Hi! It's me, aspiring Godzilla nerd and the one and only fan of Varan!
I sorta wanted to start making blogs about Godzilla movies in order, talking about maybe 1 to 2 movies at a time starting with the first duology, but I just got finished watching Destroy All Monsters and just HAD to write about it. I have a LOT of opinions on this one. This'll be very rambly and idk if anyone will care enough to read it all the way through but it's still fun to just ramble into the ether, for my own enjoyment :3
From the blog title you can prob tell how I felt about this movie, a movie that I've sort of kept in the back of my mind all these years, ever since I was a kid. I was very hyped for it, to say the least.
I used to have a friend in elementary school who ADORED Godzilla, and after all these years I can say I finally understand his feelings on it. I was always apprehensive about the series, content in just listening to his ramblings about it because i wasn't really particularly interested in big monsters. I watched him play the old Destroy All Monsters Melee game on xbox, and thought that was how all Godzilla things were. So, it was sorta the defining thought for how I pictured Godzilla movies being. Now that I've been watching all the movies, I see now it's much more than just a buncha monsters duking it out and destroying cities, although that is a very fun component of them. There's a lot more to Godzilla movies than just spectacle, and that's why i've been enjoying them so much, I think.
Anyways, lets get on with it!!
As a quick overview, Destroy All Monsters is a 1968 tokusatsu (japanese term for live-action movie that mainly uses practical effects) movie created by the Toho company. It's like, the 9th or so movie in the Godzilla series, and it includes *most* of the monsters from previous installations, as well as a few that previously had nothing to do with Godzilla, until this one! On the movie poster you can see all the monsters that appear in the movie, all duking it out, shooting beams at eachother or swooping in for an attack (while Manda stands there menacingly, on the left). Planned to be the final movie in the original Godzilla series, it aimed to be a great sendoff for the series. It had a huge budget, and Toho really tried to cram as many monsters as they could into it. The movie ended up doing so well however, that Toho just decided that they'd just keep making more.
Now, you would think a movie called Destroy All Monsters (or I guess called Monster Total Advancement in japan) and which has such a great poster like this would have a great big battle with all of them involved, including the destruction of all such monsters, right? Especially since it's supposed to be a sendoff to the entire series... Well, you'd be mostly wrong. In fact, two of the monsters only appear for a couple seconds at most in the middle and end of the movie, with another two just coming on screen for about a minute and who do nothing but shoot confetti everywhere. Also, I'm pretty sure I only remember ONE monster getting destroyed...
Yeaaa we're gettin into some false advertising here! You can prob start to see where I'm coming from with the disappointment for this movie. The title and poster feels like it's leading you onto some grand final battle movie with all of Godzilla's friends and enemies, old and new, but instead we ended up getting a pretty uninteresting re-hash of previous movies' "Aliens are invading" storyline, with a not very bad final battle, but one that should've been set up more properly instead of being relegated as the one and only monster fight section of the whole movie.
~~~~~~~~~~~~ The Plot ~~~~~~~~~~~~
Let's get into the plot, cause it's quite boring and unoriginal despite being a quite long-winded. This movie takes place in the **FUTURE**, wherever that may be. It's supposed to be the *most future* of all the old Showa era movies (Showa being what people call the original, old as heck movie series before they originally rebooted it during Japan's Heisei era), and it has all the monsters living in MonsterLand, a big island where all the Kaiju live happily together on a prison island where they're all happy friends and are given endless food and water so the humans can study them. There's some moon base where people live or something, it doesn't really matter except that there's some astronauts stationed there that also have a powerful spaceship and one of the astronauts has a friend? sister? or girlfriend? or something that's stationed back at the MonsterLand control center. Their relationship is a bit unclear and it also doesn't really matter despite her being put in constant danger for a lot of the film.
Anyways, suddenly the control station for MonsterLand is attacked by some unknown entity, who floods the station with sussy looking yellow gas, and the government promptly loses contact with them. Then, all the monsters break loose and spread out across the world where they start destroying big cities! The government then decides to send the astronauts with their special spaceship named SY-3 to go investigate the island control center to see wtf happened. Why they send people stationed on the literal moon instead of any army or police force is beyond me. They quickly find that the people at the station seem to be fine, and in fact seem to be even purposefully controlling the monsters to attack cities! When asked why, suddenly a goofy looking lady in a grey gown covered in sparkly glitter comes out and says that she's an alien of a race called the Kilaak, and that her people are not our enemy. They simply want to create a new technology-based civilization on earth, and that sacrifices must be made. Why they must be made, is never explained, and why she tries to come off as friendly is unclear when it's much more clear that they are trying to take over the Earth by force.
When asked why the people at the control center are helping these aliens, the commander explains that he is fascinated by their scientific knowledge and creativity, and that their ability to control monsters with science is one such advancement that fascinates him. This doesn't really explain anything, and the astronauts are not really fooled by this farce. They try to use force to take the Kilaak leader, but she's got some forcefield protection that doesn't really come up at all except for this instance. They try to take the humans back by force, but the place starts to be filled with gas that the people at the control center dont seem to be bothered by, and the astronauts need to get gas masks and start a big shootout with the others until they take one hostage and leave in their ship.
Now it's quite an interesting start to a movie like this where, if it isn't obvious, the people have been mind controlled by the Kilaaks to do their bidding for them. That lady who was once a friend is now talking all stiffly and doesn't seem bothered by the people being killed by the monsters. Aliens are trying to come under a guise of peace meanwhile they're doing as they please to take control. It's kinda cool, unless you've watched the other Godzilla movies. Because if you did, you'd know that this is a pretty close retelling of the film "Invasion of Astro-Monster", except in that film it's done way better where the aliens actually act nice for half the film before backstabbing the humans and sending monsters back to earth to attack. That movie doesn't have the mind control aspect, but everything here is basically 1:1 exactly how it was, just done worse. Which bothers me a lot, because that's my favorite Godzilla movie!! You can't just rehash something you didn't even do that long ago, and then do it way worse too!
Most of the movie is just the astronauts flying around on their SY-3 ship, investigating where the Kilaaks' bases could be while a mind-controlled Godzilla tries to stop them. There's a part a bit past the half-way point where the mind-controlled girl just tells them where the base is, and the main character yanks the mind-controlling earrings off her and that's the end of any mind-controlled humans. It's quite disappointing.
A mid-point battle is quite standard in these movies, and it's the only interesting part of this entire bulk of the movie with the human/alien focus. They immediately organize a military push for the alien base and are met with resistance from Godzilla, Anguirus, and Rodan.
Despite knowing all about each monster's instincts and fears (which is stated at the start of the movie), as well as all the myriad ways to contain them due to having them trapped on MonsterLand island, the humans literally just go in with some rockets and tanks and obviously get owned. Godzilla and Anguirus are unfazed by the tiny rockets and start destroying a bunch of tanks, and Rodan chases off SY-3 with actually really cool shots of Rodan and the ship flying through the air. I was really expecting a super cool dogfight, which while wasn't in the original Rodan movie, my favorite part was Rodan chasing and destroying planes in the air. But instead, the astronauts decide against fighting and just fly off into the atmosphere, where Rodan can't fly. What a dud of a scene. I guess they didn't want the monsters to get hurt at all cause they had to fight in the final scene, but like, couldn't we get something more substantial in this scene? Monsters get hurt all the time in these movies and just get back up and keep fighting anyways so why not here, where the humans should've had the upper hand? They make some excuse like "eurgh, our weapons are being jammed! Those damn aliens!", which just makes any chance at a cool fight get stopped in its tracks.
The movie moves on to them finding out that the real base with the mind control stuff is actually on the moon, and there's just an incredibly long and uninteresting section where the SY-3 finds the base, is stopped by... flamethrowers i guess?.. and then they take a little car and blow up the base with a tiny laser in one shot. There's an absolutely limp-wristed section where they find the monster mind control device and have to jerry-rig their car's laser to a battery so they can break off the main mind-control module inside the facility by hand, and like it feels like the writers thought this scene would be super exciting and nail-biting, but it's just very boring. The whole section goes on way too long with zoom-ins of the main character's sweating face, the music ramps up, the laser's battery is catching fire and they only got a small window to get it done, and when the thing finally breaks off, it falls over like a piece of cardboard.
OK so the plot is mostly finished! We're actually 90% of the way through with the movie and the only thing remotely interesting that's happened is the opening scene with the shootout, and the mid-movie battle. Now that the humans have the mind-control device, they can finally take back all the monsters and make them go destroy the alien base.
I'll get to the last battle but for now that's all for the main plot. Let's break down the things I liked and didn't like about this movie, and get into the nitty-gritty of that final battle and how emblematic it is of this movie's quality.
~~~~~~~~~~ The Good! ~~~~~~~~~
Despite how I've talked about this movie so far, it still has some impressive scenes and competent effects in it. The city destruction scenes in particular really stand out. They include a handful of the monsters, with Manda the serpent being front and center in various shots. I'm really glad because they get completely owned in the movie they're from, which was 'Atragon'. It helped make the battleship Atragon look pretty powerful and cool, but I always thought Manda was cool too with his breathy hissing and simple design. As a puppet, he didn't really have much range of motion, but in this movie he's given a spotlight to curl around a raised railway and destroy it alongside godzilla, and slither around the city streets.
Anguirus too is given a second chance, because in the movie he was originally introduced in, the second movie 'Godzilla Raids Again', he sorta scuffles with Godzilla a few times and then pretty quickly gets his neck bitten and dies. In this movie though he comes back in full glory with a new suit, and gets to smoosh some tanks and we get to hear his wonderfully unique roar! In the final battle he even gets to go toe to toe with King Ghidorah! Although, he does get knocked around quite a bit, it's still very fun to see Anguirus get such a big spotlight after so many years.
There's also Gorosaurus, the big raptor/t-rex like dinosaur kaiju from 'King Kong Escapes'. It's a lovely surprise to see him come back, cause apparently King Kong was in older scripts of this movie, but Toho's rights to use him had expired, so I guess they settled with the raptor instead. He's fun, and gets to do his signature kangaroo-esque jumping kick on King Ghidorah during the final battle. They also use him to burrow to paris for some odd reason. It was supposed to be Baragon who burrows there, cause he's the one that digs, but they replaced him because they couldn't use his suit (as i'll explain in the bad section). Anyways, Gorosaurus is quite fun, and gets to fight alongside Godzilla quite a bit in the final battle.
Overall, this movie has some fantastic suit designs and suit acting. The suit they remade for Anguirus is fantastic, and Godzilla's new suit is such a massive step up from the last movie, Son of Godzilla, which I thought was just really stupid looking. This is really how Godzilla should look, not too cutesy and just the right amount of cool. You can seriously tell they put a lot of the budget making the suits look good, and the miniatures looking great too. All the city portions are some of the best I've seen so far, and same with the more flat, mountainous regions filled with only trees. They don't look as barren as some older shots from other movies.
The cities destruction is fun and the explosions are well done. They weren't afraid to set off some explosions really close to the suit actors, which normally they are afraid of doing because you might get the accident that happened during Mothra vs Godzilla, where the Godzilla suit caught fire. It looked really incredible for the movie, but is quite dangerous for the poor actors in the suits.
Finally, I really did like the spaceship SY-3. I'm a fan of Atragon, the cool wartime battleship that can burrow, fly, and swim, and even shoot lasers and ice beams, so the SY-3 being an all-purpose and important ship in the same vein did appeal to me. It doesn't do anything like burrow or shoot lasers, but its design is good and the flying scenes with it were some of the more interesting in the movie for me. Like I mentioned earlier, if we got a cool dogfight with Rodan and SY-3, I woulda been so stoked. We didn't but what we got wasn't too bad regardless.
~~~~~~~~~~~~ The bad.... ~~~~~~~~~~
Now, we can FINALLY get into why exactly this movie was so disappointing. I think I got my distaste for the main plot down, but it really dos bother me that there was so much wasted potential in the movie's opening scenes. The mind control aspect could've been a very refreshing addition to the re-hashed Alien invasion plot, but it's resolved fairly quickly when the main girl is un-mind-controlled.
There's a hint of this subplot developing, where the mind-controlled woman, Kyoko, now leads the others in helping the Kilaak, and it almost poses this question whether or not they're stuck like this and if there's more than what the Kilaaks are letting on. It starts to fall apart though when it's revealed that there's just a little marble stuck behind their ears that's used to control them. They really had me believing Kyoko would go on to be like some mastermind, orchestrating the monster attacks or something cool, because she has these scenes where shes walking the opposite direction of the scared crowds of people, and smiling like a villain who's plan is coming to fruition. She also gets past the government's searching by actually having her mind control beads in her earrings, and almost seems to be controlling the monsters as she moves around the city.
This would all be really cool and all if it amounted to anything. The next time we see her she smugly tells the other humans where the Kilaak's base is, and immediately gets tackled by her friend who somehow knows her earrings are controlling her and tears them off unprompted. From then on the whole subplot is dropped and forgotten. It could've been really good to see the emotional distraught it'd bring the main character to see his sister doing these awful things with a smile on her face. What a waste of time it turned out to be, especially considering there's no real reason for the Kilaaks to have even used human slaves to do their bidding in the first place. All they're really used for is to turn off the Monsterland defenses and then flounder about taking up precious screentime.
The rest of the movie's time away from the monsters also just feels like wastes of time. Even the scenes leading up to the only really impactful plot point in the movie, the destruction of the moon base and the taking of the mind control device, feel boring and stretched out. It's like, all I could think of through all these parts are "when are we gonna get off this boring plot and just get to the part where the monsters fight each other?" I normally really enjoy the subplots in these movies, whereas other people may just want it all to be about monster fights, but this one just felt like I was waiting for the good part that never came.
There is no "destroy all monsters", in fact, only Ghidorah gets destroyed. There's not even any hint of a plot about destroying ANY monsters actually, as the humans only ever fight them because the monsters were waiting for them at one of the bases! It's only when King Ghidorah shows up that there's a necessity to beat him and save the world from the aliens. He has a pretty great fight at least as he's basically doing a 1v6 for the final fight. Yeah, the final fight is King Ghidorah vs literally everyone else. Idk what the writers were thinking, because Ghidorah got his ass beat by just 3 of these guys in his first movie, by 2 in his next movie, and now he thinks he can do a 1v6? Dude's got a deathwish or something. Sure, the second movie he was mind controlled, but he still wanted to fight after he was free but that's besides the point lol.
Regardless of the odds, he still does a great job of looking cool and kicking some ass. He does quite a number on Anguirus and holds his own for a while, but it's clear there's no way to really write the fight as anything else but a beatdown once literally every other monster dogpiles onto him, literally grabbing, chewing, and biting on every part of him. I don't dislike these fights, but I am talking about it here because of its limitations in fixing the movie. These issues with pitting Ghidorah against everyone and this being such a small part of the movie really are what make it disappointing for me. Well, that... and.... and........ AND.......
VARAN ISN'T EVEN PRESENT IN THE FINAL FIGHT
Yeah! So, I fucking love Varan. Everyone can make fun of him or whatever but I loved his movie. It's my favorite movie of all the Toho Showa catalogue, right next to Astro-monster. But he's completely absent in this, along with Baragon. The story goes that they didn't have the budget to remake Anguirus, Baragon, AND Varan, so they remade just Anguirus, and just kept Baragon and Varan as little miniatures to make cameos with. Apparently Varan's suit was in horrible disrepair since his movie was quite old at the time, and Baragon's suit was reused in the Ultraman show, and repainted multiple times. So, it makes a bit of sense why they might cut them out for budgetary reasons. In the grand scheme of things, this movie was supposed to be the final send off for the entire Godzilla series, along with all the other kaijus, so it's ok if there's cameos and some characters don't really get a spotlight cause it's a big movie... right? WRONG.
The issue with this whole thing is that, the movie doesn't feel like a big celebration send-off for all the monsters. 90% of the movie is all about the Kilaak and the astronauts! Them cutting out Varan and Baragon just stings when they wrote an intrusive alien plot that amounts to nothing! It could've been something really grand if they actually wrote a story that was more focused on the monsters, so they could've allocated more of the budget to them instead of this half-baked, unoriginal story we actually got.
I mean, Mothra's a larvae again for some reason, why wouldn't you use Mothra in her full glory for the send-off when they basically just used her moth form in Ebirah's movie? Manda was prominent in earlier scenes so why is he just off on the sidelines with Varan and Baragon? And yea, while we're at it, where's Ebirah, the big crab monster? Why is Kumonga, the spider, just shooting confetti everywhere? There's no King Kong, and there's no Kamacuras, the preying mantis guys from the movie just a year prior. Apparently they even wanted the gargantuans from "War of the Gargantuans" but they were cut too!
I dunno, to me all this compounds into just a big ball of disappointment for me. I'd been waiting for this movie for a while, watching every movie leading up to it in preparation. I'd made sure I watched everything that related to it so I was fully caught up. Now that I'm well versed in all these Kaiju movies, I feel like this one ends up being a strong contender for the worst. I didn't like Son of Godzilla, but at least it's put together more competently, and even more charming.
Usually these movies are very goofy at times, and very charming. The monsters have silly quirks or the people make some good jokes here and there and it's all very campy and fun. But this movie's played very straight and serious. There's really nothing very fun about it. You can really feel the big, gaping hole that not having Shinichi Sekizawa as a writer leaves in this movie. His writing really does deliver a perfect balance of intrigue, comedy, and action that this movie just lacks.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Well, I think that's it. All my thoughts on Destroy All Monsters. I watched it with a group of friends, excited to watch something as fun and goofy as King Kong vs Godzilla (which i also watched with them and had a lot of a fun laughing along with), but we all just ended up sitting in silence because we were all just sorta bored with it. People online seemed to like it a lot, but I just can't. Its issues feel a bit too overbearing to enjoy this movie for what it is, and it's just not bad or campy enough to laugh at with your friends.
Thanks for readin, and if you got this far thanks for bearing with me!!!
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❀lionel❀
I dig this movie. Been watching Godzilla films as long as I can remember. It’s just goofy low budget fun to me. My personal favorite Showa Era Godzilla film is probably Godzilla vs Hedorah
yeah Hedorah rocks!! That movie is like, really funny just by virtue of suddenly becoming very 70s when you compare the rest of the movies to it
by Ryougi Fangirl; ; Report
Yeah I love the style of it and have a lot of respect for Yoshimitsu Banno. Have you seen Minus One yet?
by ❀lionel❀; ; Report
Yes! that's actually what got me to watch all of the showa godzilla movies in like, a week or something. I didn't care about Godzilla at all but my friend dragged me to the theater to watch minus one and now I'm a huge fan.
by Ryougi Fangirl; ; Report
I'm glad to hear that its created so many new fans. I hope you enjoy your journey with the franchise!
by ❀lionel❀; ; Report
I'm glad to hear that its created so many new fans. I hope you enjoy your journey with the franchise!
by ❀lionel❀; ; Report
The Atlanta Monsters
Yeah, could have been better. I have a vague memory of it beating Astro-Monsters/Monster Zero, but I think that's just because it has so many monsters in it... it's been so long since I've seen either, the execution may have been much worse. Imo neither topped the alien intrigue subplots of some of the other ones (especially Ghidorah, the Three Headed Monster), but it's possible that Astro-Monsters was the better of the two.
Astro-Monster is my favorite showa Godzilla movie, so there's that lol. The original Ghidorah movie was also very good, but doesn't beat Astro-monster for me because of how ridiculously silly and memorable the latter was. In terms of 'alien intrigue', they're both on-par, and both are kinda the best the showa era has to offer too! Destroy All Monsters really coulda been the most intriguing with how it was building up, but it def just drops the ball pretty quickly.
by Ryougi Fangirl; ; Report
Agreed!
by The Atlanta Monsters; ; Report