Black and White Film Review: Godzilla Raids Again (1955)

The original Godzilla, lovingly crafted from a screenplay adapted by Honda Ishiro and Murata Takeo from Kayama Shigeru’s original story, was a deep allegory about nuclear warfare and disarmament, whose main characters featured heavily in the ideological struggle between scientific study and destructive technology and whose side characters featured a war widow and her two children facing the destruction of yet another city, that ran for 95 minutes and had a purpose for every minute.  The sequel was slapped together in six months from a screenplay by Murata Takeo and Hidaka Shigeaki with half a dozen recycled scenes and a half an idea, whose main characters partake in half a romantic comedy while the supporting characters run a prison escape farce, over the course of eighty two minutes that is mostly filler.

Perhaps the most telling sign is that, despite the attempts to imitate elements of Honda’s style, this is the only one of the six films in the Godzilla series’ first eleven years not to feature Honda Ishiro in the director’s chair.  While Honda was busy with films like Love Makeup, Half Human and Rodan, Toho Studios was busy doing what they could to capitalize on the popularity of his 1954 film.

Godzilla Raids Again has it all: a ballroom dance scene, devastation reminiscent of a nuclear explosion, a female main character that the film is determined to pretend is not the main character, pseudo-science, Dr. Yamane, and Godzilla, after a fashion.  That last line is probably the least fair – after all, this is but the first of many times that the Godzilla suit was redesigned and the original, while much better looking, would not have been able to spend a third of the film fighting with Anguirus.  On the other hand, the fact that Anguirus is only in about a third of the film, during which he and Godzilla fight for no discernible reason other than the fact that “Anguirus is hostile against other species”, is certainly part of the problem.

This is a film that tries to be a lot of things, but it doesn’t try very hard at any of them (I blame most of this last part on the six month production schedule).  It wants to be a Godzilla sequel, but it also wants to be a giant monster battle, and for some strange reason it also wants to be a comedic farce.  While it is certainly possible for a daikaijubattle to move the series forward in a believable way (even if it would take until the third try for this series to get it right), it certainly doesn’t do that here, and the end result feels as though Anguirus is trying to drag the film to a stand-still and prevent the sequel that is taking place in the rest of the film.  Other than human elements (that are completely unrelated to main characters) drawing Godzilla into the city to attack, the humans have nothing to do with the defeat of Anguirus (or indeed, the fight at all), which relegates either the humans or Anguirus to the status of being a distraction.  In later films, this would be accomplished by having the destruction wreaked by Godzilla drive the human pilots to revenge against Godzilla (and to have a human weapon play some role in Anguirus’s defeat).  Instead, Godzilla is simply treated as a natural disaster, one that they do not waste energy or emotion on, despite the fact that the damage is sufficient to invoke more atomic bomb imagery.

This confusion about when to use which bits of the original concept continues on to other realms.  Dr. Yamane – the one individual who was absolutely against destroying Godzilla, even in the wake of his attack on Tokyo – is the person who arrives to advise the locals how to destroy the King of Monsters.  The statement that Godzilla is from two million years ago – intended to invoke a parallel between the origin of the monster and the dawn of humanity – is gone, giving a more accurate age for the era in which Ankylosaurus lived, as well as doing all but saying “this is an Ankylosaurus, but ‘Anguirus’ is a better monster name, so we’ll call it that”.

Outside of a sub-plot that takes up perhaps fifteen minutes of screentime (probably less), the characters have no development.  The pilots have a role in the battle, and Hidemi has a minor role in that (if you watch Wakayama Setsuko’s acting, you realize just how much better a more involved script would have made this film), and that’s about it.  This film, like so many kaiju films after it, is about the visual spectacle.  Unfortunately, the visual spectacle just isn’t that good.  On a lesser budget, with twice the monsters, there was little likelihood that this film would be able to bring the images its predecessor did, but this is made even worse by shoddy direction that simply doesn’t understand how to make actors in rubber suits look like giant monsters.  While Godzilla has always been about interesting ways to show a man in a costume traipsing about cardboard buildings, Godzilla Raids Again is one of the few sequels that actually looks like a man in a costume traipsing about cardboard buildings.

There is little doubt in my mind that Godzilla Raids Again is the weakest of the Japanese Godzilla films.  Like so many films before and after guided by the studio’s understanding of success, it grasps on to many concepts with the most meager idea of what made them popular, with no idea how to properly replicate them despite an urge to do so.  The human plot is shallow, the kaiju plot is the same, the prison break makes little sense in context, Weand the end result is a film that tries to do too much and accomplishes none of it.  An important part of Godzilla history, and one that is just as well forgotten.