Superhero Media: Godzilla Vs Mechagodzilla II

So here's the thing about Godzilla films of this era I've been covering lately; they're ok. Very few fans tend to consider the 1990s to be a great time for the King of the Monsters, even if the worst offerings tend more towards the dull than the outright terrible. Drawing upon the successes of Mecha Anime and Super Sentai, Godzilla Vs Mechagodzilla II pits a team of scientists against Godzilla in their mehca with jet attachment. So yeah, this is one of those Godzilla outings that is human-focused. Godzilla is around, and doing stuff, but the mood is closer to a high-budget Power Rangers series than Shin Godzilla. Or, I'm guessing Super Sentai, but I haven't seen any Sentai, so Power Rangers was my touchstone. There's even a cute monster who helps there heroes, Minilla (or Baby Godzilla, depending on your translation), and the puppetry on the suit, especially the eyes, is fantastic, so whilst the character is silly, it always looks good on-screen.

Rhodan is also in Godzilla Vs Mechagodzilla, but he almost seems an after-thought, intended to provide a tenuous link for a Pterodactyl-obsessed engineer to join the team. There's even that whole "international" team element for the Mechagodzilla crew common to Sentai and Power Rangers, though the justification here is that they are provided and trained by the UN's Anti-Godzilla Taskforce. What? Of course the UN has an Anti-Godzilla Taskforce in the Godzilla universe, that's just common sense. And they must be backed pretty well, because Mechagodzilla looks pretty damn expensive, even with the Apple 2Es in the control banks. Sadly, the action scenes of Godzilla fighting Mechagodzilla aren't all that great, even if Mechagodzilla looks awesome, it just can't seem to move very much and ends up being swung around on wires blasting beams of light at everything. Comparing it to Godzilla Vs Kong is unfair, but even the robots in [Japanese] Spiderman have more movement.

Again, I'm not the kind of fan who gets down on Kaiju films that focus on human characters, as Shin Godzilla and Gamera: Revenge of Iris are some of the best in the genre and do that same thing with their characters. The team of scientists aren't super deep or anything, but seeing normal people react to the continued presence of Kaiju in their world is pretty interesting; again, the UN having an anti-Godzilla taskforce is silly, but not within the setting. It tends to be subtext in the Godzilla films, but for the most part, the characters, and thereby Japan as a nation, are accustomed to life with Kaiju, to an extent. The destruction and death related to continued monster attacks are still tragic, but it's not a surprise and people are working to fix the problem as best they can. When you remember that Godzilla is very much a metaphor for the threat and destruction of nuclear power, this lends a credence and depth to the series that isn't obvious with all the rubber suits and atomic breath.