Destroy All Monsters

The Party at the End of the World!

Ever read Ragnarok, the old Norse myth about how the world's gonna end? There are different versions of the story, but the details I remember go like this: in the beginning there was the Ice-Cow. (Just bear in mind that I'm working from memory, okay?) Then out of the great Ice-Cow came the Giants, including Fenrir the Giant Wolf, Midgarthsrmr the World Serpent, and a slew of other psychos. (Yes, this is where the Fenrir esper from Final Fantasy VI came from, but if I stopped to note every single RPG reference I'd never finish telling the story.) Then out of the Giants were born the Gods, who include Thunor (Thor), Wodan (Odin), and a bunch of other bozos. The Gods then rose up against the Giants. They couldn't destroy the Giants, but they did manage to contain them - for example the Fire-Giants were locked up in the south somewhere, the great Wolf was bound up in the north, and the World -Serpent was cast into the sea (where it grew so big it wrapped all the way around the planet. There's another story that one day Thunor was out fishing and he hooked the World-Serpent, but it swam off after a long fight - the earliest-recorded instance of "the Big One that Got Away!" Anyway . . . ). So time passes and time passes and the Gods pretty much establish hegemony over middle-earth, or Middangeard. They war, and they invent humans, and the humans war too, but all that fighting is just preparation for the great battle coming on the day of Ragnarok.

There's this neat character named Loki - he's half-Giant, half-God. In some tellings he's all evil. But in others he's not so much evil as what D&D folks would call "Chaotic Neutral". He's kinda like the Joker from Batman - he only causes mayhem cuz it strikes him as funny. For example, once he started a war between two groups of Gods by stealing Thunor's hammer (ya know, the one that makes all the lightning) and then framing this group of outcast Gods. So he put on a dress, led Thunor and a team of other tomato-heads to the castle of the Outcast Gods and they infiltrated it by pretending Loki was a princess who was coming to marry one of the Bachelor Outcast Gods. The God in question was blown away by Loki's babeliciousness, but a little shocked by "her" monstrous appetite at the banquet hall. I think in the end Loki fessed up and gave the hammer back to Thunor but he was still ostracized by all the Gods afterwards. Which is maybe why he did what he did later on.

The Day of Ragnarok is when all hell breaks loose. Literally. Fenrir the Great Wolf breaks out of his bindings and comes running down from the north. Midgarthsrmr rises from the sea and creates all manner of typhoons and hurricanes in his wake as he swims toward the mainland. And worst of all, Loki breaks loose from whatever prison the Gods put him in. (See? Jail just makes the bad guys get badder! Now what if the Gods had only talked things over with poor Loki and reassured him of their love?? Anyway . . . ) Loki's real pissed now. So he frees all the Fire-Giants and they hop on a huge boat and set sail out of the south. All these Giants come converging on Yggdrasil, the World Tree, to take Wodan, Thunor, and the rest of the Gods down. The Gods prepare for battle and the souls of all the dead human champion warriors of history descend from Valhalla to help the Gods out in their last stand against the Giants. Not that it'll make any difference - cuz everybody, Giant, God, and human alike know what the end will be.

Thunor gets wrapped up in the coils of Midgarthsrmr. He serves the Serpent a mortal blow, but not before he gets bitten by its equally fatal venomous fang. Fenrir leaps into outer space and swallows the whole sun without even chewing. When he comes back down again he gets challenged by Wodan, and that's the end of the two of them. Some minor God offs and gets offed by Loki, I think, which sucks because Loki shouldn't die. I don't remember the minor God's name, but he was some annoying upstart, like Rodimus Prime from The Transformers The Movie. Everybody gets wiped out, and the death of the sun brings on a kind of pre-nuclear nuclear winter (hmmmmmm . . . ) and that's the end of The End of the World. Except for a later version, possibly influenced by the newer Judeo-Christian tradition, where two humans and a couple of young Gods survive and live happily ever after, how uplifting.

Fun with Freud!

So what does all this have to do with Destroy All Monsters?? Absolutely nothing! But it is a neat story to know if you're a fan of the kaiju. One could even start making up connections. For instance, why didn't the Kilak's ever invade Earth before? Well, somehow they escaped from their frigid prison on the moon - remember how they transform from the Emasculating All-Powerful Nun-Babes into the Shriveled-Up Impotent Dust-Wyrms whenever they're exposed to cold? So that means they're kinda like the Fire-Giants, who also arrived on a ship. (Okay, so it wasn't a spaceship, but still.) And in the end, they aren't destroyed, just put back into their hibernation cells (moon-rocks), which is kinda like how the Gods caged the Giants at first.

One could even say that since the Kilak's were all female, it makes sense that they're like the Giants, who gave birth to the Gods. Hey, why not? All the astronauts are male, after all, and the last human traitor is a brainwashed female (and it would have to be a female, cuz the aliens' backup plan is to hide the brainwashing device in a pair of earrings). Plus the Kilak strongholds are both ovic symbols - globular containers. But don't just take my word for it - have a closer look at the design of the base in the mountain, and then compare it to the establishing shots of Mothra's egg in both the original and the remake of Godzilla vs. Mothra. And both the moon and the mountain often symbolize "the feminine", at least in the West - check out D.H. Lawrence, Thornton Wilder, Rider Haggard and Hemingway if ya don't believe me. Plus both of em are destroyed by being "penetrated" - one by the astronaut's (phallic) rocket, and the other by Godzilla's mega-stomp.

Think I'm not being serious? Think back to the scene then. The rocket goes to the moon. Then it descends into an opening. The crater responds by heating up - firejets surround the intruding rocket. Then how does the rocket respond? It responds by shooting its unstoppable laser beams at the door which bars entry into the chamber beneath the crater. They burst through the door. (Are we having fun yet?) The astronauts all come streaming out of the rocket and swarm into the newly-exposed chamber. They finally find the mysterious pulsing object. The strongest astronaut sweats and strains and finally detaches the object and cradles it to his body. Cut to his girlfriend on Earth, who gives a wordless sigh of contentment. Its mission finally accomplished, the rocket withdraws from the crater and returns to earth.*

But why should sex be like war? Isn't that messed up? Well, think of it this way instead - war is like sex. Marx and Hegel wrote about how nothing new can arise without the dialectic - you need thesis and antithesis if you wanna achieve synthesis. You need Giants and Gods if you wanna have humans. Likewise, the nun-like Kilak's were sexually neuter - both as Emasculating Moon-Babes and as Impotent Moon-Wyrms - they would have been a force of destruction if the male astronauts hadn't come in and joined forces with the pulsing energy orb. Or, you could say, the Kilak's would have doomed the human race if the kaiju hadn't been there to engage em in the monster/alien dialectic. Either way, union makes salvation. Of course, Middangeard still gets destroyed in Ragnarok, and maybe one day the Kilak's'll wake up and still conquer the world. I guess crisis is always a gamble . . .

Hello!!! What about the Movie?!

Whoops! Well, Destroy All Monsters was the ONE Godzilla movie I was always dying to see when I was a kid. It had the most memorable soundtrack of all the Ifukube-scored films. I had it memorized waaayyy before Star Wars came out and with it the epitome of sci-fi movie music. It was also cool because it had all the monsters, well all the major ones anyway. (I never cared for that big ape.) But now that I'm older, there are other kaiju eiga I enjoy more, both from the old series and the new. It just doesn't live up to its name, yo! Lots of it is stock footage and only Godzilla and Ghidorah get a lot of work. And Mothra never even transforms! Plus how could Ghidorah die?! HOW?! Unacceptable. I even felt sorry for the ol' "menace a trois" when the party started ganging up on him, stomping on his necks and wings. Messed-up scene! And after all that, how could the "Fire-Dragon" not be a let-down? Answer: it couldn't not be a let-down. The editing in the scene where it tries to take the Moonlight SY-3 down with it is pretty intense, and the explosion is believable even by modern standards, but it's still just a flying saucer and not a real "monster".

There are some dope moments in this movie that make it worthwhile to see even as an adult. One is the final roundup when all the radio reporters are waiting to see who the first kaiju-on-the-scene will be, and everybody's waitin and waitin, and then a head pops up and it's Minya. Another is the part at the end where all the kaiju stand back to let Godzilla blast the Kilak enclosure with his nuclear ray. He huffs and he puffs but the house won't fall down. So when the other monsters start to get impatient G finally steps up to the mountain, lifts up a leg and smashes the shell to pieces with his kaiju-fu front kick! And a really amazing shot I noticed the last time I saw this movie was near the beginning when the astronauts are confronting the Kilak's for the first time, on Ogasawara. Gas starts spraying out and obscuring the humans' vision and the camera cuts to a close-up of the leader of the Kilak's, wearing a bemused, tranquil smile. Then the camera swiftly tracks back until her smiling face disappears into the haze. Haunting stuff!

Is it good for kids?

Oh yeah, it's awesome. Except maybe if you're bringing em up in a feminist way and you don't want them to be exposed to these macho adventures where the villains are feminine. Plus, when I was a kid, I was freaked out by the scene where the hero subdues the woman and tears off her earrings, cuz I thought he just ripped her earlobes right off. And, like I said, the scene where Ghidorah's getting stomped on even after he's been put down is kinda messed up. Okay, so it's not exactly Rodney King, but it's still violent. And that shot of his quivering tails reminds me too much of the ending of Yongary, which was so sad that when I saw it as a child it actually gave me a stomachache! (Who says violence doesn't affect kids?!) But I wanna say one more thing about kids and kaiju.

When John and I saw this movie at Lincoln Center last year, there were groups of adults in the audience who were there with the Mystery Science Theater 3000 attitude - ya know, laughing VERY loudly at all the sets, the spaceships, even some of the monsters. And I felt bad about that, cuz there were kids in the audience, and I don't think we should mess around with a kid's enjoyment of a monster movie like that. I mean, one of the reasons why we watch these as adults is to relive our childhood, right? And the one magical thing about that which you will never fully regain is watching the movies and having no clue as to how the effects are done, or even that the effects are "done" by anybody. I really believed in giant monsters when I was a kid. So since we've already had that chance, all I'm asking is, if you see a monster movie in a public place, and there're kids around, yeah, you should laugh when it's funny and have a good time, cuz you paid for your ticket too, but please don't start yelling one-liners at the screen and acting like one of these MST3K idiots. Let the kids get immersed in the fantasy. Who knows, you might even start getting into it too! And chances are nothing you can think of spontaneously will be as hilarious as the brilliant stuff on that show, anyway.

So whaddya say?

If you're a kaiju eiga fan, you definitely must own this movie. If you aren't, or if you want to get somebody into the genre, this is still a good movie to rent. It's got enough intentional humor, memorable cinematography, and rousing music to give ya a nice time. Compared to the other kaiju eiga, I'd say this one is very very good but not quite one of the great ones.

B+/A-