Monster Zero x SciFi Japan - Archive Only

The Garuda pilot that Aoki replaces is named “Johnson.” I don’t think we ever see him though. Aoki’s co-worker from the beginning of the movie is the guy who gets the Mechagodzilla job after Aoki is fired. He’s in the cockpit during the final battle and even identifies Aoki as the Garuda pilot.

Watching this again just made me realize the stark decline in Kawakita's effects work. In this film he begins abandoning a lot of the basic stuff about how to film the monster suits and miniatures in a way to give the sense of scale and power and more often than not he's just lazily pointing a camera without any of that! And what's up with the enormous spaces between the buildings? No urban area is laid out that way. I noticed this in the previous film with the impossibly enormous streets in the city Battra attacks. I understand those are there so that the actors in the monster suits have the space to perform, but I also know from the behind-the-scenes footage from many other Kaiju films that when they do that they shoot to avoid showing you those enormous empty spaces. Here, it's like you're seeing what you're not supposed to see: the tokusatsu equivalent of seeing a boom mic at the top of the screen.

Excellent points.

The really empty sets in the climactic battle have always irked me. It's not like the later Showa movies where budget restrictions forced them to stage sfx scenes in countryside. Here there's an urban environment that has a few skyscrapers, a baseball stadium (all of which are quickly destroyed), and nothing else. But more than that it's the uncomplimentary photography for such a long sequence that already isn't very engaging.