Son of Godzilla has one of the best casts of any Godzilla film. We've got a team of United Nations scientists working toward a solution to world hunger, a reporter who jumps out of an airplane on a whim and a woman who had been living on the island all her life. There's not really a villain among the human cast. Furukawa gradually goes mad from the heat throughout the film, becoming a problem for everybody else more than once, but he redeems himself as a team player by the end. I think this might be the only Godzilla movie without any human casualties.
The setting for this film is unique. Aside from beginning and ending scenes at sea, the entire movie takes place on Sollgel Island. The grueling heat that the characters live with every day is conveyed effectively and I like how, despite being isolated from the rest of the world on that island, giant monsters just happen upon them. They start off dealing with some large mantises, then the radioactive storm turns them huge, then those mantises unearth the egg that hatches Minilla, then Godzilla shows up, and finally we learn that there's been a giant spider sleeping on the island all along. They picked a hell of a place to conduct their experiment.
When I was a kid I didn't understand why Godzilla seems to temporarily abandon Minilla on two occasions, right after he's hatched and at the end. I think that was Godzilla wrestling with the decision of whether to take on the responsibility of being a father. He comes to the island because he hears the distress cry (or distress brain wave... whatever), not knowing what exactly he's responding to. He sees three Kamacuras preying on a newborn of his own species so of course he intervenes, but afterward he doesn't seem interested in sticking around with this kid he just found. He eventually has a change of heart, maybe realizing that Minilla will die without him, so he returns to take the infant with him. After they defeat Kumonga together, Godzilla's instinct is to leave the snowy island and return to the ocean. When he sees that Minilla doesn't even have the strength to follow him through the snow, he realizes that Minilla isn't old enough to go into the open ocean. Godzilla has to choose between wandering back out into the world as the free-roaming King of the Monsters or staying on that frozen island for Minilla, and he decides that his adopted son is more important.
Jun Fukuda and Sadamasa Arikawa seemed to really like showing human-monster interaction. Both this movie and
Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster have several scenes where people and monsters are consciously aware of each others' presence, with lots of composite shots showing them in the same image together, and here there are even life-size props of Kamacuras' pincer and Kumonga's leg that the actors perform with in front of the camera.
Son of Godzilla is definitely one of my favorites in the series. It always has been.
but that's the same look he always has.