by Giganfan » Sat Dec 29, 2018 2:26 am
You want to know why this is hands-down one of the three best Godzilla movies, period (the other two being, of course, Godzilla '54 and Godzilla vs. The Thing)? It's because of the beautiful irony of how the story unfolds. Think about this. The people of Earth sell Godzilla and Rodan down the river, leave them stranded on the other side of the universe, in the name of "intergalactic-friendship" with their newly-discovered neighbors of Planet-X, only to discover that their new "friends" only wanted to unleash the fury and destruction of two VERY PISSED OFF, scorned giant monsters, and they even manage to get Goji and "Ra-don" (as Glenn would say) to kick Earth's ass, with the assistance of their sworn enemy of one film a ago, the appropriately-named "Monster Zero", the Zero, of course being the number your world's population is reduced to, if it happens to be visited upon by King Ghidorah!
And then, when the X-seijin plan goes to sh*t, and Ghidorah is left to his own devices, guess who has to save our sorry-a**'s from the Three-Headed Terror, AGAIN!?!
Yeah, Ghidorah was LEAVING Earth, after Godzilla and Rodan went double-kamikazee over the cliff with him. They won that fight.
I just finished reading the Honda biography by Steve Ryfle and Ed Godziszewski that i got for Christmas, and afterwards, this movie in particular flew off the pages, and off the screen in ways that I hadn't considered before. It really is a solid production from start-to-finish, with a very unique style all its own. And I've often regarded the score by Akira Ifukube to be the absolute best of all of his fantasy scores. The "Kaiju Daisenso March" is piece that Ifukube developed from the first Godzilla film, and clearly thought highly of it and over the years, refined it through a couple films, until it emerges here, triumphantly, along with a Godzilla, Rodan, Ghidorah, three-part-symphony of destruction that has really never sounded better. When I think of Tanaka, Honda, Tsuburaya, Ifukube and their collaborators, "The Great Monster War" just springs to mind.
These guys were one helluva-team.
"EVERYONE FORGET YOUR TROUBLES! ENJOY YOURSELVES!THERE'S NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT!" - Gigantis The Fire Monster
"It was HUGE...It was...IT WAS LIKE A MONSTER!!! Suddenly the rocks rose...ALIVE!" - Godzilla 1985