If you’re a scientist, and your daughter dies, what would you do? Why, you would preserve her spirit by fusing her cells with rose cells, then fusing Godzilla cells into it to make it a superpowered indestructible doom plant, of course. It’s what anyone would do.
This movie picks up directly where Godzilla 1985 left off, with the discovery of a few Godzilla scales that contain his cells. These cells are important for scientific research, specifically plant development. In one of the laboratories where some cells were present, a bomb goes off and kills the daughter of Dr. Shiragami. 5 years later, he’s asked to develop an anti nuclear energy bacteria to stop Godzilla if he comes back. There’s some thieves after the cells, and they threaten to unleash Godzilla from the volcano if they don’t get what they want.
Unfortunately, Godzilla is released anyway, and he continues his rampage across Japan. Dr. Shiragami, meanwhile, conducted a secret project where he fused Godzilla cells with a rose, which also had his daughter’s cells in it. Obviously, it goes horribly wrong, and the rose-Godzilla-human- hybrid breaks out of the lab and sets itself in the lake where it grows over 85 meters tall. I just don’t know what went wrong.
Godzilla follows the calls of the plant monster, which Dr. Shiragami calls Biollante, apparently naming her after a plant spirit goddess thing from Norse mythology. I checked all over the internet for any mythological being/creature called Biollante, and I found nothing. It was just made up… which means the Dr. pulled that name out of his @$$.
Anyway, Godzilla has a brief showdown with Biollante, and ends up burning her alive, but her spores drift up into the atmosphere. Now Japan only has one kaiju to deal with again. From this point on, it’s nothing but Godzilla action, which is what I like. The problem with the Showa era movies is that usually, there wasn’t a whole lot of kaiju action until 45 minutes to an hour in. And when the action finally started, it didn’t last very long, and it kept cutting back to the human characters, who were never that good to begin with. Heisei solves a lot of these problems, delivering long lasting kaiju battles and decent human characters, and the wait isn’t as long.
After several failed attempts to stop the King, Biollante’s spores come down from the atmosphere, and form together to reveal her new look, and holy crap is that thing HUGE! The prop itself had to be at least 8 or 9 ft tall! With so many animatronics and wires on the vines, I’m yet again amazed that they pulled it off so well. It looks awesome! Too bad, because it’s not a long fight at all. Godzilla ends up retreating due to the anti nuclear bacteria, and Biollante just reverts back to her spores, putting the girl’s spirit to rest. It’s anticlimactic, to say the least. But in no way was this a bad movie.
First of all, the special effects are once again top notch. The explosions were cool, the miniature cities looked amazing, and the suit actors did a great job. The soundtrack was pretty good, too. The human characters were decent as well. No more American splicing into the movies anymore. The characters as they are do just fine. One person who will be sticking with us throughout the rest of the series is the psychic girl. She can sense when Godzilla is around, or what he’s doing sometimes. She actually stood up to him and told him to screw off from Osaka. Wow.
Although Biollante isn’t one of the classic Godzilla enemies, she’s a well designed kaiju, and this movie isn’t too bad. You could honestly skip over this one and not miss anything important to the series, but it’s still enjoyable, so give it a watch.
FINAL RATING: 34 / 50
STORY: 3 / 5
ACTING: 3 / 5
CHARACTERS: 3 / 5
SPECIAL EFFECTS: 4 / 5
ACTION: 4 / 5
SOUNDTRACK: 4 / 5
TONE: 3 / 5
ENJOYABILITY: 4 / 5
REWATCH VALUE: 3 / 5
OWNING VALUE: 3 / 5
No comments:
Post a Comment