Mothra vs. Godzilla
Khoi Vinh

Review by Khoi Vinh Patron

Mothra vs. Godzilla 1964

★

Watched 07 Jun 2024

This is the kind of movie that would’ve been perfect to play on the TV monitors at a dive bar or dingy club in the east village in the 80s or 90s, with the sound turned off and post-punk music playing at 11 while blitzed out patrons drink and talk and dance, The dissonance of its imagery, along with its retro vibe, would’ve been ideal for that generation of disaffected pleasure seekers. 

What’s on the screen of this bizarre kaiju is the stuff of an incoherent nightmare: a giant moth- or bee-like monster that’s somehow the hero; two miniature Japanese ladies in identical fur outfits that get carried around in a pirate’s treasure chest; a hidden tribe of “island natives” performing dance rituals of worship; Japanese mods running around in perfect pressed suits even in disaster zones; a giant—I mean humongous—egg that gets an airplane hangar built around it. There’s lots more weirdness but the really amazing thing is that it all makes the guy in the rubber lizard suit stomping around miniatures of Japanese cities the least out there part of the whole movie. 

Beyond its value as a cavalcade of truly bewildering imagery, the narrative makes no sense. I can’t even tell you what the human characters are doing or their contributions to the plot; they mostly stand around and point offscreen at the kaiju destruction. You could read it all as some kind of febrile articulation of post-Hiroshima anxiety, or you could see it for what it is: a cash grab.

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