Fourteen years after the original Godzilla, director Ishiro Honda, special-effects supervisor Eiji Tsuburaya, and composer Akira Ifukube reunited to potentially end the series. Sort of like the first Avengers, the idea here was pretty simple and very much scraping the bottom of the barrel: what if the characters from all those other movies teamed up to fight a bunch of forgettable aliens? That’s right, Destroy All Monsters is an 11-kaiju extravaganza, featuring everyone from Anguirus to ‘Zilla himself. But is it any good?
Set in the remote future of 1999, mankind has achieved world peace and reached for the stars, sending scientists to live and work on the moon. More importantly, we’ve confined all of the world’s kaiju to a single island called Monsterland where they can live in harmony and feast on dolphins (real classy Japan). Everything is great until suddenly it isn’t, when the kaiju suddenly appear in major cities all over the world and start wreaking havoc: Godzilla shows up in New York and blows up the UN, Rodan soars over Moscow, Mothra slithers around Beijing, and my boy Manda starts derailing trains in London. What the hey dudes? I thought they were happy?
Meanwhile, the intrepid crew of the spaceship Moonlight SY-3 return from the moon and visit the kaiju research station on an island near Monsterland. There, they find their colleagues acting very suspiciously and things get pretty uncomfortable when they reveal that they’re actually being mind-controlled by a group of aliens called Kilaaks. The Kilaaks, who are just a bunch of women in silver robes, confess that they’re also controlling the world’s kaiju and demand that all of humanity surrender or die. Despite having the best military tech you could find in 1999, it looks like we’re totally outmatched. Can our spaceboys find a way to liberate the kaiju and stop the Kilaaks?
Yes, of course they can. But what’s awesome is that after they destroy the mind-control system, the Kilaaks call on King Ghidorah to fight everybody. With the backdrop of Japan’s iconic Mount Fuji, Ghidorah engages in an epic melee with Godzilla, Minilla, Mothra, Rodan, Gorosaurus, Anguirus, Kumonga, and Varan. Basically they all just do their special moves and just wreck the alien king of the monsters, it’s pretty sweet. It would have been a great climax to the series, but it’s not even the actual climax of the film, as they invent an excuse for the Moonlight SY-3 to get in a sky battle with a cartoon that’s just a big letdown after all the monster battling fun. One of the big struggles with Godzilla movies is balancing the monster action with human drama, and this one has way too much just like “humans solving sci fi problems action.”
That said, all three of us have been busy watching heavy European movies this weekend and I’m pretty glad to wrap the week up with something so light and fun. Destroy All Monsters is 88 minutes long and has a scene where Minilla puffs a smoke ring that somehow strangles King Ghidorah. I think you already know if this movie is for you or not.