about the human wrestling element to monster fights to a new level. This is literally a tag team fight, and I do mean Gigan walks over to Ghidorah and tags him in at one point in the fight. It's really funny and enjoyable to watch.
The monster fight in this movie is decently long with it starting with roughly 30 minutes left in the movie. It's really enjoyable to watch and if you have a child with they they'll definitely have a blast. The one thing I have to address with this fight and the monsters scenes in general in this movie is the very jarring stock footage cuts. This movie's fight takes place at night, prior to this movie all of Ghidorah's movies have taken place in the daytime so literally everytime we get a cut it will fire from darkness to sunny with clear skies until Ghidorah finishes what he was doing then goes back to standing around and shooting his gravity beams. I'm not sure if the Ghidorah suit was in bad condition for this movie or not, but outside of his stock footage scenes Ghidorah doesn't do much besides fly around in the most stiff way possible, and walk with Gigan. Besides that he's mostly in the background.
The characters here are nothing great. They fill their roles and progress the story along besides the character Tomoko who doesn't do much but know karate and save the others at one time. They aren't horrible and you enjoy what you get from them, there are some really bad acted scenes but overall it's fine. The aliens are pretty much the least inconspicuous aliens ever. They bring up peace whenever they can, and the chairman just comes out and tells Gengo about Space Hunter Nebula M when he asks about what he's writing when he first meets him. I'm pretty sure if he would have asked if they were aliens they would have told him right there they were and have explained it what they were doing, but then of course we wouldn't have the scene with them being captured and discovering they were actually cockroaches. That's right these aliens are giant cockroaches, but you never really see them besides a shadow and a scene as they're dying.
Overall Godzilla vs Gigan doesn't bring many new things to the table in terms of Godzilla movies, but it does everything well enough it doesn't have to. There are aliens that are here to take over and you're okay with that. This isn't a great movie but it works with what it has. The more into sci fi you are the more enjoyable it is if you can just look past the badly edited stock footage cuts this is a fun movie to watch with your children. A good film to help introduce them to Godzilla.
